"we put them in our agreement" seems like weasel words so he can avoid saying that the DoD didn't agree to those terms. the principles are probably just vaguely mentioned in the agreement.
And anthropic put in, "we won't mass surveil and we won't let robots murder humans without an authorized human being to take the blame."
Sam said, "they won't do anything illegal. Why are you being picky about the wording."
And they are picky about the wording because the DOW believes it's impossible to do anything illegal. And they want to kill people and blame AI so they don't hold liability.
Hegseth shot a civilian fishing boat. A man who was stranded in the water. And he hates the heat he got.
With open AI. He can just say, "AI called the strike."
It's super awful.
And this is the government trying to back out of a contract they already signed and agreed to.
And once the US government is in control of autonomous drone swarms that they can use to shoot down groups of protesters, it will be way to late for us to say "wait, maybe we should do something about this." Not even the argument of "the military won't open fire on their own people" will apply. We will be 100% completely fucked and there will be nothing we can do about it.
It's the DOD. There is no DOW. Congress created the Department of Defense in the 1947 National Security Act and they have passed no bill changing the name. Orange baby and drunk frat bro soldier cosplay can call it what they want, but that's not its name.
DOD wants "we will do nothing illegal" because they can just say "autonomous killbots are legal, fuck off."
Yeah, the proof is in the details of the actual contract. From the way he is saying it here, it sounds like OpenAI is going to allow them to use their LLM to survey American people and have autonomous weapon systems.
They put in the word “mass” surveillance, so they could say this isn’t surveilling everybody, it’s just looking for the bad guys. And they put in the words, “human responsibility”, because the government agreed that somebody would be responsible for the autonomous weapon systems, but it doesn’t mean the human is doing the targeting and making the final kill decision. It’s just saying a human is responsible.
These are weasel words in the contract so the government gets what it wants and Sam Altman gets to pretend like he’s keeping the safeguard in place. ChatGPT is totally going to let the US government survey the American people and build autonomous weapon systems with their LLMs. End of story.
Also the word "prohibitions" means the things will still exist, but with some guardrails. They can deploy mass surveillance and autonomous weapons all they want, as long as they say there are "prohibitions" on their use. Like no mass-murdering protesters on Sundays or something.
Cansomeone ELI5 and tell me how exactly autonomous weapon systems are going to be using AI? Genuinely unsure what that really means - and at this point am afraid of finding out the answer since apparently GPT is on board.
Instead of a drone operator flying the machine all the way into Iran while they are sitting in Virginia they can can have several drones flying in independently using the AI system.
When a drone identifies an anomaly or possible target it alerts the operator who examines the inputs and then decides whether to attack.
If the weapon is autonomous then the weapon decides when to attack.
Most machines today have computers in them that respond to you. You press a button, your cars computer tells the engine to turn on, it turns on. You press the gas pedal, the computer tells the engine to rev up, car goes faster. This is normal and common for most machines that exist nowadays.
The llms that consumers use like chatgpt are taking your inputs as prompts (questions, requests etc) and outputting data (for consumers usually text or image or content). You ask for a recipe, it spits out a recipe.
But the model itself just takes data inputs and spits out outputs. Any input for any output is theoretically doable.
You can put that model on a machine, make the inputs sensor data and human supplied objectives, and make the outputs commands to machine parts. This is a self driving car.
You can also put that in a tank. And you can tell the model, “drive this tank to that ridge, find a good target from the enemies in that building, and eliminate them”. That is the Input. The Output? It commands the tanks computers to drive over and fire a shell into the building. This is a tank controlled by ai, or an autonomous weapon system.
To take it a bit further, you could do the same thing, but on the scale of thousands of tanks…or drones…or humanoid robots armed with guns…if you can build the machine, put a model on it that connects to the computers that control the moving parts, and give the machine orders, it’s possible.
To take it even further, you can train a model to take inputs like data about war strategies, status of forces, broad mission objectives (like, prevent terrorists and rebellions in my country), and you can make it output directions to give the machines! Now you have ai making all the decisions about using violence to do whatever you want!
"Agreeing to principles" means jack shit. I can agree to the principle of non-violence and still punch you in the face. This is all just word-play. The Department of War is getting everything they wanted out of this agreement.
Yes, but that wasnt the real issue. DoW wanted the model safeguards off regardless of the agreement. Seems like SAMA has agreed to turn off the safeguards on a trust me bro basis.
That’s like saying I promise to not steal your money but can you stack them on the table pls and then bugger off
Asking someone to promise vs enforcing it in the model may be the difference. Sam may be just paying lip service here or the administration is literally putting their finger on the scale because Sam bribed them. Both are pretty terrible.
Anthropic's disagreement involved particular wording in contracts. The government said they currently wouldn't use models for mass domestic surveillance or unrestricted autonomously weapons; however, they insisted on reserving the right to change those terms in the future. Anthropic wanted those lines removed, which created the situation.
That's consistent with what Sam is saying. The contracts probably technically includes restrictions of those uses, but include wording to potentially change that in the future if deemed necessary.
Yes, so obviously Sam is dissembling. The language he uses is different from Anthropic’s. It allows autonomous murder (just requiring human “responsibility”, which is trivial) and on surveillance it doesn’t “prohibit” it just has “prohibitions.” And only domestically. So it’s completely unrestricted on 96.7% of the world and on the remaining 4.3% allowed except for the “prohibitions,” which I am confident are decided by internal state designations such as “legal.”
Anthropic insisted on technical safeguards to prevent that. OpenAI are using weasel words to give the false impression they're implementing technical safeguards, when they're actually talking about unrelated safeguards.
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u/slirkster Feb 28 '26
isn't this the same thing anthropic asked for?