AI executive Dario Amodei on the red lines Anthropic would not cross
“It’s about the principle of standing up for what’s right,” said Dario Amodei, CEO of the artificial intelligence firm Anthropic, who has found himself at the center of a new kind of firestorm. What’s wrong, in his view, is why the AI company he co-founded has been banned from the federal government.
“It feels very punitive and inappropriate, given the amount that we’ve done for U.S. national security,” he said.
Anthropic created Claude, an AI chatbot you might use at work or school. Since last summer, its government version has been deeply embedded in military intelligence and classified operations at the Pentagon. This past week, in the lead-up to the attack on Iran, the Defense Department demanded Anthropic hand over its AI without restrictions for lawful military use. The company refused.
“We have these two red lines,” said Amodei. “We’ve had them from Day One. We are still advocating for those red lines. We’re not gonna move on those red lines.”
Those red lines? Not allowing Anthropic’s AI to perform mass surveillance of Americans, and prohibiting its AI from powering fully-autonomous weapons without any human involvement. [Continue reading…]
The US military reportedly used Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, to inform its attack on Iran despite Donald Trump’s decision, announced hours earlier, to sever all ties with the company and its artificial intelligence tools.
The use of Claude during the massive joint US-Israel bombardment of Iran that began on Saturday was reported by the Wall Street Journal and Axios. It underlines the complexity of the US military withdrawing powerful AI tools from its missions when the technology is already intricately embedded in operations.
According to the Journal, US military command used the tools for intelligence purposes, as well as to help select targets and carry out battlefield simulations.
On Friday, just hours before the Iran attack began, Trump ordered all federal agencies to stop using Claude immediately. He denounced Anthropic on Truth Social as a “Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about”.
The flaming row was triggered by the use of Claude by the US military in its raid to capture the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, in January. Anthropic objected, pointing to its terms of use which do not allow Claude to be applied for violent ends, to develop weapons, or for surveillance. [Continue reading…]