I’m a bit suspicious that it’s not the same red line Anthropic is taking, and that it’s instead something that seems superficially similar but is optimized to get the administration to choose OpenAI over Anthropic
Yeah, this bit specifically:
We would ask for the contract to cover any use except those which are unlawful or unsuited to cloud deployments, such as domestic surveillance and autonomous offensive weapons
This seems to match how the DoW itself is framing the situation, which is that Anthropic’s “red lines” are already covered by “only lawful use”. So if OpenAI signs a DoW contract without any additional restrictions, precisely the way the DoW wants, this would still be technically in line with Altman’s statement here.
But per Anthropic’s refusal, there’s a difference between the kinds of mass domestic surveillance that are illegal and the kinds of mass domestic surveillance that Anthropic wants to rule out:
To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI. For example, under current law, the government can purchase detailed records of Americans’ movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant, a practice the Intelligence Community has acknowledged raises privacy concerns and that has generated bipartisan opposition in Congress. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale.
So my current read is that Altman has once again managed to commit to exactly nothing.
Edit: Well, I guess he is still at least making a show of public support, which should increase the pressure on the DoW and at least make it look like the whole industry is against them? Unless this statement is intended to be parsed by the DoW as OpenAI offering them a line of retreat, a way to give them everything concrete they want while de-escalating the public narrative? Hm.
We would ask for the contract not to cover use that is unlawful. Examples of unlawful use: domestic surveillance, autonomous offensive weapons.
As in, surveillance/autonomous weapons are framed as instances of unlawful use (“such as”). If we accept that framing, then any contractual language that merely says “no unlawful use” would technically cover them, even if it doesn’t mention those items explicitly. The issue is that the law may be forbidding “domestic surveillance” and “autonomous weapons” under definitions of those terms that are importantly narrower than the custom (?) definitions on which Anthropic is insisting.
(Though I don’t know that digging this deeply into Altman’s Exact Words here makes sense. This may have just been a throwaway statement, without this heavy wording-optimization.)
Surely he meant something by “unsuited to cloud deployments”?
I wasn’t sure what this meant, but I asked Claude, and it sounds like this is probably a reference to confidential military operations that require airgapping. This seems like a technical issue that has basically nothing to do with ethics, suggesting that the “ethical” part routes entirely through the “no unlawful use” part.
The part where Altman says “AI should not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons [...] These are our main red lines” sounds pretty unambiguous, but maybe this is easier to wriggle out of than a concrete statement about the contract OpenAI will request.
I don’t see why it would be difficult to get data about movement patterns of individual people brought from data brokers into an airgapped environment.
Why? You put the data on a hard drive and then put the hard drive into your airgapped environment.
Even if we leave out the data brought from data brokers, the US military has plenty of spy satellites. Given the permission for doing foreign surveillance, there’s a good chance that they are currently running agents in the Palantir system that analyze satellite imagery (and other sensor information) for foreign surveillance.
Given that a lot of those surveillance satellites aren’t geostationary, they are likely already flying over the US and that data is available for analysis already.
Yeah, this bit specifically:
This seems to match how the DoW itself is framing the situation, which is that Anthropic’s “red lines” are already covered by “only lawful use”. So if OpenAI signs a DoW contract without any additional restrictions, precisely the way the DoW wants, this would still be technically in line with Altman’s statement here.
But per Anthropic’s refusal, there’s a difference between the kinds of mass domestic surveillance that are illegal and the kinds of mass domestic surveillance that Anthropic wants to rule out:
So my current read is that Altman has once again managed to commit to exactly nothing.
Edit: Well, I guess he is still at least making a show of public support, which should increase the pressure on the DoW and at least make it look like the whole industry is against them? Unless this statement is intended to be parsed by the DoW as OpenAI offering them a line of retreat, a way to give them everything concrete they want while de-escalating the public narrative? Hm.
I’m confused—I parsed Altman’s statement as:
Isn’t this equivalent to what Anthropic wants?
My parsing is:
As in, surveillance/autonomous weapons are framed as instances of unlawful use (“such as”). If we accept that framing, then any contractual language that merely says “no unlawful use” would technically cover them, even if it doesn’t mention those items explicitly. The issue is that the law may be forbidding “domestic surveillance” and “autonomous weapons” under definitions of those terms that are importantly narrower than the custom (?) definitions on which Anthropic is insisting.
(Though I don’t know that digging this deeply into Altman’s Exact Words here makes sense. This may have just been a throwaway statement, without this heavy wording-optimization.)
Surely he meant something by “unsuited to cloud deployments”?
I wasn’t sure what this meant, but I asked Claude, and it sounds like this is probably a reference to confidential military operations that require airgapping. This seems like a technical issue that has basically nothing to do with ethics, suggesting that the “ethical” part routes entirely through the “no unlawful use” part.
The part where Altman says “AI should not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons [...] These are our main red lines” sounds pretty unambiguous, but maybe this is easier to wriggle out of than a concrete statement about the contract OpenAI will request.
Seems I called it?
I don’t see why it would be difficult to get data about movement patterns of individual people brought from data brokers into an airgapped environment.
The issue is that LLMs that run on the cloud can’t interact with airgapped data.
Why? You put the data on a hard drive and then put the hard drive into your airgapped environment.
Even if we leave out the data brought from data brokers, the US military has plenty of spy satellites. Given the permission for doing foreign surveillance, there’s a good chance that they are currently running agents in the Palantir system that analyze satellite imagery (and other sensor information) for foreign surveillance.
Given that a lot of those surveillance satellites aren’t geostationary, they are likely already flying over the US and that data is available for analysis already.