Assuming this isn't just a supply issue on their side, nothing says "ethical AI" like only allowing mega corporations to use it through cost barriers.
How many government sanctioned school bombings does it take for them to quit working with said government? For now we know that number is somewhere between infinity and 1.
The question of collaboration with USG is a much more complex one, but is not the one raised above.
Edit: I'll also add that I doubt any AI-doom people "trust" Anthropic per se. The entire angle of questioning – again – misunderstands the AI-doom argument. You appear to think that if companies behave unethically, they cannot be trusted and they will not produce good outcomes, inversely: if they behave ethically, they can be trusted, and they will produce good outcomes.
Any competent AI-doomer would argue that ethics or trust are essentially irrelevant.
The entire problem is that people can act totally reasonably, even ethically, and this is not a guarantee of good outcomes. Situations can be created in which completely ethical, reasonable behavior actually produces a bad outcome. You do not need to assume people are bad in order to produce a bad outcome, and inversely you cannot assume that you will get a good outcome from good people.
"Arms races" are one class of situations that often have this characteristic. "Bureaucracy" is another class that we encounter a lot in daily life. There's a lot of them!
Anthropic needs to be at least somewhat in the good graces of a capricious administration that is already under pressure from businesses and citizens to regulate AI companies across multiple different domains, whether it's energy consumption, job displacement, military and defense applications, surveillance, etc.
If Anthropic wants to survive, they need to acquire influence with the government that most impacts them as an American company, and a massive exporter of services in the AI space to other countries, otherwise they could get locked down and locked out of the market for national security reasons.
It sucks, but sometimes the survival choice is to make an ethical compromise in hopes that you can still be around to make better decisions later.
This "simple" fact needs quite a bit of additional context and work. Making grandiose ethical claims like this can be countered with other grandiose claims such as the fact that there is no ethical existence under communism or socialism.
The fact that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism is not material to whether or not ethical existence is possible under communism or socialism. In order to survive in a capitalist society, one inherently has to make choices that require trade-offs, and those trade-offs are burdened by a history of decisions made not just by the people alive today, but our ancestors as well. Does that mean I walk around chanting "Reparations", "Land-back", or other calls to action? No, but I do acknowledge that there are unresolved issues and as a Canadian, I know we need to do more to resolve treaty issues, and environmental issues, and system discrimination. I also know that Americans need to do better to address systemic discrimination and many, many other issues. It also doesn't mean I want to give back my house, or give away all of my possessions. It just means I try to make good choices and support businesses and people that are open about the trade-offs they make and try to engage as ethically as possible.
Acknowledging those facts doesn't absolve us of responsibility, it's a framework that allows folks concerned about whether or not they are doing the right thing to accept the trade-offs that they choose to make and be responsible and accountable for those choices to themselves or their communities.
We live in a world with scarce resources. It's possible that with a foundational redesign of the global economy, and the requisite authoritarian government that would be required to force such a redesign, we could eliminate food scarcity, solve energy scarcity, and make sure that everyone has a place to live. Those trade-offs are probably not worth the ethical cost in political and physical violence required to accomplish it. We have seen the trade-offs that happen when the powerful are able to exploit communist or socialist governments. We are seeing the "late stage capitalism" impacts of allowing the powerful to exploit capitalism in democratic societies. Acknowledging that the current capitalist system has lead to the greatest prosperity for the upper echelon (financially) of humanity, and a dramatic reduction in global poverty shouldn't obscure the reality that much of that wealth comes from exploitation of people and the environment.
It's a huge problem to unwind, and we can't let the burden of every choice that we make stop us from trying to do better, but we (as in society in general) can't do better if we don't at least acknowledge the compromises we are making along the way, and try to plan to fix it in the future.
Probably a topic better suited to beer and a pub setting than HN though :P
I don't believe that this is a fact. How are you demonstrating that this is a fact?
When you talk about things like reparations or "land back" you're already cargo-culting in concepts and ideas that themselves need to be fleshed out in order to make a subsequent claim that a specific economic system is unethical. Someone can just argue all economic systems are unethical, how are you going to defend against that? And can you pay reparations for example without going back in all of human history and finding all cases of injustices and then tallying it up? Why pick an arbitrary point in time? Better yet, why not start in countries where slavery still exists instead of focusing on the west which led the world in abolishing slavery and created concepts such as universal human rights.
Even with respect to "eliminating food scarcity" - eliminate in what sense? All olive groves and grapevines and rice farms have to be destroyed and rebuilt to only build certain foods?
Dabbling in communism or other inhumane and authoritarian governmental systems is extremely dangerous and in the same vein of extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence, suggesting as you did creating an authoritarian government to create a utopia is precisely the same project of suffering and death that mass murderers throughout history have undertaken to abject failure, and thus, you need some incredible amount of evidence and theory to be able to even fairly suggest going down this path.
I am not going to do the work of gathering the evidence for you, and I don't think this is the right venue for a debate on the topic.
If you don't have evidence I think it's mature of you to admit that and applaud you in doing so. We all like to just talk and don't have to always provide evidence for every citation or what not and it's fair to just say hey I'm just making this up and it requires further discussion.
Talk about a strawman!