OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network

Respectfully, it's very hard to see how anyone could look at what just happened and come to the conclusion that one company ends up classed a "supply chain risk" while another agrees the the same terms that led to that. Either the terms are looser, they're not going to be enforced, or there's another reason for the loud attempt to blacklist Anthropic. It's very difficult to see how you could take this at face value in any case. If it is loose terms or a wink agreement to not check in on enforcement you're never going to be told that. We can imagine other scenerios where the terms stated were not the real reason for the blacklisting, but it's a real struggle (at least for me) to find an explanation for this deal that doesn't paint OpenAI in a very ethically questionable light.

(Disclosure, I'm a former OpenAI employee and current shareholder.)

I have two qualms with this deal.

First, Sam's tweet [0] reads as if this deal does not disallow autonomous weapons, but rather requires "human responsibility" for them. I don't think this is much of an assurance at all - obviously at some level a human must be responsible, but this is vague enough that I worry the responsible human could be very far out of the loop.

Second, Jeremy Lewin's tweet [1] indicates that the definitions of these guardrails are now maintained by DoW, not OpenAI. I'm currently unclear on those definitions and the process for changing them. But I worry that e.g. "mass surveillance" may be defined too narrowly for that limitation to be compatible with democratic values, or that DoW could unilaterally make it that narrow in the future. Evidently Anthropic insisted on defining these limits itself, and that was a sticking point.

Of course, it's possible that OpenAI leadership thoughtfully considered both of these points and that there are reasonable explanations for each of them. That's not clear from anything I've seen so far, but things are moving quickly so that may change in the coming days.

[0] https://x.com/sama/status/2027578652477821175

[1] https://x.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/2027594072811098230

Did Sam Altman say that he wouldn't allow ChatGPT to be used for fully autonomous weapons? (Not quite the same as "human responsibility for use of force".)

I don't want to overanalyze things but I also noticed his statement didn't say "our agreement specifically says chatgpt will never be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance." It said something that kind of gestured towards that, but it didn't quite come out and say it. It says "The DoW agrees with these principles, and we put them in our agreement." Could the principles have been outlined in a nonbinding preamble, or been a statement of the DoW's current intentions rather than binding their future behavior? You should be very suspicious when a corporate person says something vague that somewhat implies what you want to hear - if they could have told you explicitly what you wanted to hear, they would have.

But anyway, it doesn't matter. You said you don't think it should be used for autonomous weapons. I'd be willing to bet you 10:1 that you'll never find altman saying anything like "our agreement specifically says chatgpt will never be used for fully autonomous weapons", now or any point in the future.

> My understanding is that the OpenAI deal disallows domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons,

In that case, what on earth just happened?

The government was so intent on amending the Anthropic deal to allow 'all lawful use', at the government's sole discretion, that it is now pretty much trying to destroy Anthropic in retaliation for refusing this. Now, almost immediately, the government has entered into a deal with OpenAI that apparently disallows the two use cases that were the main sticking points for Anthropic.

Do you not see something very, very wrong with this picture?

At the very least, OpenAI is clearly signaling to the government that it can steamroll OpenAI on these issues whenever it wants to. Or do you believe OpenAI will stand firm, even having seen what happened to Anthropic (and immediately moved in to profit from it)?

> and that OpenAI is asking for the same terms for other AI companies (so that we can continue competing on the basis of differing services and not differing scruples)

If OpenAI leadership sincerely wanted this, they just squandered the best chance they could ever have had to make it happen! Actual solidarity with Anthropic could have had a huge impact.

"AI shouldn't be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons". The statement from OpenAI virtually guarantees that the intention is to use it for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. If this wasn't the intention them the qualifier "domestic" wouldn't be used, and they would be talking about "human in the loop" control of autonomous weapons, not "human responsibility" which just means there's someone willing to stand up and say, "yep I take responsibility for the autonomous weapon systems actions", which lets be honest is the thinnest of thin safety guarantees.

Assuming this is real: Why do you think anthropic was put on what is essentially an "enemy of the state" list and openai didn't?

The two things anthropic refused to do is mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, so why do _you_ think openai refused and still did not get placed on the exact same list.

It's fine to say "I'm not going to resign. I didn't even sign that letter", but thinking that openai can get away with not developing autonomous weapons or mass surveillance is naive at the very best.

Why would you believe that? If that were the case what was the issue with Anthropic even about?

You, and your colleagues, should resign.

My understanding is that OpenAI's deal, and the deal others are signing, implicitly prevents the use of LLMs for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons because today one care argue those aren't legal and the deal is a blanket for allowing all lawful use.

Today it can't be used for mass surveillance, but the executive branch has all the authority it needs to later deem that lawful if it wishes to, the Patriot Act and others see to that.

Anthropic was making the limits contractually explicit, meaning the executive branch could change the line of lawfulness and still couldn't use Anthropic models for mass surveillance. That is where they got into a fight and that is where OpenAI and others can claim today that they still got the same agreement Anthropic wanted.

Why do you suppose OpenAI's deal led to a contract, while Anthropic's deal (ostensibly containing identical terms) gets it not only booted but declared a supply chain risk?

#1 weekend HN is not a sane place. #2 emotions are high. #3 for what it’s worth @tedsanders I understand where you’re coming from and I believe you’re making the right choice by staying or at least waiting to make a decision. Don’t let #1 and #2 hurt you emotionally or force you to make a rash decision you later regret.

Edit: I don’t work at OpenAI or in any AI business and my neck is on the chopping block if AI succeeds… like a lot of us. Don’t vilify this guy trying to do what’s right for him given the information he has.

The founders are all on a first name basis. I’m surprised no one has noted that Anthropic and OpenAI winning together by giving the world two different choices, just like the US does in its political landscape. In this circumstance, OpenAI wins the local market for its government and aligned entities (while having the free consumer by a matter of cost dynamic for that ideal customer profile which is vary broad and similar to Google’s search audience where most their revenue still depends), while Anthropic is provided the global market and prosumer market where people can afford choice by paying for it.

Ted, what do you think of your CEO’s statement: “the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.”

The evidence seems to overwhelmingly point in the opposite direction.

Thank you for responding. Everyone wants to think they will “do the right thing” when their own personal Rubicon is challenged. In practice, so many factors are at play, not least of which are the other people you may be responsible for. The calculus of balancing those differing imperatives is only straightforward for those that have never faced this squarely. I’ve been marched out of jobs twice for standing up for what I believed to be right at the time. Am still literally blacklisted (much to the surprise of various recruiters) at a major bank here 8 years after the fact. I can’t imagine that the threat of being blacklisted from a whole raft of companies contracting with a known vindictive regime would make the decision easier.

You should quit because the only reasonable thing for your leadership to have done is to refuse to sign any agreement with DoW whatsoever while it's attempting to strongarm Anthropic in this fashion.

It doesn't even matter if OpenAI is offered the same terms that Anthropic refused. It's absurd to accept them and do business with the Pentagon in that situation.

If you take the government at its word, it's killing Anthropic because Anthropic wanted to assert the ability to draw _some_ sort of redline. If OpenAI's position is "well sucks to be them", there's nothing stopping Hegseth from doing the same to OpenAI.

It doesn't matter at all if OpenAI gets the deal at the same redline Anthropic was trying to assert. If at the end of this the government has succeeded in cutting Anthropic off from the economy, what's next for OpenAI? What happens next time when OpenAI tries to assert some sort of redline?

What's the point of any talk of "AI Safety" if you sign on to a regime where Hegseth (of all people) can just demand the keys and you hand them right over?

To me it looks weird that a replacement won't accept Dept of War terms. This was the source of the dispute so...

I do not know but I would not very optimistic about those new terms.

These sort of agreements are easily bypassable, especially on such tools.

Someone might just create a spawn of openai with a tag and do all the stuff there...

There is no much guarantee I think

> My understanding is that the OpenAI deal disallows domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons

And you believe the US government, let alone the current one will respect that? Why? Is it naïveté or do you support the current regime?

> If it turns out that the deal is being misdescribed or that it won't be enforced, I can see why I should quit.

So your logic is your company is selling harmful technology to a bunch of known liars who are threatening to invade democratic countries, but because they haven’t lied yet in this case (for lack of opportunity), you’ll wait until the harm is done and then maybe quit?

I’ll go out on a limb and say you won’t. You seem to be trying really hard to justify to yourself what’s happening so you can sleep at night.

Know that when things go wrong (not if, when), the blood will be on your hands too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith_(existentialism)

What people don't understand is that domestic surveillance by the government doesn't happen and isn't needed. They know it's illegal and unpopular and for over two decades they have a loophole. Since the Bush administration it's been arranged for private contractors to do the domestic surveillance on the government's behalf. Entire industries have been built around creating "business records" for no other purpose than to sell them to the government to support domestic surveillance. This is entirely legal and why the DoW has been able to get away with saying things like "domestic surveillance is illegal, we don't do that" for over two decades while simultaneously throwing a shit fit about needing "all legal uses" if their access to domestic surveillance is threatened.

There's a big difference between "the government won't use our tools for domestic surveillance" (DoW/DoD/OpenAI/etc) and "we won't allow anyone to use our tools to support domestic surveillance by the government" (Anthropic)

Hegseth and the current Trump admin are completely incompetent in execution of just about everything but competent administrations (of both parties) have been playing this game for a long time and it's already a lost cause.

Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.

I can totally see why you should quit, but we see different things apparently.

You can't be this naive?

You're paid to look the other way. At least, own it.

Please read about the imperial boomerang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang

How would OpenAI respond to China or Russia using OpenAI--or any AI--for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons?

Giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming [1] does not play a role in your thinking:

I don't mean this in any way rude and I apologize if this comes accross as such but believing it won't be used in exactly this way is just naive. History has taught us this lesson again and again and again.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189650#47189970

Aside from that unlikely read, this deal was still used as a pressure point on Anthropic, there's absolutely no way OpenAI was not used as a stick to hit with during negotiations.

What is your red line?

Anthropic is deemed a betrayer and a supply chain risk for actually enforcing their principles.

OpenAI agrees to be put in the same position as Anthropic.

It seems like you must actually somehow believe that history will repeat itself, Hegseth will deem OpenAI a supply chain risk too, then move to Grok or something?

There's surely no way that's actually what you believe...

Looks to me like you have decided that you are being paid to shut up and take the word of the most thoroughly dishonest and corrupt US government we've yet seen. Why on God's slowly-browning green earth do you trust that Altman got the deal Anthropic was trying for?

For the record I don’t care if you quit or not. Cash rules after all… However, you are incredibly naive if you think the current admin will follow through on those terms.

This is not meant as a personal attack but this has got to be the most naive thing I've read.

You may have missed that no single word said or written by any of the current US government’s members can be believed.

Assuming this isn't a troll and you really think this, you should at least have the cojones to admit you're taking the blood money instead of trying to pretzel the truth so hard that you just look like a moron instead.

I don't know you, so maybe you're actually for real and speaking on good faith here but honestly this and your other responses in this thread read exactly like "...salary depends on not understanding"

Your work will be used to power an auto aim kill bot. I personally couldn't live with that.

lol, naive as hell. why would your company's agreement be the same as the one who just refused the _same_ agreement? Even my question doesn't even make sense, this is a contradiction, therefore your statement must be false. There, it's proven

I won't trust a word coming from Sam Altman's mouth until I see official signed documents (which I won't).

"domestic" "mass" surveillance, two words that can be stretched so thin they basically invalidate the whole term. Mass surveillance on other countries? Guess that's fine. Surveillance on just a couple of cities that happen to be resisting the regime? Well, it's not _mass_ surveillance, just a couple of cities!

“ It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

You’re being purposefully niave if you trust any government and especially this government to behave legally or ethically.

Coward.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I have a bridge to Brooklyn to sell you if you believe this.

Standing up for whats right often is not easy and involves hard choices and consequences, your leader has shown you and the world that he is not to be trusted.

I can't tell you what to do but I hope you make the right decision.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

>OpenAI deal disallows domestic mass surveillance

And the US Military is forbidden from operating on US soil, but that didn't stop this administration from deploying US Marines to California recently.

You're fooling yourself if you think this administration is following any kind of rule.

You can make blood money but you have to be aware it's blood money. Don't delude yourself in to thinking you work for an ethical or moral company.

> Given this understanding, I don't see why I should quit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning

You work for a company that’s part of the Trump, Ellison, Kutchner orbit of corruption.

Y’all are developing amazing technology. But accept reality and drop whatever sense of moral righteousness you’re carrying here. Not because some asshole on the internet says so, but for your own mental health.

Listen, if the Government using it for legit and safe use cases wasn’t an issue, then they wouldn’t have complained about Anthropic’s language. Sam is just looking the other way and pretending for you employees.

Or Sam bribed the government to do this, which is also entirely possible.

This seems like the kind of foolishness it takes a lot of money to believe. Anthropic blew up their contract with the Pentagon over concerns on lethal autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. OpenAI rushes in to do what Anthropic wouldn't.

If you think that means your company isn't going to be involved in lethal autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance... I don't really know what to tell you. I doubt you really believe that. Obviously you will be involved in that and you are effectively working on those projects now.

Your response is a perfect encapsulation of "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

I think its wrong for someone to ask someone to resign but acting that there is no issue here is debating in bad faith.

Bad timing to be defending OpenAI's collaboration with the military as it launches an illegal bombing campaign.

At the next town hall ask them directly - you making assumptions here.

there is a recent post about how one of the top OpenAI exec has given 25 million$ to a Trump PAC before publicly supporting Anthropic/signing this deal.

One got characterized as supply chain risk and so much for OpenAI to get the same.

And even that being said, I can be wrong but if I remember, OpenAI and every other company had basically accepted all uses and it was only Anthropic which said no to these two demands.

And I think that this whole scenario became public because Anthropic denied, I do think that the deal could've been done sneakily if Anthropic wanted.

So now OpenAI taking the deal doesn't help with the fact that to me, it looks like they can always walk back and all the optics are horrendous to me for OpenAI so I am curious what you think.

The thing which I am thinking OTOH is why would OpenAI come and say, hey guys yea we are gonna feed autonomous killing machines. Of course they are gonna try to keep it a secret right before their IPO and you are an employee and you mention walking out of openAI but with the current optics, it seems that you/other employees of OpenAI are also more willing to work because evidence isn't out here but to me, as others have pointed out, it looks like slowly boiling the water.

OpenAI gets to have the cake and eat it too but I don't think that there's free lunch. I simply don't understand why DOD would make such a high mess about Anthropic terms being outrageous and then sign the same deal with same terms with OpenAI unless there's a catch. Only time will tell though how wrong or right I am though.

If I may ask, how transparent is OpenAI from an employees perspective? Just out of curiosity but will you as a employee get informed of if OpenAI's top leadership (Sam?) decided that the deal gets changed and DOD gets to have Autonomous killing machine. Would you as an employee or us as the general public get information about it if the deal is done through secret back doors. Snowden did show that a lot of secret court deals were made not available to public until he whistleblowed but not all things get whistleblowed though, so I am genuinely curious to hear your thoughts.

Right beautifying lies are always going to head in the direction of doing whats self interested.

I know the money is good, but if I were you (or any OpenAI employee), I'd move over to Google or Anthropic posthaste.

Is it really worth the long-term risk being associated with Sam Altman when the other firms would willingly take you and probably give you a pay bump to boot?

It doesn't make sense to me why anyone would want to associate themselves with Altman. He is universally distrusted. No one believes anything he says. It's insane to work with a person who PG, Ilya, Murati, Musk have all designated a liar and just general creep.

Defending him or the firms actions instantly makes you look terrible, like you'll gladly take the "Elites vs UBI recipients" his vision propagates.

Shame on you people. What a disgusting vision.

Can you at least stop lying to yourself? Given what they did with Anthropic for not supporting domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons...

> My understanding is that the OpenAI deal disallows domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons

Your understanding is entirely wrong. At least stop lying to yourself and admit that you are entirely fine with working on evil things if you are paid enough.

So its ok as long as its not domestic. Got it

What a joke

You are naive, and assisting a fascist regime.

Why would you trust anything out of Sam's mouth? He's a sociopath. Is that lost on you?

insane cope

Scam Altman already got community noted btw

In all seriousness, what’s the average tenure at OpenAI and how much of the company in March 2026 was even around for that?

Review the signers https://notdivided.org

And h1 slaves

The difference is that Anthropic wanted to reserve the right to judge when the red lines are crossed, while OpenAI will defer to the DoD and its policies for that. In both cases, the two parties can claim to agree on the principles, but when push comes to shove, who decides on whether the principles are violated differs.

I'm sure it's a matter of interpretation. Anthropic thinks the DoW's demands will lead to mass surveillance and auto-kill bots. The DoW probably disagrees with that interpretation, and all OpenAI needs to do is agree with the DoW.

My bet is that what the DoW wants is pretty clearly tied to mass surveillance and kill-bots. Altman is a snake.

Anthropic has safeguards baked in the model, this is the only way to make sur it's harder for the DOJ to misuse it. A pinky swear from the DoD means nothing

Human responsibility is not the same as human decision making.

And they are crossing the picket line, which honestly I was sure they would do, though I did expect it to take a bit longer.

This is too transparent even for sama.

Good ole Sammy has never lied

Unrelated, but want to buy a bridge?

You could recoup your investment in a year by collecting toll. Expedited financing available on good credit!

[flagged]

> some I suppose will stay in their jobs because leaving isn't an easy decision to make.

Anyone who chooses to stay shouldn’t have signed the letter. What’s the point of doing it if you’re not going to follow through? If you signed the letter and don’t leave after the demands aren’t met, you’re a liar and a coward and are actively harming every signatory of every future letter.

While that thought crossed my mind, someone in a sub thread of parent comment made a point: OpenAI made a statement about how "We insisted this be not be used in those ways and DoD totally says they won't". Which sounds to me like they ceded any hard terms oand conditions and are letting the DoD use it in "any lawful means" which is what Anthropic didn't stand for.

They seem moderately competent at doing blatant corruption ( https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/official-trump/ , Qatari jet, etc...). See jeffbee's comment below.

Do you expect that to work?

>Supposedly OpenAI had the same terms

"we put them into our agreement." is strange framing is Altman's tweet. Makes me think the agreement does mention the principles, but doesn't state them as binding rules DoD must follow.

None of those explanations are compatible with the pledge of solidarity in the We Will Not Be Divided letter.

I prescribe literally zero truth value to what Sam says. He will say whatever he needs to get ahead. It is honestly irritating to me that you and many others here seem to implicitly assume his messages are correlated with truth, doing his social engineering work for him, as if his word should adjust your priors even slightly.

I don't necessarily think he's lying, but there's so much obvious incentive for him to lie here (if only because his employees can save face).

> Supposedly OpenAI had the same terms as Anthropic (according to SamA).

He said human responsibility. Anthropic said human in the loop.

And Anthropic refused to say any lawful purpose would be allowed reportedly.

It's this simple: Trump is a criminal. Larry Ellison is his pal. Sam Altman has a huge deal for cloud services from Oracle. Trump is using the DoD budget to backstop Ellison's business.

Maybe Sam Altman said nicer things about Donald Trump. Maybe he promised that he would not revoke their API keys when Hegseth directs the military to seize ballots. Maybe he's jockeying for position to take over the government when AGI hits.

Ultimately, I don't know how much the specific reasons matter. Pete Hegseth must be removed from office, OpenAI must be destroyed for their betrayal of the US public, that's all there is to it.

Is there a name for this phenomenon? I've taken to calling it "the nihilist's excuse"

Knowing Sam, that's exactly what happened -- and the echo chamber inside OpenAI wouldnt dare to disagree

yeah or he didn't even

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it seems like oai deal does include the same red lines, plus some more, and the ability for oai to deploy safety systems to limit the use cases of the model via technical means

this seems strictly better than what anthropic had. anthropic has ruined their relationship with the US govt, giving oai a good negotiating hand

the oai folks are good at making deals, just look at all the complex funding arrangements they have

Cancelling is the only language these companies understand.

Even Disney couldn't ignore the mass cancellations after dropping Kimmel and Disney+ bearly turns over a profit.

This is ultimately about drawing moral lines, isn't it? In that case it wouldn't matter if it hurts their business or not.

I think their consumer plans are gross margin positive but OpenAI has ~50M paying subscribers driving >$10B in revenue.

Realistically, you need at least ~1M subscribers to cancel to make this painful.

But I suspect this will get drowned out in the face of other news.

It will hurt in future funding rounds if their subscriber metric is stalling or going backwards, regardless of how many of those subscriptions are profitable.

Does it matter? These AI companies need to be able to prove that users are willing to pay at all, even if they're not paying a profitable amount of money. If investors see that they're dumping money into something that's not selling, why continue to do so?

The DoW is engaging in simple crybullying. In my time as an online moderator I see it all the time.

“You are impinging on my freedom to force you to participate in activities you have expressly indicated it is against your will to engage in! You bully! I am such a victim!”

https://xcancel.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070?s=20

This is endemic of the entire current administration. It is as disappointing as it is unsurprising.

I find myself totally agreeing with the quoted text and also this sentiment. It just makes no sense to nuke Anthropic as a negotiation tactic if your interest is in preserving the republic long term.

AFAIK, the U.S. government is fully entitled to serve them under the U.S. Department of War’s terms as per the Defense Production Act. The government has yet to do this, but a company acting in a way that the Department of War perceives as benefiting enemy states could certainly be a justification for declaring a supply chain risk. Anthropic’s decision timing as the U.S. has launched a war in the Middle East to save millions of Iranian lives (tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iranians have already been killed by the Islamic Regime) definitely seems to be unjustifiable and the U.S. Department of War (so weird for me to type that instead of DOD) was smart, in my opinion, not to force Anthropic to work with them but to drop all work with them and move to providers who will meet the military’s needs while at war.

(Just in case anyone was wondering, I live in Israel)

This is it exactly.

They DoW doesn't care about laws, that's the whole point. Anthropic did not believe the most law breaking administration in history when their drunkard incompetent leader said "lol trust us bro"

> which I will not believe and you should not believe

It seems like you chose to immediately disbelieve it.

> until a trustworthy news outlet publishes the text

If you've found one of these, let me know. I'm still looking...

Won’t anyone think of the poor billionaires?

> We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should

How surprised should I be that a government who’s consistently railed against “woke AI” isn’t caring about that?

huh? the same deal was offered to anthropic who decided not to take it.

Anthropic was too public about being “good”. And if there is one thing the Trump admin cannot abide it’s morality.

Where can I read more about all the licensed engineers toppling unethical military projects?

Sam has -6/100? How does that work? If you can go into the negatives, how low can you get?

Unfortunately most engineers irrationally hate unions

A guild. Control who learns the trade.

Also, it's probably tricky to find a Schelling point that a broad range of people can agree to.

* no military use

* no lethal use

* no use in support of law enforcement

* no use in support of immigration enforcement

* no use in mass surveillance

* no use in domestic mass surveillance (but mass surveillance of foreigners is OK)

* no use in domestic surveillance

* no use in surveillance

* require independent audits

* require court oversight

* require company to monitor use

* require company to monitor use and divulge it to employees

* some other form of human rights monitoring or auditing

* some other form of restriction on theaters/conflicts/targets

* company will permit some of these uses (not purport to forbid them by license, contract, or ToS) but not customize software to facilitate them

* company can unilaterally block inappropriate uses

* company can publicly disclose uses it thinks are inappropriate

* some other form of remedy

* government literally has to explain why some uses are necessary or appropriate to reassure people developing capabilities, and they have some kind of ongoing bargaining power to push back

It feels normal to me that a lot of people would want some of those things, but kind of unlikely that they would readily agree on exactly which ones.

I even think there's a different intuition about the baseline because one version is "nobody works on weapons except for people who specifically make a decision to work for an arms company because they have decided that's OK according to their moral views" (working on weapons is an abnormal, deliberate decision) and another version is "every company might sell every technology as part of a weapons system or military application, and a few people then object because they've decided that's not OK according to their moral views" (refusing to work on weapons is an abnormal, deliberate decision). I imagine a fair number of people in computing fields effectively thought that the norm or default for their industry was the latter, because of the perception that there are "special" military contractors where people get security clearances and navigate military procurement processes, and most companies are not like that, so you were not working on any form of weapon unless you intentionally chose to do so. But, having just been to the Computer History Museum earlier this week, I also see that a lot of Silicon Valley companies have actually been making weapons systems for as long as there has been a Silicon Valley.

"Starting today I will be asking prominent members of the tech community to sign their name onto this. A code of conduct, authored by me, that pledges them to a universal ethos, which I created, that I call tech ethics or Tethics for short."

Very possible, double speaking is Sam Altman's specialty.

The fact they were able to strike a deal in the first place hours after Anthropic was declared a supply chain risk should make this obvious. Their employees are smart people, the only way they can reason past this is their compensation.

That's very possible! In the last few days Anthropic was getting a lot of attention, and OpenAI was looking weaker in comparison. It seems like a politically coordinated job to remove competition.

For sure, he's been pissed that OpenAI no longer has the Mandate of Heaven and Claude is all anyone has been talking about since December. (And it's not just an ego thing: because OAI isn't profitable yet, they need the hype to keep going to raise money on favorable terms, so loss of buzz is an existential threat). I absolutely believe that he started making calls to try and get buddies in the White House to take Anthropic down.

Hell, I would have thought it likely that anthropic was doing the same thing. Of course that was proven wrong, but for OAI I wouldn't even be guessing. This has always been what sama does.

It's already happened in the Korean DMZ

It's incredibly unlikely that it won't do exactly that, although we'll be very lucky if it's just that and not a random, innocent city

Verhoeven fans would simply call it "a glitch".

> Mad respect to Sam

And people wonder how we got here.

He’s certainly solidified his place in the history of this era.

But I suspect the public sentiment will eventually turn against him. When society sets its pitchforks on big tech he’ll be the poster boy. A 21st century John D. Rockefeller.

Him, Musk, Bezos, and Zuck.

absolute truth nuke and the hysteria around it is yet more evidence that HN is a negative signal.

anything HN countersignals, go long on.

Hitler won the race in the 1930s too. Totally crushed it.

I’m sure a big donor just used the US gov as a bludgeon to destroy their competition

Anthropic would probably not renegotiate in a year about the principles, while Sam Altman is known to be morally flexible so OpenAI will almost surely allow the military to do what they want in the future. Sam Altman might even have said behind closed doors that these restrictions will be removed once the drama has died down.

What principals do Anthropic have?, they happily build a product and acknowledge it will lead to the loss of millions of jobs, particularly SWE's first, but shrug and say 'nothing we can do, we just build the thing', that will kill a lot of people.

I tried doing that but I'm certain they didn't delete it, because I tried logging in after a week and it worked

It absolutely matters, especially when done in unison like this.

Cancelling ChatGPT sends a signal that you don't agree with weaponizing AI. Switching to Claude says you support Anthropic's principled stance against it. If you have a strong opinion either way, today is the day to vote with your wallet.

Dismissing every small action as meaningless is just apathy and how nothing ever changes.

What has an impact is cancelling a subscription and then talking about it. The media will amplify it the pushback. The goal is to make the name OpenAI and ChatGPT toxic, that whatever you do will be converted into a technology that will surveil or bomb you.

At least I'm not getting my hands dirty.

Yes? Earnings matter to investors

I think you have too much pessimism. It's not guaranteed to work, but as I mentioned in another thread, since around December, Claude (and Gemini to a lesser extent) has had all the buzz in tech circles, while Chat-GPT has seemed like the also-ran. And that matters: decision-makers in companies notice these things and momentum becomes self-reinforcing (you use Claude Code because everyone else uses Claude Code). If a large enough group of developers visibly defects from OpenAI because of this, it definitely could have consequences. It's not a sure thing, but it's far from hopeless.

I was not a Chat-GPT user even before this, but I'm bumping my Claude Code subscription to the next tier up. Fuck OpenAI.

> but stop pretending this kind of thing matters one iota

This is blatantly false and intellectually dishonest. Of course it matters. Your edit is also wrong; you are advocating for nihilism with statments like these.

It's the only thing that matters. These companies don't follow the rules of capitalism physics. They live or die on vibes alone and the tech community abandoning them en masse is bad for the vibes. Once they lose the vibes they are Wiley Coyote looking down at the canyon below.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has over 200,000 personnel. There are thousands of putative SAM sites and MANPAD launch sites. The amount of data to crunch is significant.

Alternatively, the DoW is simply incompetent and Trump or Hegseth wants to use AI to draft war plans.

The Iran situation is unique. If it is true that Epstein was part of a blackmailing operation run by Israeli intelligence, then the time to act is limited. It may only be a matter of time before the US-Israel special relationship begins to deteriorate, especially as the House of Representatives starts digging into what was going on.

For hardline right wing Israeli government officials who would be privy to such information, the window of time to leverage to US to enact regime change on the Islamic Republic is closing. The survival of Israel over the long run really depends on not having a hardline Islamic regime in Iran developing nuclear weapons. Things like AI safety and US elections are secondary to such prerogatives. The question for voters in the US is whether it really is worth it to the average US citizen to shed blood and tax dollars for this stuff.

I hope there can be a peaceful regime change in Iran and that there will be peaceful relations with Iran and Israel in the future. But damn I wish things could go back to normal with our US political system once this is all settled.

You'd have to think so. They're really the only serious player left - I doubt Google would want to be involved, and xAI is a significant step down.

If you believe that any country should have a military and intelligence apparatus, the job of that apparatus is to kill people and surveil foreigners. I do think the US government should have a military and intelligence apparatus. Therefore, any company that works with it, from suppliers of clothing and food to suppliers of compute and AI, are supporting an organization with that mission.

The US military _does not_ need to build autonomous weapon systems and _should not_ surveil US citizens broadly.

Just because you sign a deal that didn't mean you can't change it or terminate it in the future. As long as both parties agree any contract can be modified or terminated. If they don't usually the contract contains information on how it works.

OpenAI is not losing money from inference. HN has told you the opposite repeatedly.

Yeah, you’re right. I’m overly hopeful and naïve

Edit: as soon as I hit submit I realized this might sound condescending, but I actually mean this lol

I guess I’m hanging on what

> reflects them in law

Means exactly. What law and what does it say?

I’m also sure he quietly bent the knee, but I want to know what “law and policy” it’s being reflected in to know.

I think it's plausible, given the effort he seemed to put into his initial response to the ads: https://x.com/sama/status/2019139174339928189