Ashley Capoot, CNBC; Anthropic is clashing with the Pentagon over AI use. Here’s what each side wants
"Anthropic wants assurance that its models will not be used for autonomous weapons or to “spy on Americans en masse,” according to a report from Axios.
The DOD, by contrast, wants to use Anthropic’s models “for all lawful use cases” without limitation."
REBECCA HEILWEIL, Fast Company; Palantir is caught in the middle of a brewing fight between Anthropic and the Pentagon
"A dispute between AI company Anthropic and the Pentagon over how the military can use the company’s technology has now gone public. Amid tense negotiations, Anthropic has reportedly called for limits on two key applications: mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. The Department of Defense, which Trump renamed the Department of War last year, wants the freedom to use the technology without those restrictions.
Caught in the middle is Palantir. The defense contractor provides the secure cloud infrastructure that allows the military to use Anthropic’s Claude model, but it has stayed quiet as tensions escalate. That’s even as the Pentagon, per Axios, threatens to designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” a move that could force Palantir to cut ties with one of its most important AI partners."
David E. Sanger, The New York Times ; Biden Administration Outlines Government ‘Guardrails’ for A.I. Tools
"President Biden on Thursday signed the first national security memorandum detailing how the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and other national security institutions should use and protect artificial intelligence technology, putting “guardrails” on how such tools are employed in decisions varying from nuclear weapons to granting asylum.
The new document is the latest in a series Mr. Biden has issued grappling with the challenges of using A.I. tools to speed up government operations — whether detecting cyberattacks or predicting extreme weather — while limiting the most dystopian possibilities, including the development of autonomous weapons.
But most of the deadlines the order sets for agencies to conduct studies on applying or regulating the tools will go into full effect after Mr. Biden leaves office, leaving open the question of whether the next administration will abide by them...
The new guardrails would also prohibit letting artificial intelligence tools make a decision on granting asylum. And they would forbid tracking someone based on ethnicity or religion, or classifying someone as a “known terrorist” without a human weighing in.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of the order is that it treats private-sector advances in artificial intelligence as national assets that need to be protected from spying or theft by foreign adversaries, much as early nuclear weapons were. The order calls for intelligence agencies to begin protecting work on large language models or the chips used to power their development as national treasures, and to provide private-sector developers with up-to-the-minute intelligence to safeguard their inventions."
