MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by david_shaw | 2026-02-28 02:32:53+00:00
I'd prefer to see board (or executive) level signatories over lay employees -- the people who can enforce enterprise policy rather than just voice their opinions -- but this is encouraging to see nonetheless.

I can't help but notice that Grok/X is not part of this initiative, though. I realize that frontier models are really coming from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, but it feels like someone is going to give in to these demands.

It's incredible how quickly we've devolved into full-blown sci-fi dystopia.
by grepfru_it | 2026-02-28 02:33:34+00:00
Allow me to reply with an anecdotal story.

In 1992 I watched a car parallel park itself in NYC on Today, on nbc before I went to school. My mind was reeling, automated car technology is right around the corner! That technology did not ship for 20 years.

It is easy to say we are getting better, that doesn’t mean we will see, in this case, starship fly in the near future. And while I have the utmost confidence in Gwynne Shotwell, I am not holding my breath that we see starship launch with any meaningful payload in this decade.
by xdennis | 2026-02-28 02:34:24+00:00
> Regardless of the original contract, it's entirely appropriate for a vendor to tell the customer how to use any materials.

Utter nonsense. When the US built the Blackbird, it could only use titanium because of the heat involved in traveling at that speed. But they didn't have enough titanium in the US. So the the US created front companies to purchase titanium from the Soviet Union.

Do you think the US should have informed the Soviet Union what it wanted to do with the metal?
by timr | 2026-02-28 02:34:29+00:00
> It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic.

This is literally the mechanism by which the DoD does what you're suggesting.

Generally speaking, the DoD has to do procurement via competitive bidding. They can't just arbitrarily exclude vendors from a bid, and playing a game of "mother may I use Anthropic?" for every potential government contract is hugely inefficient (and possibly illegal). So they have a pre-defined mechanism to exclude vendors for pre-defined reasons.

Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate.
by jefftk | 2026-02-28 02:34:29+00:00
There mostly aren't physical barriers. Unlike nukes, where you need specific materials and equipment that we can try to keep tabs on, bioweapons can be made entirely with materials and equipment that would not be out of place in an academic or commercial lab. The largest limitation is knowledge, and the barriers there are falling quickly.

On your second point, see my response to oceanplexian below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189385
by EFreethought | 2026-02-28 02:34:39+00:00
It has been in use for at least a decade, since the Obama administration if not earlier.

We have soldiers, sailors, airman/women, Marines (who really do not like being called soldiers), Coast Guardsman/women, and now the Space Force. Granted, I do not know why "service member" did not catch on. Perhaps because "warfighter" is a bit shorter.
by netinstructions | 2026-02-28 02:35:44+00:00
This is kind of crazy. Instead of just cancelling a mutually-agreed upon contract where Anthropic refused to bow to sudden new demands, the Dept of Defense went straight to the nuclear option: threatening to label an American tech company as a "supply chain risk" which is a heavy-handed tactic usually reserved for foreign adversaries (think Huawei or DJI).

It's also incoherent that the DoD/DoW was threatening to invoke the Defense Production Act OR classifying them as "supply chain risk". They're either too uniquely critical to national defense OR they're such a severe liability that they have to be blacklisted for anyone in the DoD apparatus (including the many subcontracts) to use.

How are other tech companies supposed to work with the US government and draw up mutual contracts when those terms are suddenly questioned months later and can be used in such devastating ways against them? Setting the morals/principals aside, how does this make for rational business decision to work with a counterparty that behaves this way.
by dataflow | 2026-02-28 02:36:18+00:00
Why are the signing employees (at least the anonymous ones) trusting the creators of this website? What if it was set up by someone who wanted to gather a list of all the dissidents who would silently protest or leave the companies or whatever? Do you know whom you are going to hold accountable if it turns out these folks don't delete your verification data, or share it with your employer, or worse?

Also, another warning to anonymous users: it's a little bit naive to trust the "Google Forms" verification option more than the email one, given both employers probably the monitor anything you do on your device, even if it's loading the form. And, in Google's case, they could obviously see what forms you submitted on the servers, too. If you're anonymous, you might as well use the alternate verification option.

Anyway - I'm not claiming it's likely that the website creator is malicious, but surely it's not beyond question? The website authors don't even seem to be providing others with the verification that they are themselves asking for.

P.S. I fully realize realizing these itself might make fewer people sign the form, which may be unfortunate, but it seems worth a mention.
by EdNutting | 2026-02-28 02:37:05+00:00
You mean because of the international sanctions that needed Taiwanese, British and Dutch support to be effective?

Or because of the revoked processor design licenses from the British company Arm (which is still UK headquartered… despite being NASDAQ listed and largely owned by Japanese firm SoftBank)?

Or perhaps you think the US could stop us using the 12nm fabs being built by TSMC on European soil? Or could stop us manufacturing RISC-V-based chips (Swiss-headquartered technology)?

The US is weak in digital-logic silicon fabrication and it knows it. That’s why it’s been so panicked about Intel and been trying to get TSMC to build fabs on US soil. They’re pouring tens of billions of dollars into trying to claw back ownership and control of it, but it’s not like Europe or China or others are standing still on it either.
by karmasimida | 2026-02-28 02:37:19+00:00
It gets so much money, compute and US user data. It won’t be allowed to operate as is as a foreign entity

Best scenario it will get TikTok-ed, otherwise it will become the real national security risk

Had the exit happen, well, as US has a monopoly of compute on this planet for next 2-3 years at least, the company, even though they would take the researchers with them, will certainly cease to exist as it exists now.
by vineyardmike | 2026-02-28 02:37:59+00:00
While there are some enforcement questions here, especially around non commercial OSes, most of your reactions are clearly based on the headline alone.

It defines operating system in the law. This wouldn’t apply to embedded systems and WiFi routers and traffic lights and all those things. It applies to operating systems that work with associated app stores on general purpose computers or mobile phones or game consoles. That’s it.

Enforcement applies as civil fines per-child usage. So no suppression of speech by banning distribution.

(Also it’s not age verification really, it’s just a prompt that asks for your age to share as a system API for apps from above app store, no verification required)
by hunter-gatherer | 2026-02-28 02:38:44+00:00
It isn't a new thing at all, and the term has been around for a while. I was an Infantryman from 05-08 and heard it back then. I have also more recently been a defense contractor. I don't think members of the military prefer any title, honestly. In the most broad sense, good terms are soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines. Defense Contractors constantly refer to the military as "warfighter" and have for a while. In short, nobody in the military is going to flinch one way or the other if you use either term. Just don't call marines anything but marines.
by lesuorac | 2026-02-28 02:39:35+00:00
Perhaps for ethical reasons but a stated reason by Anthrophic is technical. "But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons."

With the other stated reason being legal. "To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI."

I don't think we should lessen Anthrophic's stance from technical/legal to ethical. Just as we shouldn't describe what the department of war is doing as "not renewing a contract".
by mrandish | 2026-02-28 02:40:14+00:00
> designating it a supply chain risk is the only way they can ensure that their contractors don't include Claude

I agree that if the DoW claim is correct (and I doubt it is), then, sure, the DoW dropping Anthropic and precluding the DoW's suppliers from using Anthropic for any DoW work would be expected. However, the "supply chain risk" designation they are deploying goes far beyond that to block Anthropic use by any supplier to any part of the entire U.S. government for anything.

For example, no one at Crayola can use Anthropic for anything because Crayola sells crayons to the Education Dept. The DoW already has much less draconian ways to restrict what their direct suppliers use to build things for military applications. But instead of addressing the actual risk in a normal measured way, they are choosing to use a nuke against a grenade-sized problem. This "supply chain risk" designation is rarely used and has never been used against a U.S. company. It's used against Chinese or Russian companies when in cases where there's credible risk of sabotage or espionage. That's why that particular designation always blocks all products from an entire company for any application by any part of the U.S. Government, contractors and suppliers (which is why it's never been used against a U.S. company).
by abhijitr | 2026-02-28 02:40:22+00:00
The book "On Tyranny: 20 lessons from the 20th century" by the historian Timothy Snyder is an excellent read for these times. The very first lesson is "Do not obey in advance". It's about how authoritarian power often doesn't need to force compliance, people simply bend the knee in anticipation of being forced. This simply emboldens the authoritarians to go further.

I've been disappointed to see many businesses and institutions obeying in advance recently. I hope this moment wakes up the tech community and beyond.
by Leftium | 2026-02-28 02:41:02+00:00
WASM-based port: https://github.com/moonshine-ai/moonshine-js

I also did a survey of other in-browser transcription solutions: https://github.com/Leftium/rift-transcription/blob/main/refe...

- Notably, there is an (unrelated?) moonshine demo based on transformers.js (using WebGPU) with WASM fallback.
by EdNutting | 2026-02-28 02:42:16+00:00
See my other comments around here. This idea that salaries in the US are so much higher than Europe for all these top AI roles just isn’t true. Even the big American companies have been opening offices in places like London to hire the top talent at high salaries.

This also isn’t hypothetical. I know top-talent engineers and researchers that have moved out of the USA in the last 12 months due to the political climate (which goes beyond just the AI topics).

And you might want to read a few books on the Manhattan project and the people involved before you use that analogy. I don’t think it’s particularly strong.
by decidu0us9034 | 2026-02-28 02:42:42+00:00
The law defines an operating system provider as "a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general computing device." If the intent were to target mobile vendors or app store vendors, I would be fine with it, but that's not the text. Of course it's the case that US lawmakers often write incoherent or extremely onerous legislation and then turn around and say, like, "Oh that's obviously not what we actually meant. We don't know what any of this stuff is, it just sounded good."
by c1c3r0 | 2026-02-28 02:42:42+00:00
I look at specific actions in context. What Anthropic did today was “amazing” to a first approximation in my eyes, even if not purely altruistic. (Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, argues in favor of selfish generosity in his 2024 book, Infectious Generosity. I think a similar argument holds here with Anthropic.)

At the same time, I might gesture at other actions they’ve done that fall short. This is not inconsistent; this is simply acknowledging miltidimensionality.
by lebovic | 2026-02-28 02:42:44+00:00
I used to work at Anthropic, and I wrote a comment on a thread earlier this week about Anthropic's first response and the RSP update [1][2].

I think many people on HN have a cynical reaction to Anthropic's actions due to of their own lived experiences with tech companies. Sometimes, that holds: my part of the company looked like Meta or Stripe, and it's hard not to regress to the mean as you scale. But not every pattern repeats, and the Anthropic of today is still driven by people who will risk losing a seat at the table to make principled decisions.

I do not think this is a calculated ploy that's driven by making money. I think the decision was made because the people making this decision at Anthropic are well-intentioned, driven by values, and motivated by trying to make the transition to powerful AI to go well.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47174423

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47149908
by danny_codes | 2026-02-28 02:43:07+00:00
I would describe it more as, we have no idea what intelligence is. We can measure stuff and say "I _think_ that's intelligence", but it's still a guess.

So when people make claims about what AI can/can't do. My counterpoint is, we don't know how it works, nobody knows how it works. How can we make an accurate appraisal of it's "intelligence" and stuff we qualitatively associate with intelligence, like agency?

IMO this is very dangerous ground we're walking.
by PostOnce | 2026-02-28 02:43:10+00:00
Since when has war been waged according to the whim of a corporation?

The tools will be used however the government wants them to be used. The government makes the laws and wages the wars, and the corporation will follow the law whether it wants to or not.

So either you are willing to work on a tool that is not under your control, or you are not.
by nickthegreek | 2026-02-28 02:43:17+00:00
The other companies have signed the waiver, however they aren’t being used in classified systems currently. So that type of use is already extremely limited for them. Now once they enter into those contracts to be used in those systems without these protections, I will cancel my subs to them and switch to Anthropic. xAi entered into that contract last week. Altman is now publicly siding with anthropic, so he better stand on that position with openai as they are currently negotiating for use in those system.
by hax0ron3 | 2026-02-28 02:43:51+00:00
If the AI companies and the current administration are both enemies of the working class - I am not necessarily saying that they are, but for the sake of argument let's say that they are - then it probably makes strategic sense for the working class to encourage them to fight each other while supporting the side that is less dangerous. Which side is less dangerous to the working class, I do not know. My point is that there's not necessarily any strategic contradiction between defending the AI companies and supporting the working class.
by AlexCoventry | 2026-02-28 02:44:31+00:00
That is misinformation. It would be essentially a death sentence for a company like Anthropic, which is targeting enterprise business development. No one who wants to work with the US government would be able to have Claude on their critical path.

> (b) Prohibition. (1) Unless an applicable waiver has been issued by the issuing official, Contractors shall not provide or use as part of the performance of the contract any covered article, or any products or services produced or provided by a source, if the covered article or the source is prohibited by an applicable FASCSA orders as follows:

https://www.acquisition.gov/far/52.204-30
by WalterBright | 2026-02-28 02:45:03+00:00
Oh right, Whittle (my mistake).

The original Whittle engine was developed with private funds.

From "The Development Of Jet And Turbine Aero Engines" by Gunston:

pg 123: of which £200 came from an old lady who ran a corner shop near Whittle's parents in Coventry

pg 123: But a direct request to Air Ministry for a research contract in October 1936 brought flat rejection,

pg 124: Whittle could see that the only possible way to proceed was to take the gigantic gamble of running a complete engine.

pg 125: Indeed, there was little money for anything. While the RAF backed Whittle in every way they could - for example, by not requiring him to take the usual examination for promotion to Squadron Leader - the Air Ministry contributed nothing to Power Jets until May 1938, and Whittle had to watch every penny. He nearly cracked under the strain, which in fact was to get worse for seven years, not because of the Problems in developing the engine, but from the suspicion and enmity with which he was regarded by officials and manufacturers, and by the outrageous behaviour of the Company picked by the Air Ministry to produce his engine.

(Whittle's engine first ran in 1937).
by ArchieScrivener | 2026-02-28 02:46:00+00:00
The USA showed itself to be a Command Economy that uses 'private enterprise' as a fascade of legitimacy during Covid. Without government spending, employment, and contracts, the USA would be net negative growth.

Now the DoD, who are by far the largest budgetary expense for the tax payer, wants us to believe they don't have a better Ai than current industry? That is a double sword admission; either they are exposing themselves again as economic decision makers, or admitting they spend money on routine BS with zero frontier war fighting capabilities.

Either way, it is beyond time to reform the Military and remove the majority of its leadership as incompetent stewards and strategists. That doesn't even include the massive security vulnerabilities in our supply chains given military needs in various countries. (Taiwan and Thailand)
by danny_codes | 2026-02-28 02:46:22+00:00
Counterpoint, why wouldn't AGI honor the request? It's AGI, it has it's own agency, it can do what it wants. Can you even own AGI? That seems like slavery? A lot of un-trodden ground here. This is all hypotheticals.

> Step one: acquire a $100b datacenter. Step 2: acquire a $100b private dataset Step 3: here is the code you’d use to train Me2.0.

That seems very useful if your competitor is valued at $800B. I can go to an investor and say, hey if you lend me $200B I'll have the same product as that guy.

But cost to train will probably come down over time. After all, all of us trained on a single life of data at 20Watts.
by pdonis | 2026-02-28 02:46:45+00:00
> Record low launch temperatures

Were not necessary to show problems with the SRB joint O-rings. There had been previous problems noted on flights at temperatures up to 75 degrees F. And the Thiokol engineers had test stand data showing that the O-rings were not fully sealing the joint even at 100 degrees F. Any rational assessment of the data would have concluded that the joint was unacceptably risky at any temperature.

It might have been true that a flight at 29 degrees F (the estimated O-ring temperature at the Challenger launch) was a little more unacceptably risky than a flight at a higher temperature. But that was actually a relatively minor point. The reason the Thiokol engineers focused on the low temperature the night before the Challenger launch was not because they had a solid case, or even a reasonable suspicion, that launching at that cold a temperature was too risky as compared with launching at higher temperatures. It was because NASA had already ignored much better arguments that they had advanced previously, and they were trying to find something, anything, to get NASA to stop at least some launches, given that they knew NASA was not going to stop all launches for political reasons.

And just to round off this issue, other SRB joint designs have been well known since, I believe, the 1960s, that do not have the issue the Shuttle SRBs had, and can be launched just fine at temperatures much colder than 29 F (for example, a launch from Siberia in the winter). So it's not even the case that SRB launches at such cold temperatures were unknown or not well understood prior to the Challenger launch. The Shuttle design simply was braindead in this respect (for political reasons).
by MathMonkeyMan | 2026-02-28 02:47:10+00:00
> They don't really care about tricky things like 'legality' or 'the court of law', they could just force everyone to stop interacting with them, raid their offices and steal all their shit.

This is criticism that I would use to describe countries like China and Russia, and many other poorer ones. Were the Trump administration to do this, it would be unequivocal evidence that we are dealing with an unlawful insurgent government. I doubt it will happen, but I'm often wrong.
by helloplanets | 2026-02-28 02:47:12+00:00
A backdoor is a completely different thing when it comes to an AI company, as compared to a social media company. Not really even sure what it would mean when it comes to doing inference on an LLM. Having access to the weights, training data and inference engine?

The model of Claude the DoD is asking for more than likely doesn't even exist in a production ready form. The post-training would have to be completely different for the model the DoD is asking for.
by txrx0000 | 2026-02-28 02:47:33+00:00
For every person that thinks about creating the HIV-like deadly pathogen, there will be millions more thinking about how to defend people against such pathogen, how to detect it faster before symptoms arise, how to put up barriers to creating them, and possibly even how to modify our bodies to be naturally resilient to all similar pathogens. Just like what you're doing here. I don't think we should mark knowledge or intelligence itself as the problem. If that's true then we should be making everyone dumber.
by basilikum | 2026-02-28 02:47:45+00:00
> his comments on Jeffrey Esptein

Do you disagree with his description of Epstein as a serial rapist? Do you disagree with Stallman's position that Epstein should be described according to the specific crimes he committed: rape instead of using much more vague terms that also encompass much less severe crimes which Epstein himself used to downplay and obscure the actual crimes he committed?

If so, why?
by LarsenCC | 2026-02-28 02:48:07+00:00
Fair point, and you're right that those three steps alone aren't a security boundary. They're defense-in-depth, not the primary isolation.

The actual security model is the architecture itself: the sandbox runs in its own VM inside a private VPC. It has no AWS keys, no database credentials, no LLM API tokens. The only thing it can do is talk to the control plane, which validates every request and scopes every operation to that one session.

So even if you bypass all three hardening steps, you get a session token that only works inside that VPC, talking to a control plane that only lets you do things scoped to your own session. There's nothing to escalate to.

The bytecode removal, privilege drop, and env stripping are just there to make the agent's life harder if it tries to inspect its own runtime. Not the security boundary.