This is how all of these companies work. They’ll follow some ethical code or register as a PBC until that undermined profits.

These companies are clearly aiming at cheapening the value of white collar labor. Ask yourself: will they steward us into that era ethically? Or will they race to transfer wealth from American workers to their respective shareholders?

Then they ignored the researchers warning about what it could do, and I said nothing. It sounded like science fiction.

Then they gave it control of things that matter, power grids, hospitals, weapons, and I said nothing. It seemed to be working fine.

Then something went wrong, and no one knew how to stop it, no one had planned for it, and no one was left who had listened to the warnings.

If we need safety, we need Anthropic to be not too far behind (at least for now, before Anthropic possibly becomes evil), and that might mean releasing models that are safer and more steerable than others (even if, unfortunately, they are not 100% up to Anthropic’s goals)

Dogmatism, while great, has its time and place, and with a thousand bad actors in the LLM space, pragmatism wins better.

We must build a moat to save humanity from AI.

Please regulate our open-source competitors for safety.

Actually, safety doesn't scale well for our Q3 revenue targets.

I don't know enough to evaluate this or other decisions. I'm just glad someone is trying to care, because the default in today's world is to aggressively reject the larger picture in favor of more more more. I don't know how effective Anthropic's attempts to maintain some level of responsibility can be, but they've at least convinced me that they're trying. In the same way that OpenAI, for example, have largely convinced me that they're not. (Neither of those evaluations is absolute; OpenAI could be much worse than it is.)

It increasingly feels like operating at that scale can require compromises I’m not comfortable making. Maybe that’s a personal limitation—but it’s one I’m choosing to keep.

I’d genuinely love to hear examples of tech companies that have scaled without losing their ethical footing. I could use the inspiration.

Pledges are a cynical marketing strategy aimed at fomenting a base politics that works to prevent such a regulatory regime.

How magnanimous! They are only thinking of others, you see. They are rejecting their safety pledge for you.

> “We didn't really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments … if competitors are blazing ahead.”

Oops, said the quiet part out loud that it’s all about money. “I mean, if all of our competitors are kicking puppies in the face, it doesn’t make sense for us to not do it too. Maybe we’ll also kick kittens while we’re at it”.

For all of you who thought Anthropic were “the good guys”, I hope this serves as a wake up call that they were always all the same. None of them care about you, they only care about winning.

That said, I'm not thrilled about this. I joined Anthropic with the impression that the responsible scaling policy was a binding pre-commitment for exactly this scenario: they wouldn't set aside building adequate safeguards for training and deployment, regardless of the pressures.

This pledge was one of many signals that Anthropic was the "least likely to do something horrible" of the big labs, and that's why I joined. Over time, the signal of those values has weakened; they've sacrified a lot to get and keep a seat at the table.

Principled decisions that risk their position at the frontier seem like they'll become even more common. I hope they're willing to risk losing their seat at the table to be guided by values.

1. AI is military/surveillance technology in essence, like many other information technologies,

2. Any guarantee given by AI companies is void since it can be changed in a day,

3. Tech companies have no real control over how their technology will be used,

4. AI companies may seem over-valued with low profits if you think AI as a civil technology. But their investors probably see them as a part of defense (war) industry.

Is the implication here that Anthropic admits they already can't meet their own risk and safety guidelines? Why else would they have to stop training models?

Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy, the hard commitment to never train a model unless safety measures were guaranteed adequate in advance, lasted roughly 2.5 years (Sept 2023 to Feb 2026).

The half-life of idealism in AI is compressing fast. Google at least had the excuse of gradualism over a decade and a half.

This is the problem with every AI safety scenario like this. It has a level of detachment from reality that is frankly stark.

If linesman stop showing up to work for a week, the power goes out. The US has show that people with "high powered" rifles can shut down the grid.

We are far far away from a sort of world where turning AI off is a problem. There isnt going to be a HAL or Terminator style situation when the world is still "I, Pencil".

A lot of what safety amounts to is politics (National, not internal, example is Taiwan a country). And a lot more of it is cultural.

I genuinly curious why they are so holy to you, when to me I see just another tech company trying to make cash

Edit: Reading some of the linked articles, I can see how Anthropic CEO is refusing to allow their product for warfare (killing humans), which is probably a good thing that resonates with supporting them

The article yes, but we cannot be sure about its topic. We definitely cannot claim that they are unrelated. We don't know. It's possible that the two things have nothing to do with each other. It's also possible that they wanted to prevent worse requests and this was a preventive measure.

I don't think it's going to be as easy to tell as you think that they might be becoming evil before it's too late if this doesn't seem to raise any alarm bells to you that this is already their plan

‘While there’s value in safety, we value the Pentagon’s dollars more’

> Then they ignored the researchers warning about what it could do, and I...

...tried it and became an eager early adopter and evangelist. It sounded like something from a dystopian science function novel I enjoyed.

> Then [I] gave it control of things that matter, power grids, hospitals, weapons, and...

...my startup was doing well, and I was happy. We should be profitable next quarter.

> Then something went wrong, and no one knew how to stop it, no one had planned for it...

...and I was guilty as fuck,

FTFY, to fit the HN crowd.

They inserted themselves into the supply chain, and then the government told them that they'll be classified as a supply chain risk unless they get unfettered access to the tech. They knew what they were getting into, but didn't want the competitors to get their slice of the pie.

The government didn't pursue them, Anthropic actively pursued government and defense work.

Talk about selling out. Dario's starting to feel more and more like a swindler, by the day.

> The meeting between Hegseth and Amodei was confirmed by a defense official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/hegseth-to-meet-with-anthropi...

Public benefit corporation, hm?

Given by anyone, actually.

Also don’t take investment from anyone who isn’t fully aligned ethically. Be skeptical of promises from people you don’t personally know extremely well.

That may limit you to slower growth, or cap your growth (fine if you want to run a company and take home $2M/ye from it; not fine if you want to be acquired for $100M and retire.) It may also limit you to taking out loans to fund growth that you can’t bootstrap to, which is a different kind of risky.

Pledges are generally non-binding (you can pledge to do no evil and still do it), but fulfill an important function as a signal: actively removing your public pledge to do "no evil" when you could have acted as you wished anyway, switches the market you're marketing to. That's the most worrying part IMO.

I mean, yes, that is actually how world works. That is why we need safety, environmental and other anti-fraud regulations. Because without them, competition makes it so that every successful company will fraud, hurt and harm. Those who wont will be taken over by those who do.

The moral failing is all of ours to share.

But lucky for the AI companies, most of them are based in place that only has a government on paper and everyone forgot where that paper is.