More details on the difference between the OpenAI and Anthropic contracts from one of the Under Secretaries of State:
>The axios article doesn’t have much detail and this is DoW’s decision, not mine. But if the contract defines the guardrails with reference to legal constraints (e.g. mass surveillance in contravention of specific authorities) rather than based on the purely subjective conditions included in Anthropic’s TOS, then yes. This, btw, was a compromise offered to—and rejected by—Anthropic.
> For the avoidance of doubt, the OpenAI - @DeptofWar contract flows from the touchstone of “all lawful use” that DoW has rightfully insisted upon & xAI agreed to. But as Sam explained, it references certain existing legal authorities and includes certain mutually agreed upon safety mechanisms. This, again, is a compromise that Anthropic was offered, and rejected.
> Even if the substantive issues are the same there is a huge difference between (1) memorializing specific safety concerns by reference to particular legal and policy authorities, which are products of our constitutional and political system, and (2) insisting upon a set of prudential constraints subject to the interpretation of a private company and CEO. As we have been saying, the question is fundamental—who decides these weighty questions? Approach (1), accepted by OAI, references laws and thus appropriately vests those questions in our democratic system. Approach (2) unacceptably vests those questions in a single unaccountable CEO who would usurp sovereign control of our most sensitive systems.
> It is a great day for both America’s national security and AI leadership that two of our leading labs, OAI and xAI have reached the patriotic and correct answer here
It is a great day for both America’s national security and AI leadership that two of our leading labs, OAI and xAI have reached the patriotic and correct answer here
He's an administration official openly cheerleading his team. This should be characterized as the insider perspective/spin, not a neutral analysis of the relevant facts.
Even this most-charitable-possible (to DoW) explanation does not even come close to justifying the supply chain risk designation. It is absolutely enough (and honestly more than enough) for a contract cancellation and a switch to a competitor. DoW could have done that for any reason at all, or no reason at all. If they had issues with Anthropics terms, they 100% should have done that.
Nothing in the quoted text comes anywhere close to the realm of justifying the retaliatory actions.
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!”
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)
> 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.
Conversely, I’m glad that we’re looking a little further than that, and are worried about what happens after this missile exchange. After living through an endless “global war on terror” that gave us the biggest mass surveillance enabling act, it’s hard to not dismiss “it’s just until the end of this war, and we promise it’ll end well!”
> Anthropic’s decision timing as the U.S. has launched a war in the Middle East [...]
According to Anthropic, their terms have been in their contract from the beginning. The only decision they made recently is not to be strong-armed into renegotiating their contract to allow things they don't want to allow. I don't see how that's a bad thing.
> 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.
What’s the difference between a company not building something that’s fit for purpose for fighting a war (like a nursery refusing to build land mines), and thus not being a qualified supplier to the Government for conducting military operations, vs. being tarred with the “supply chain risk” brush? The former seems uncontroversial; the latter seems petty and retaliatory. “Supply chain risk” designations are for companies that you would do business with but might be compromised by the enemy, like when a supplier agrees to provide the DoW grenades, but the grenades could be intentionally defective such that they detonate prematurely in the soldier’s hand.
Besides, as an Israeli, imagine a world in which the manufacturers of Zyklon B refused to sell Hitler their product for the purposes of gassing human beings. It might not have prevented the Holocaust, but at least maybe impeded it a little.
>Besides, as an Israeli, imagine a world in which the manufacturers of Zyklon B refused to sell Hitler their product for the purposes of gassing human beings. It might not have prevented the Holocaust, but at least maybe impeded it a little.
Honestly, if the Holocaust was today, we would probably get 10% of comments here trying to defend "both sides". Some people have a need to try to defend every side, even if one of the sides it's asking for them to be murdered.
A government promise that they'll only do lawful things is not reassuring at all:
1. We've seen government lawyers write memos explaining why such-and-such obviously illegal act is legal (see: torture memo). Until challenged, this is basically law.
2. We've seen government change the law to make whatever they want legal (see: patriot act)
3. We've seen courts just interpret laws to make things legal
A contractor doesn't realistically have the power to push back against any of these avenues if they agree to allow anything legal.
(At the risk of triggering Godwin's Law, remember that for the most part the Holocaust was entirely legal - the Nazi's established the necessary authorization. Just to illustrate that when it comes to certain government crimes, the law alone is an insufficient shield.)
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"
You're quoting social media posts from a regime official who says he didn't participate in these negotiations and doesn't work for the relevant department.
If his characterization of the agreement is correct, which I will not believe and you should not believe until a trustworthy news outlet publishes the text, I suppose this would convince me that Hegseth does not literally plan to build a Terminator for democracy-ending purposes. There's a lot of inexcusable stuff here regardless, but perhaps merely boycotting OpenAI and the US military would be a sufficient response if this all checks out.
I did choose to immediately disbelieve it. If a Trump regime official tells me something, and they could plausibly benefit from lying to me about it, I assume until proven otherwise that they're lying. They've earned this reputation through a large number of consequential and later disproven lies; my apologies to Mr. Lewin if he personally is an honest man, although I might encourage him to think about whether the good he's doing in his role is so important that it outweighs the lies he's providing cover for and the gradual erosion of his integrity.
> If you've found one of these, let me know. I'm still looking...
I do not assume, and I would recommend that you do not assume, that there is such a thing as a text of the contract. It's much easier to lie about contents of documents that don't actually exist yet. Then you can craft the text in response to public feedback, writing it down in early March and telling people that it's totally a copy of what was agreed to on February 27.
As a corollary, you should be skeptical of any purported text that is not widely published soon. If there is indeed such a contract, and it says what Altman claims, he will desperately want to ensure that his employees have read a "leak" of the text by Monday morning.
how I wish that "patriotic" meant something instead of just "did what we wanted". I'm so tired of living in an era where every communication made by every organization feels like a lie
The old science fairs actually did find real geniuses. Many kids who placed highly in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search ended up winning Nobel Prizes later in life.
The modern ones are sadly just another checkbox for college admissions, full of cheaters gaming the metrics.
>Many kids who placed highly in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search ended up winning Nobel Prizes later in life
Do you happen to have a list available? I saw a few among the winners, but I wasn't able to find much about non-winning top placers.
The ones I could find won their Nobel much later than their Talent Search win (40+ years, and in one case more than 60 years after), so it might be premature to rule out the more modern contestants. (at least based on that alone)
They haven't really added anything to Office since 2013, the last pre-subscription version. There were massive changes between Office 98 and 2013, including entirely new programs like OneNote. They just found a way to get their customers to rebuy the same product every year.
Same thing happened with Adobe and CS6; feature development slowed to a crawl after the change to a subscription.
I want viable alternatives too. But Microsoft's stuff accounts for a million+ edge cases that you don't really encounter until you're neck deep into whatever you're working on.
For the sake of conversation, though, there's SoftMaker Office:
But they're a subscription too. You save only $20 a year for less features than Office 365 as well (especially the lack of an email program). For most people, that savings and "no Microsoft" isn't enough.
About three years ago, I had a Macbook and I wanted to play with Flash/Animate again.
I went to Adobe's website, and couldn't find a non-subscription version to just buy, so I actually contacted customer support about it, and they said "nope, you have to pay for a subscription".
I could have of course sailed the high seas, but I opted to just buy a copy of Toonboom Harmony, which is fairly different than Flash but close enough and still offers perpetual licenses (and shockingly works pretty well with Wine/Proton on Linux).
I didn't really want to resort to piracy; I think it's stupid that Adobe won't sell a perpetual license.
I got a license to Moho from a Humble Bundle like a year ago, and I think Toonz is open source nowadays, all in addition to the ToonBoom copy I have so I probably don't need the real Adobe Animate anymore.
The pace has probably slowed down, but problem isn't so much that they're not adding anything, it's that the additions are either somewhat niche (e.g., new Excel formulas), don't work as well as they should (e.g., syncing), or are confusing (e.g., the new Outlook that lives alongside "classic" Outlook).
Can confirm as someone who was using pre-subscription Office to write/read files while everyone else at work was using the 365 version. Now that I'm using 365 too, I do however appreciate the ability to do shared live editing in the office programs.
I found this using my secret inside IT knowledge: searched "buy office perpetual" on the internet.
I know microsoft is the evil soulless megacorp on HN, but the least you could do is attack them for true things instead of totally made up, has-never-ever-been-true things.
Only because you chose to walk through the port instead of through town. Google Maps' walking route is shorter than the route that goes through that road, entirely on sidewalks, and only requires crossing one road wider than one car lane per direction (and said road has a signalized crosswalk). There is also a pedestrian bridge across that road that could be used instead, but Google didn't pick it, likely because it connects with "private" property (the convention center's path).
Someone doesn't understand that any article that's drawing conclusions based on a workflow that involves putting a Chevy Suburban (functionally a chevy pickup from the B pillar forward) and a Honda HRV into the same category is sus at best and anyone uncritically accepting said conclusions is also sus at best.
If one wanted to be honest they'd look at GVW or some other metric that tracks size far more closely than a fairly arbitrary categorization that is highly gamed for regulatory reasons.
We're all just so sick of these shallow analysis. Shitting numbers and graphs onto them doesn't make them not shallow. Like what even is the point of a raw "deaths by state" map?[1]?
Suburbans are on truck chassis and are SUVs. HRVs are on car chassis and are crossovers. The bucket is called "trucks and SUVs" to make this less ambiguous.
>Suburbans are on truck chassis and are SUVs. HRVs are on car chassis and are crossovers. The bucket is called "trucks and SUVs" to make this less ambiguous.
TFA does not use data broken down in that way.
TFA cites "sales by body type" which puts a 'Burb (functionally a pickup for this discussion) into the same category as a 2002 Forester (which is an SUV on paper, but obviously a car).
As an adamant enthusiast of both cars and infrastructure design, if someone puts a crossover in the trucks and SUVs category, I am dubious of anything that follows. Crossovers are basically just cars with higher rollover risk. They're lighter, they have smaller engines, they can stop more quickly, and overall have much, much better safety characteristics.
Like I'm sorry but if you put crossovers and SUVs in the same bucket for a discussion anywhere, but especially in the realm of safety, I'm not taking your opinions seriously.
>The axios article doesn’t have much detail and this is DoW’s decision, not mine. But if the contract defines the guardrails with reference to legal constraints (e.g. mass surveillance in contravention of specific authorities) rather than based on the purely subjective conditions included in Anthropic’s TOS, then yes. This, btw, was a compromise offered to—and rejected by—Anthropic.
https://x.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/2027566426970530135
> For the avoidance of doubt, the OpenAI - @DeptofWar contract flows from the touchstone of “all lawful use” that DoW has rightfully insisted upon & xAI agreed to. But as Sam explained, it references certain existing legal authorities and includes certain mutually agreed upon safety mechanisms. This, again, is a compromise that Anthropic was offered, and rejected.
> Even if the substantive issues are the same there is a huge difference between (1) memorializing specific safety concerns by reference to particular legal and policy authorities, which are products of our constitutional and political system, and (2) insisting upon a set of prudential constraints subject to the interpretation of a private company and CEO. As we have been saying, the question is fundamental—who decides these weighty questions? Approach (1), accepted by OAI, references laws and thus appropriately vests those questions in our democratic system. Approach (2) unacceptably vests those questions in a single unaccountable CEO who would usurp sovereign control of our most sensitive systems.
> It is a great day for both America’s national security and AI leadership that two of our leading labs, OAI and xAI have reached the patriotic and correct answer here
https://x.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/2027594072811098230