MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by guerython | 2026-02-28 02:08:07+00:00
Really interesting to see an OpenClaw character shipped directly into Discord. In our deployments we let each server live in a per-user event log, keep the “thread of consciousness” files per-profile, and run a background summarizer every 12–24 hours that pushes older chunks back into the 200K-window context so the agent can remember “what you said last Tuesday” without the tokens creeping up. That summarizer also copies key relationship events into a lightweight metadata table so we can merge, delete, or audit them without replaying the whole conversation. Might be a useful lever once usage scales beyond a handful of communities.
by est | 2026-02-28 02:08:11+00:00
I think one of the reasons why AI companies are valued this high is one can actually inspect what user inputs & outputs are.

It's basically an OSINT siphon.

In this Chinese case, the tokens are leaked at least twice. ChatGPT offers no direct access to the Chinese, they have to use some kind of Openrouter-like service, but the data where also in clear-text during transmission.
by dang | 2026-02-28 02:09:03+00:00
Here's the sequence (so far) in reverse order - did I miss any important threads?

Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188697 - Feb 2026 (31 comments)

I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47186677 - Feb 2026 (872 comments)

President Trump bans Anthropic from use in government systems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47186031 - Feb 2026 (111 comments)

Google workers seek 'red lines' on military A.I., echoing Anthropic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47175931 - Feb 2026 (132 comments)

Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47173121 - Feb 2026 (1527 comments)

The Pentagon Feuding with an AI Company Is a Bad Sign - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47168165 - Feb 2026 (33 comments)

The Pentagon threatens Anthropic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154983 - Feb 2026 (125 comments)

US Military leaders meet with Anthropic to argue against Claude safeguards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145551 - Feb 2026 (99 comments)

Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142587 - Feb 2026 (128 comments)
by ok_dad | 2026-02-28 02:10:12+00:00
Don't worry, OpenAI will kneel for the king:

> Sam Altman told OpenAI employees at an all-hands meeting on Friday afternoon that a potential agreement is emerging with the U.S. Department of War to use the startup’s AI models and tools, according to a source present at the meeting and a summary of the meeting seen by Fortune. The contract has not yet been signed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188698

Fuck this authoritarian bullshit.
by hirvi74 | 2026-02-28 02:10:43+00:00
> This could kill Anthropic

I am both dumb and without access to Claude, thus I must ask: My fellow smart HN'ers, what kind of impacts would this likely have on the economy?

Has a lot of money and resources not been pumped into Anthropic (albeit likely less than OpenAI)? I imagine such a decision would not be the ROI that many investors expected.
by MarcLore | 2026-02-28 02:10:47+00:00
The gap between 36 hand-coded params and 311 trained params is fascinating and honestly underappreciated. It mirrors something we see repeatedly in ML: gradient descent finds solutions in a fundamentally different region of parameter space than a human engineer would design.

When you hand-code the weights, you're essentially implementing a known algorithm (carry-propagation) directly into the network topology. But trained networks often discover distributed representations that spread the computation across more parameters in ways that are harder to interpret but more robust to input distribution shifts.

I'd be curious whether the 311-param trained model generalizes better to bases other than 10, or to addition with different digit counts than it was trained on. In my experience, the 'messier' learned solutions sometimes capture more structural regularity than the clean engineered ones, precisely because they aren't locked into a single algorithmic strategy.
by bigyabai | 2026-02-28 02:10:58+00:00
Admittedly, Dorsey is nowhere near Ellison or Musk levels of evil. Maybe he's too stupid, maybe he's not ambitious enough. Who knows. But he is an unprincipled chud with a track record that makes his contemporaries look like Einstein by comparison.

The guy's a grifter, Block spent $68 million on a single party and we're all supposed to believe that the executive leadership is blameless? I wasn't born yesterday.
by dmix | 2026-02-28 02:12:12+00:00
The EU and UK is a long way from attracting top AI talent purely from opportunity and monetary terms.

Not to mention UK is arguably further down the mass surveillance pipeline than the US. They’ve always had more aggressive domestic intelligence surveillance laws which was made clear during the Snowden years, they’ve had flock style cameras forever, and they have an anti encryption law pitched seemingly yearly.

I’d imagine most top engineers would rather try to push back on the US executive branch overreach than move. At least for the time being.
by rectang | 2026-02-28 02:12:15+00:00
I don't see this as a "conspiracy". Here's an example of how it would be applied: the Venezuelan boat strikes are plainly unlawful but the administration is pursuing them anyway despite the legal risks for military personnel; having Claude make decisions like whether to "double tap" would help the administration solve a problem of legal jeopardy that already exists and that they consider illegitimate anyway.
by bottlepalm | 2026-02-28 02:12:15+00:00
We all knew AI had the potential to be extremely powerful, and we all perused it anyways. What did we think would happen? The government/military always takes control of the most powerful/dangerous systems. If you work for a defense contractor or under ITAR then you already know this.

The right way to deal with this is political - corporate campaign contributions and lobbying. You're not going to be able to fight the military if they think they need something for national security.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-28 02:13:06+00:00
5A taking without compensation, for one thing. The government can't unilaterally change the terms of a contract to seize more value for itself, at least not without following processes that don't play out on Twitter.

You could even make a Third Amendment case if you stretched the logic far enough. Does "you can't be forced to quarter soldiers" extend to being forced to provide other forms of support?
by dakolli | 2026-02-28 02:14:55+00:00
Yeah, I find it funny how we're now defending these AI companies, when they're clearly still an enemy of the working class.

They've made it incredibly clear their plans are to disenfranchise labor, and welcome in a world of God knows what with their technologies. Like they're making a stand on mass surveillance, this seems a bit like a red herring, cool they stop using their tools for war fighting, but continue to attack their fellow working working class?

All three of these companies are spending hundreds of millions to psyop decision makers across every industry to give your salary to them. Get out of here, with "We will not be divided" OpenAI, Google and Anthropic employees are not friends of labor and should not use our phrases.. or they'd sabotage and or quit.

And why is there no mention of how we caught OpenAI being used in government dashboards through Persona, only two weeks ago, that were directly connected to intelligence organizations and tools to identify if you are politician or high profile personds? OpenAI has been complicit in this since last January when 4o was the first model that qualified for "top secret operations"

(kind of weird how 4o went onto cause a bunch of people to go literally insane and commit crazy acts of violence yet is allowed to be used in the most sensitive aspects of government.. nothing to see here).
by mustardo | 2026-02-28 02:15:02+00:00
In an interview with Zelinsky Trump asks "why haven't you had an election? " Zelensky
: "because we are at war" you can see the idea percolating then. People think I'm a nutter for suggesting there just won't be another election but that's where my money is. I'm waiting for his version of the Gestapo, ICE seems to be a proving ground
by sho_hn | 2026-02-28 02:15:37+00:00
The EUV and other factory equipment everyone's using is predominantly European. High-end testing tools used in R&D are largely European.

The fabs aren't, and that is no small thing. The tech stack is there though.

It's pretty tiresome that the HN audience keeps assuming Europe doesn't have "tech" because it doesn't have Facebook. Where do you think all the wealth comes from? Europe is all over everyone's R&D and supply chain.
by EdNutting | 2026-02-28 02:15:40+00:00
You seem to have a very ill-informed view of UK/EU salaries in this particular sector; And also: yeah, people take salary hits to go do things they believe in (this is like, the entire premise of the underpaid American startup founder model) - it should come as no surprise that people are willing to forgo pay for reasons other than just building their own business / making themselves personally wealthy.
by layer8 | 2026-02-28 02:17:11+00:00
My understanding is that it’s about the contract allowing Anthropic to refuse service when they deem a red line has been crossed. Hegseth and friends probably don’t want any discussions to even start, about whether a red line may be in the process of being crossed,
and having to answer to that. They don’t want the legality or ethicality of any operation to be under Anthropic’s purview at all.
by littlexsparkee | 2026-02-28 02:17:14+00:00
> that corporate profits would rise while consumer spend dropped are literally incompatible realities

on a macro-level yes; CEOs are only thinking about firm-level though (other tech firms will act differently or tech is small part of total economy, many ways to rationalize). they should be assuming others will follow in their footsteps but they are not incentivized to model that or think in the longterm.
by Loughla | 2026-02-28 02:17:46+00:00
I had the same thing happen to me when I posted about how unbridled capitalism requires external costs in the form of pollution and what not. I didn't make it clear that I thought it was a terrible truth.

Once the hive decides you're being serious without checking, they turn the down vote button into an I disagree with you button.

This is actually one of the reasons I left Reddit. I hate to see it here.
by nullocator | 2026-02-28 02:17:55+00:00
Anthropic was not anticipated injured party with standing in American courts, until today, now they are very much injured and do have standing to bring a whole slew of lawsuits against the administration who is operating illegally and unconstitutionally against an american company. This seems like the start of the battle for anthropic not the end. The government signed contracts they don't get to just reneg whenever they fucking please because cheeto bantito in chief and his unhinged alcoholic secretary of defense are unreliable liars
by fluidcruft | 2026-02-28 02:18:09+00:00
This is a summary from Gemini of the news reporting:

Recent news reports from February 2026 indicate that a significant rift developed between Anthropic and the Department of War (Pentagon) following the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026.

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal (referenced by TRT World and others on February 14–15, 2026), the controversy originated when an Anthropic employee contacted a counterpart at Palantir Technologies to inquire about how Claude had been used during the raid.
Key Details of the Reports:

* Discovery of Use: Anthropic reportedly became aware that its AI model, Claude, was used in the classified military operation through its existing partnership with Palantir. This was allegedly the first time an Anthropic model was confirmed to be involved in a high-profile, classified kinetic operation.

* The Inquest: The Wall Street Journal and Semafor reported that an Anthropic staff member reached out to Palantir to ask for specifics on Claude's role. This inquiry reportedly "triggered the current crisis" because it signaled to the Pentagon that Anthropic was attempting to monitor or place "ad hoc" limits on how its technology was being used in active missions.

* The Confrontation: During a recent meeting between Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the inquiry to Palantir was a point of contention. Hegseth reportedly claimed Anthropic had raised concerns directly to Palantir about the Caracas raid. Amodei has since denied that the company raised objections to specific operations, characterizing the exchange with Palantir as a routine technical follow-up or a "self-serving characterization" by Palantir.

* Current Status: This friction has escalated into a public showdown. Today, Friday, February 27, 2026, reports indicate that the Trump administration has officially designated Anthropic a "supply chain risk" and ordered federal agencies to cease using Claude after the company refused to remove guardrails related to autonomous weaponry and mass domestic surveillance.

The primary reporting you are likely recalling comes from The Wall Street Journal (approx. February 14, 2026) and was later expanded upon by Semafor regarding the specific communications between Anthropic and Palantir employees.
by skissane | 2026-02-28 02:18:13+00:00
> Elon being affiliated with Trump. About the strength of logic that makes Dario woke.

I think you have to distinguish between the official justification and some of the associated political rhetoric.

Official justification: "Previous admin agreed contract with unprecedented terms, we demand those terms be removed, vendor is refusing to renegotiate"

Political rhetoric: "THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS!"

If you forget about the political framing, and look at the official justification in the abstract, it doesn't actually seem facially unreasonable. The escalation to "supply chain risk" is a different story, but the core contract dispute and cancelling the contract as a result of it isn't.

So the question is, can Democrats come up with an equivalent abstract official justification–if so, what will it be? Or do they decide they don't even need that–in which case they aren't just matching Trump, they are going even further down the road to normlessness than he's gone.

> And yes, lots of service providers limit where their civilians can be deployed and under what circumstances.

There's a big difference between contracts for boots-on-the-ground and contracts for hardware/software. There is lots of precedent for contractual limitations on how boots-on-the-ground can be used. I'm not aware of similar precedent for hardware or software.

> That hasn't worked. The American electorate is looking for change. And up-and-coming Democrats are picking up on that.

Are they? Gavin Newsom? Zohran Mamdani? AOC? Do they actually sell themselves as "we see Trump breaking the rules, and we'll break them just as hard, even moreso"?

> The Democrat base absolutely wants vengeance. It doesn't play in swing states. But it probably also doesn't hurt.

It is too early to tell. You can argue in the abstract that X approximately equals Y, so if swing voters will tolerate the GOP doing X, they'll also tolerate Democrats doing Y – but the actual swing voters might not agree with you on that.
by rcxdude | 2026-02-28 02:18:57+00:00
You can 'upload' a file into a completely local web app just fine. The directory access is only necessary if you need the web app to be able to spontaneously write back to the original file on your machine, or if you want to read a whole directory tree, which might be slightly convenient for things like gerbers but can easily be dealt with in other ways (especially with gerbers, which you can distinguish by filename, something that the web browser does expose to javascript).

(and I do think it's kind of irritating that Mozilla is fighting against such useful features on somewhat patronising 'the users won't understand what permission they're granting' grounds)
by blaze998 | 2026-02-28 02:19:57+00:00
December 14, 2024

>After famed investor Marc Andreessen met with government officials about the future of tech last May, he was “very scared” and described the meetings as “absolutely horrifying.” These meetings played a key role on why he endorsed Trump, he told journalist Bari Weiss this week on her podcast.

>What scared him most was what some said about the government’s role in AI, and what he described as a young staff who were “radicalized” and “out for blood” and whose policy ideas would be “damaging” to his and Silicon Valley’s interests.

>He walked away believing they endorsed having the government control AI to the point of being market makers, allowing only a couple of companies who cooperated with the government to thrive. He felt they discouraged his investments in AI. “They actually said flat out to us, ‘don't do AI startups like, don't fund AI startups,” he said.

...

keep making petitions, watch the whole thing burn to the ground when Trump decides to channel the Biden ideas in this field.
by Muromec | 2026-02-28 02:20:37+00:00
I generally agree with the sentiment, but it's not the russian oligarch playbook. The playbook is some kind of a variation of buying out a productive asset in a legacy industry under it's market price (because everything is on fire already), then using political or monopoly power to funnel (tax) money through it and into your pockets (the asset has to function, but doesn't have to provide a good quality of service due to not allocating proper maintenance). Sovereign AI fund and Microsoft are very close to that setup. If NYC subway would be sold to certain Elon and he will then jack up the prices and have the city hall to subsidize it still, but keep the quality of service the same, that would be more or less it.

The other variation goes in reverse -- using the legacy asset and it's capture labor force to output some kind of a commodity that is sold below market price to a controlled company in a different jurisdiction, where it's resold at small discount of a market price. The company still has to function here too.

Bonus points for not even owning the asset in question, but having effective control over it through the corrupt management, this way the government still pays the bills to keep it running at loss.

What you are describing is actually very western thing, because it assumes you can exchange the asset into cash directly and then buy something with that liquidity, which assumes solid property rights. I'm not even talking about OpenAI being an actual tech company that just wasn't there before. It's not how oligarchy works in the places.

Since the US is slowly moving in a direction of oligarchy, I think the actual reference will be helpful.
by bcooke | 2026-02-28 02:20:53+00:00
Well yes, but context matters here and this is the US government's decision to take with a US-based company.

While I understand why it matters for folks affiliated with prominent AI companies in particular to sign this, the more the American people stand together, the more pressure I think that puts on our government to act responsibly.

Idealistic and naive? Probably. But sometimes grassroots efforts do spark change, and it's high time the people of the USA start living up to the first word in our country's name.

Anyways, to answer your question directly: I welcome all the fine people of the world everywhere to join in what this open letter stands for.

Unfortunately, it's abundantly clear to many of us Americans that the current administration doesn't care what we think, never mind what people outside our country do. So I'll just start with the group that this department (in theory) is supposed to represent.
by EdNutting | 2026-02-28 02:21:36+00:00
For sure we’re not currently attracting the talent. There’s more to that than just money, but money is significant factor. When it comes to compensation, AI is too broad a category to have a meaningful debate. Hardware or software or mathematics or what kind of person? Etc.

I’m not gonna dispute the UK being further down some parts of the road.

Not sure what you’d count as top engineers, but I know enough that have been asking about and moving to the UK/EU that it’s been a noticeable reversal of the historic trends. Also, a major slowdown of these kinds of people in the UK/EU wanting to move to the US.
by charcircuit | 2026-02-28 02:21:55+00:00
Imagine if a gun manufacturer sold a gun that you couldn't use against X or Y country. Private companies imposing such demands on our military should not be respected. Having weapons that can randomly detect a false positive and shut themselves down because they think you are using it wrong is a feature I would never want built in.

I have also been against these terms of services of restricting usage of AI models. It is ridiculous that these private companies get to dictate what I can or can't do with the tools. No other tools work like this. Every other tools is going to be governed by the legal system which the people of the country have established.
by a_victorp | 2026-02-28 02:22:07+00:00
You definitely would not know if you were, no one does. I think the healthy position is to assume you are wrong and trying to find evidence of why you are wrong

For instance,I'm very skeptical of AI and, from experience, do not think that the current models are worth the cost, but I'm always in HN trying to find arguments/people that use AI successfully to prove that I'm wrong