A lot has happened over the past two weeks.

It started on February 26 with Anthropic putting out a statement. The Department of War had threatened to remove Claude from its systems and invoke the Defense Production Act unless Anthropic dropped two safeguards: one against mass domestic surveillance, one against fully autonomous weapons. The statement said no.

We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk. Regardless, these threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.

I wrote:

This is personal for me. I was born in Romania, a country where the Securitate, the communist secret police, infiltrated nearly every aspect of life through torture and intimidation. If a regime like that had access to something like Claude, the revolution that brought us democracy might never have happened.

I’m also proud that Anthropic actively supports the US Army and NATO allied countries. Without that alliance, the Russian army might not have stopped at Ukraine.

An open letter went up at notdivided.org. Hundreds of signatures from Google and OpenAI employees, in hours. I tweeted:

out of everything that’s happened today, seeing hundreds of people from rival AI labs show up for us on twitter and the petition meant more than I can say

thank you all

notdivided.org signatures

The next day, Anthropic released a second statement responding to the Secretary directly:

No amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.

I posted:

Whether you’re a user who loves Claude’s voice, an engineer at a partner company who works with us when our infra goes down, or simply a citizen concerned about democracy, this is for you too.

On March 5, Dario put out a third statement:

Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences.

To be continued.