I’m glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

Dwarkesh Patel· Host0:00

So by now, I'm sure that you've heard that the Department of War has declared Anthropic a supply chain risk because Anthropic refused to remove red lines around the use of their models for mass surveillance and for autonomous weapons. Honestly, I think this situation is a warning shot. Right now, LLMs are probably not being used in mission-critical ways. But within twenty years, ninety-nine percent of the workforce in the military, in the civilian government, in the private sector, is going to be AIs. They're gonna be the robot armies that constitute our military. They're gonna be the superhumanly intelligent advisors that senators and presidents and CEOs have. They're gonna be the police. You name it, the role will be filled by an AI. Our future civilization is gonna be run on AI labor. And as much as the government's actions here piss me off, I'm glad that this episode happened because it gives us the opportunity to start thinking about some extremely important questions. Now, obviously, the Department of War has the right to refuse to use Anthropic's models. And in fact, I think they have an entirely reasonable case for doing so, especially so given the ambiguity of terms like mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. In fact, if I was the Secretary of War, I probably would have made the same determination and refused to use Anthropic's models. Imagine if there's some future Democratic administration, and Elon Musk is negotiating Starlink access to the military, and Elon says, "Look, I reserve the right to cut off the military's access to Starlink in case you're fighting some unjust war or some war that Congress has not authorized."