revolutionaryvole

That’s fair, that should have been MASS surveillance, I skipped a word.

Well yeah, that’s true, but I didn’t say that, did I? Not even remotely. We are specifically talking about mass surveillance. I will let you reflect on the implications of an intelligence apparatus with the ability to have a Claude-level AI scanning every piece of information on the internet by yourself.

No, if you want my opinion it seems too risky of a move to make all of this so public if all they want is more money. It’s possible, but I’d be surprised. I believe them when they say that what they want is to have those two particular things, fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of US citizens, removed from the contract terms (for now). This could be out of genuine moral principles, or out of fear of bad PR when this would be found out. Most likely a combination of both. My point was that from my perspective it is a very minor difference. The conclusion I kept after reading this isn’t “good guy Anthropic bravely stands against pressure from Hegseth” as some of the Hackernews comments try to paint it. It is “Anthropic mostly bends over backwards and grovels for Pentagon money, willing to massively spy on all foreign nationals and working on creating autonomous weapons - other US AI companies likely to be even worse”. As I said, horrifying.

I guess it’s good that they draw the line somewhere, but it is absolutely horrifying to me as a non-American that the moral stance is limited to: taking issue with fully autonomous AI weapons (purely for technical reasons according to this letter, they are working hard on making them possible) refusing to conduct mass surveillance of US citizens specifically (foreign nationals are fair game and the intelligence apparatus will surely only be used for good and to preserve democracy). This is not Anthropic refusing to cooperate with the Trump administration as the title may suggest, they are in fact explicitly eager to serve the US Department of War. They are just vying for slightly better contract terms.

Interesting. It sounds like soulism is very similar to anarcho-transhumanism, but with a spiritual component, is that correct?