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 20 years, 99% of the workforce in the military,
in the civilian government, in the private sector is going to be AIs.
They're going to be the robot armies that constitute our military.
They're going to be the superhumanly intelligent advisors that senators and presidents and CEOs have.
They're going to be the police.
You name it, the role will be filled by an AI.
Our future civilization is going to 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 anthropics 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 anthropics models.
Imagine if there's some future democratic administration and Elon Musk is negotiating Starlink access to the military and Elon says,