MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by straydusk | 2026-02-28 03:56:34+00:00
I know the reaction to this, if you're a rational observer, is "OpenAI have cut corners or made concessions that Anthropic did not, that's the only thing that makes sense."

However, if you live in the US and pay a passing attention to our idiotic politics, you know this is right out of the Trump playbook. It goes like this:

* Make a negotiation personal

* Emotionally lash out and kill the negotiation

* Complete a worse or similar deal, with a worse or similar party

* Celebrate your worse deal as a better deal

Importantly, you must waste enormous time and resources to secure nothing of substance.

That's why I actually believe that OpenAI will meet the same bar Anthropic did, at least for now. Will they continue to, in the same way Anthropic would have? Seems unlikely, but we'll see.
by nawgz | 2026-02-28 03:57:00+00:00
I don’t think it’s actually going to be a big deal. Anthropic’s response to Pete Kegsbreath basically said the only limitation they expect is DoD contractors can’t use it on DoD missions, not a general ban. Now that’s not nothing but there’s a whole business world hungry to generate insane amounts of code for no reason, they’re ready to collect the token tax
by dchest | 2026-02-28 03:58:46+00:00
Nothing in this post is specific to passkeys; it reads like advice to not encrypt data. There’s no way to prevent some users from losing their encryption key anyway. Whatever warnings you include, even when software doesn't connect to the internet and just encrypts local files, someone will write to support that they forgot their password and ask you to "reset" it.

Good advice at the end, though.
by lebovic | 2026-02-28 03:59:08+00:00
> I don't know why a personal testimony to the effect that "these are the good guys" needs to be at the top of every Anthropic thread.

I think they're driven by values more than many folks on HN assume.

I find this is important, because groups driven by values behave differently that groups driven by profit. That doesn't mean they're the good guys; groups driven by values commit horrible acts all of the time.

I'm the same person who posted on the last thread. Feel free to deeply investigate me if you'd like, or you can call me at (415) 200-6129
by peterlk | 2026-02-28 03:59:33+00:00
You have to read it all the way through. It’s a pretty hefty investment, but the series is truly a masterpiece. I had to read the whole series twice to feel like I was actually starting to understand some of the symbolism. I don’t blame people for not being able to get into it; it’s dense. But it’s so epic and there is so much symbolism and philosophy packed in.
by cwyers | 2026-02-28 03:59:57+00:00
There's a lot of people in this thread that assume that Sam Altman is the one who is being dishonest here, and I kind of understand, but the other two parties who could just as easily be lying are Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, and of the three of them if you think sama is the _most_ likely to lie I feel like you have not been paying attention.
by operator_nil | 2026-02-28 04:00:22+00:00
Do you know who isn't a dummy? Sam. The crucial part of that statement is that the DoD will use OpenAI systems "lawfully and responsibly," which I don't doubt is written somewhere in their contract. However, those terms are so open-ended that it's impossible for OpenAI to enforce. Sam could have clarified in his tweet that they explicitly prohibited the use of their technology for mass surveillance and autonomous killings, but it seems he chose to simply say, "We told them not to do bad things."
by mpyne | 2026-02-28 04:00:44+00:00
> Granted, I do not know why "service member" did not catch on. Perhaps because "warfighter" is a bit shorter.

Yeah, it's basically this. "service member" is clunky, like saying "person with enlistment".

Warfighter has its own issues as a descriptor but it at least rolls off the tongue better and is easier to read through in policy and regulation to the millions in the DoD.
by bensyverson | 2026-02-28 04:01:40+00:00
I think the distinction is that a passkey is meant to be used for authentication (logging in), and is usually not the only way you can authenticate. If you delete your password, passkey, or 2FA method, you can still go through a "forgot password" flow.

Encryption is different. If you encrypt data with a generated password and then delete it, you're toast, and passkeys are no different. I think the author is arguing that users may not even realize that the passkey itself is needed to decrypt, possibly because they're so associated with login.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-28 04:01:48+00:00
Instead of Epsteins blackmailing disgustful human nature, it'll be rogue AIs sending selective blackmail, 24/7, to the spiteful among us (e.g. to motivate targeted killings, either by human or machine).

>All of this should remain a bridge too far, forever.

Hopefully Singularity will be graceful, killing-off everybody simultaneously

#PaperclipMaximizer #HimFirst
by dansjots | 2026-02-28 04:01:50+00:00
I recently whipped up a bare-bones PWA wrapping Typage[0] into a quick-and-dirty tool to encrypt files individually using passkeys:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46895533

This give much more conscious control to the user knowing that they are explicitly encrypting which file with which passkey. Additionally, you can just download the page and serve it via localhost so that you always have control of the relying party for your passkey.

[0] https://words.filippo.io/passkey-encryption/
by dakolli | 2026-02-28 04:01:50+00:00
They're pretending like they didn't enter into this agreement last January and are completely entrenched in intelligence programs already. They are trying to make it look like they are stepping up in a time of need (time of need for the DoD), in reality they sold their soul to intelligence and the military a year ago.

I posted about this here after Sam made his tweet:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189756

Source: https://defensescoop.com/2025/01/16/openais-gpt-4o-gets-gree...
by hedora | 2026-02-28 04:02:42+00:00
100% of the arguments against using passkeys for e2ee data apply to using passkeys as credentials.

(Unless they are not credentials, and you can loose them then do a password reset via a phishing prone channel like email and SMS. Supporting this eliminates any possible user benefit of passkeys.)

In addition to the arguments in the article, when used as credentials, they are an obvious trojan horse allowing large websites to completely hijack your operating system.

Don’t believe me? Try logging into a bank or using rideshare/parking/ev charging with degoogled android. This is where passkeys are taking PCs, and it is their only purpose.

So, “Don’t use passkeys” would be a better title.
by mkozlows | 2026-02-28 04:02:57+00:00
So there are two possibilities here:

1. There's no substantive change. Hegseth/Trump just wanted to punish Anthropic for standing up to them, even if it didn't get them anything else today -- establishing a chilling effect for the future has some value for them in this case, after all. And OpenAI was willing to help them do that, despite earlier claiming that they stood behind Anthropic's decisions.

2. There is a substantive change. Despite Altman's words, they have a tacit understanding that OpenAI won't really enforce those terms, or that they'll allow them to be modified some time in the future when attention has moved on elsewhere.

Either way, it makes Altman look slimy, and OpenAI has aligned with Trump against Anthropic in a place where Anthropic made a correct principled stand. It's been clear for a while that Anthropic has more ethics than OpenAI, but this is more naked than any previous example.
by IG_Semmelweiss | 2026-02-28 04:03:17+00:00
You are going in the right direction.

I think its more :

if your taxable income during OR post-office exceeds (some 1,3,5 yr average) prior high watermark income, or the officeholder's salary (whichever is higher), every penny over high watermark is taxed at 99% tax rate.

That should take care of those pesky "speaking fees" and other nonsense that makes politicians rich.
by prescriptivist | 2026-02-28 04:03:22+00:00
Anthropic makes it kind of clear in all of their statements that they are not opposed to working with the surveillance state, with the military industrial complex, etc. Their central philosophy, it seems, is not incongruent with working with entities, public or private, that can be construed as imperialist or capitalistic or a combination of both. I actually appreciate their honesty here.

They exist within the regime of capital and imperialism that all of us who are American citizens exist within. This isn't a cop-out or cope. It's just the reality of the world that we live in. If you are an American and somehow above it, let me know how you live.
by anonnon | 2026-02-28 04:03:40+00:00
> Signed,

The people who:

> steal any bit of code you put on the internet regardless of the license you use or its terms, then use it to train their models, then turn around and try to sell it to you

> made it so you can't afford new, more powerful computers or smartphones anymore, or perhaps even just replacements for the ones you already have, thanks to massive GPU, DRAM, SSD, and now even HDD shortages

> flood the internet with artificial, superficial content

> aggressively DDoS your website

Real pillars of society.
by apothegm | 2026-02-28 04:03:47+00:00
If VC capital dries up, prices can no longer be subsidized and skyrocket. Many participants in a given space go out of business, so there’s less competition and less of a race to the bottom. Those that survive are the ones that price highly enough and can sell enough at that price to at least break even. Yes, there are liquidations, and drops in the cost of shovels, but generally of things that are already in surplus and do not significantly produce value.

Any downward pressure on prices stems from competition for customers’ shrinking discretionary budgets.
by kdheiwns | 2026-02-28 04:04:10+00:00
About 50% of Chinese people I meet very much agree with the government that it's part of China and always has been. The other 50% know that it's clearly independent and are tired of the whole act by the Chinese government. But the people I've talked to about this are people with the means to travel, and many of them have been to Taiwan. So it may not be representative of the typical person on the street. I've been to China several times and I don't want to ask it there, but that's less out of fear of the government but more than I don't want to bother locals with politics and present myself as an enlightened foreigner, since nobody likes that shit. Just like nobody would like a Chinese guy going to Alabama and telling the people they need to embrace socialism if they ever want to escape poverty.
by toraway | 2026-02-28 04:05:39+00:00
They're describing the intent of the administration not predicting the future impact on other companies. Essentially making the point that your original question about NSA being able to get whatever they want clandestinely isn't actually relevant because Hegseth/Trump don't actually care this much about Claude doing X or Y -- they were trying to make an example of punishing Anthropic with the expectation they would immediately crumble like the rest of Big Tech, as a warning for anyone else to stay in line and keeps their mouth shut.
by kgwxd | 2026-02-28 04:05:49+00:00
I don't think I would have even realized why I felt tension reading if you hadn't mentioned this. They/their wasn't confusing at all but, giving the hypothetical user a name was the weird part. I realize now I was expecting some other user to enter the scenario the whole time. Alice and Bob style. When I got to the end, I felt like I missed something. If there's just one, "the user"/"they"/"their" is fine.
by autoexec | 2026-02-28 04:05:52+00:00
The best way for government to fight that would be to remind those who refuse to comply with their demands that the government already knows exactly where they live, where they hang out, and that any one of them can also be targeted by a three letter agency or thrown into Guantánamo Bay. The government has been building and maintaining massive dossiers on everyone. They already have the ability to plant or fabricate whatever incriminating evidence they want. They already have the capability to jeopardize anyone, their personal assets, and their families and all of that could be turned against them if something goes haywire or where an outside adversary gains unauthorized access. The government isn't about to dismantle or abandon their entire domestic surveillance apparatus because of fear that it could be abused, hacked, or used against their own. Those are well known and accepted risks. AI is just one more risk they can't resist taking.
by nearlyepic | 2026-02-28 04:06:00+00:00
Do you honestly believe that cancelling a subscription makes a bit of difference to a company that is either committing accounting fraud on a monumental scale or shoveling venture capital money into a furnace? not to mention the whole collaborating with a fascist government thing.

taking real action is your choice, but stop pretending this kind of thing matters one iota

edit: to be clear, i'm not advocating for nihilism, but tricking yourself into thinking you made a difference to make yourself feel better isn't the play either
by Analemma_ | 2026-02-28 04:07:05+00:00
For sure, he's been pissed that OpenAI no longer has the Mandate of Heaven and Claude is all anyone has been talking about since December. (And it's not just an ego thing: because OAI isn't profitable yet, they need the hype to keep going to raise money on favorable terms, so loss of buzz is an existential threat). I absolutely believe that he started making calls to try and get buddies in the White House to take Anthropic down.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-28 04:07:18+00:00
The problem is that many of those would-be fact checkers have massive incentives to lie about it. So regardless of whether it is true, you're going to see a number of detailed and well-researched pieces over the weekend arguing that Altman is right and this whole thing is Anthropic's fault. The set of people who could cause OpenAI to burn and the set of people who have millions of dollars riding on its success substantially overlap; it may not take a particularly good argument to convince them.
by coreyh55 | 2026-02-28 04:07:23+00:00
A UEFI application that boots directly into LLM chat: no operating system, no kernel, no drivers. Just power on, select "Run Live", type "chat", and talk to an AI. Everything you see is running in UEFI boot services mode. The entire stack, tokenizer, weight loader, tensor math, inference engine, is written from scratch in freestanding C with zero dependencies. It's painfully slow at the moment because I haven't done any optimizations. Realistically it should run much much faster, but I'm more interested in getting the network drivers running first before that. I'm planning on using this to serve smaller models on my network. Why would I build this? For giggles.
by ddtaylor | 2026-02-28 04:08:10+00:00
The argument is that they are selling a product they know is "spoiled", but the analogy breaks down and actually becomes more like you allow your children to smoke cigarettes or dink alcohol regularly. They often knew they were lying and saying they were over 13 to access services, but hey, your kid can't be the only not one smoking cigarettes or drinking, right?
by mkozlows | 2026-02-28 04:08:27+00:00
I think it's definitely true that you should never count on a company to do principled things forever. But that doesn't mean that nothing is real or good.

Like Google's support for the open web: They very sincerely did support it, they did a lot of good things for it. And then later, they decided that they didn't care as much. It was wrong to put your faith in them forever, but also wrong to treat that earlier sincerity as lies.

In this case, Anthropic was doing a good thing, and they got punished for it, and if you agree with their stand, you should take their side.
by drawnwren | 2026-02-28 04:08:45+00:00
One positive thing I will say about this administration is that they have really drawn into focus the difference between de jure and de facto law.

My hope is that this gets us some real concern for things that have been defended with de facto arguments (i.e. privacy) going forward.

edit: Anthropic argues that your Crayola analogy is fundamentally incorrect.

> Legally, a supply chain risk designation under 10 USC 3252 can only extend to the use of Claude as part of Department of War contracts—it cannot affect how contractors use Claude to serve other customers.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-comments-secretary-...
by mindslight | 2026-02-28 04:09:40+00:00
Framing the argument here as "both sides" team sport is not appropriate. Did these "state actor controlled bots" also create the term DOW? No, the needlessly-divisive propaganda is now coming directly from the White House itself.

I'm a libertarian who sees both leftist and rightist thinking as two halves of a complete analysis. This situation isn't "red-vs-blue". Rather this is social-media-psychosis-red vs everybody else.

If social-media-psychosis-blue was in power and similarly attacking our society, I would be calling that out as well! But they aren't, and they haven't really been in powerful national political offices, because so far the blue extremists' main political success has been to just sandbag the Democratic party. (ostensibly because blue extremism runs counter to the parties' sponsors' interests, confining professional blue extremists to culture war topics that most people see through)

As I said, the fundamental dynamic with the original comment is that "correcting" to "DOW" was its only point. If you just casually heard the term in some [likely government] news media, you're not going to rush out and repeat it as a correction for someone saying DOD.

But sure, we can't really still assign a known motive - maybe that commenter was pointing out the "war" part to try and highlight what this administration shamelessly wants to use "AI" for. But the easy way to avoid being jumped on is to include some constructive context for what one is actually trying to get at, rather than leaving readers to apply Occam's razor themselves. So either way, that response to it was not unreasonable.
by dansjots | 2026-02-28 04:09:46+00:00
for account-associated encryption, what it should do instead is to generate a dedicated file encryption key for each backup, and encrypt said key with the account's passkeys. Each time the user adds a new passkey, it should save an additional copy of the backup's key encrypted with the new passkey. This way you can have multiple redundant passkeys that can decrypt the backup. This is basically how age's multi-recipient encryption works.
by d--b | 2026-02-28 04:10:24+00:00
At this stage, everything OpenAi does is to try to keep investors investing.

They’re willing to let their brand go to trash for this government contract.

Pretty much every American is standing with Anthropic on this. No one left or right wants mass surveillance and terminators. In fact, no one in the world wants this, except the US military.

But Altman seems so desperate to keep the cash coming he’s ready to do anything.
by encrypted_bird | 2026-02-28 04:10:33+00:00
You're probably right about why I'm getting downvoted. But, you know, in my honest opinion, those people are just further demonstrating my point. They're probably actually paid well, or at least are afraid to badmouth the hand that feeds them.

But people need to realize that most of the population aren't treated well or paid well. Most of us don't have the luxury of being SWEs, or even white-collar workers for that matter. Most of us struggle to even put food on the table and have to scrounge week to week, let alone month to month.

So, I'm not bothered by the bootlickers downvoting me. At best, they're fooling themselves; at worst, they're class traitors.

If you ask me, the time for tactful language is long over.
by georgefrowny | 2026-02-28 04:11:01+00:00
The big three will love this. They'll implement the feature, then they get to dob in Linux and friends and get them buried in regulatory lawsuits.

All three already have identity linked accounts. Windows practically shoves it down your throat on install, for example. They'll love the excuse to finally disallow web-free accounts.

Windows servers are so back baby!
by straydusk | 2026-02-28 04:11:04+00:00
I know the reaction to this, if you're a rational observer, is "OpenAI have cut corners or made concessions that Anthropic did not, that's the only thing that makes sense."

However, if you live in the US and pay a passing attention to our idiotic politics, you know this is right out of the Trump playbook. It goes like this:

* Make a negotiation personal

* Emotionally lash out and kill the negotiation

* Complete a worse or similar deal, with a worse or similar party

* Celebrate your worse deal as a better deal

Importantly, you must waste enormous time and resources to secure nothing of substance.

That's why I actually believe that OpenAI will meet the same bar Anthropic did, at least for now. Will they continue to, in the same way Anthropic would have? Seems unlikely, but we'll see.
by hedora | 2026-02-28 04:11:20+00:00
The standard includes a hardware attestation path.

That’s the backdoor allowing the eventual takeover of your OS.

First people use passkeys, and they become standard.

Then they become required for important accounts for security.

Then the important accounts require the attestation bit.

At that point, you cannot run web browsers on open source operating systems.

This is all boring and predictable. It is exactly what they did with Android, and exactly the same organizations are pushing passkeys.

Note: If they had good intentions, the operating system would manage any attestation, and not allow websites to query for or require attestation support.
by johncolanduoni | 2026-02-28 04:11:43+00:00
How many people are doing a spring cleaning of unused passkeys in their password managers? We're talking like a kilobyte of data, nobody needs to delete these things in any kind of normal circumstance.

Sure, it would be great if users would store 5 copies of their encryption keys, with one in a lockbox on the bottom of the ocean. But that's just not going to happen at any kind of scale, so an automatic way of putting encryption keys in a replicated password manager makes sense. And compared to how people normally handle end-to-end encryption keys, it's going to result in a lot less loss data in practice.
by cyberax | 2026-02-28 04:12:14+00:00
It has not been a monopoly here for the last 2 decades (at least). There also was Wave Broadband nearby they serve some high-rise buildings, I got a private business-class line from them.

But it was not profitable for them to expand normally. They can't offer drastically cheaper service than Comcast, the installation costs in cities are huge. I also have Starlink as a backup, and it's even slower than Comcast.

So yeah, government actually works better than commercial companies for most infrastructural needs. And in particular, municipal broadband is usually head-and-shoulders better than anything from large commercial companies. It has higher consumer satisfaction ratings and is cheaper on average.
by willio58 | 2026-02-28 04:13:28+00:00
Thanks for the reminder. Doing the same now.

The little respect I had left for Sam is now wiped. Makes me sick.

Growing up I always thought AI would be this beautiful tool, this thing that opens the gates to a new society where work becomes optional in a way. But I failed to think about human greed.

I remember following OpenAI way back when it was a non profit explaining how AI uncontrolled could be highly detrimental. Now Sam has not only taken that non profit and made it for-profit. It seems he’s making the most evil decisions he can for a buck.

Cancel your subscription, tell your friends to. And vote to heavily tax these companies and their leaders.