See You in Court

AI #159: See You In Court - by Zvi Mowshowitz Don't Worry About the Vase Subscribe Sign in AI #159: See You In Court Zvi Mowshowitz Mar 12, 2026 21 8 1 Share The conflict between Anthropic and the Department of War has now moved to the courts, where Anthropic has challenged the official supply chain risk designation as well as the order to remove it from systems across the government, claiming retaliation for protected speech. It will take a bit to work its way through the courts. Anthropic has the principles of law on its side, a maximally strong set of facts and absurdly strong amicus briefs. If Anthropic loses this case, there will be far reaching consequences for our freedoms. Let us hope this remains in the courts and is allowed to play out there, and then ultimately that negotiations can resume and the parties can at least agree on a smooth transition to alternative service providers. If DoW wants an otherwise full deal more than it wants the right to use Claude to monitor Americans and analyze their data, a full deal is possible as well, but if they demand full ‘all lawful use,’ all trust has been lost or they are or always were out to hurt Anthropic, then there is no deal or ZOPA. That has overshadowed what would normally be the main event, which was the release of the excellent GPT-5.4 , which I found to be a substantial upgrade, sufficient to put it back in my rotation especially for intensive ‘tell me what is happening’ questions. OpenAI has a plausible claim that it once again has the best model. I also finally got a chance to offer a Claude Code, Cowork and Codex update . I am rather exhausted, there are spires to slay, and all of us could use a break. Thus, if we are fortunate enough to get a bit of a lull, I’m going to use it as a mini vacation, rather than purely an opening to catch up on non-AI material with the open days. Table of Contents Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Use patterns remain sticky. Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Reliability of both AI and human. Language Models Break Your Vital Internet Infrastructure. Amazon vibe coding. Huh, Upgrades. Anthropic ships. On Your Marks. The models are improving faster than the benchmarks. Choose Your Fighter. Legal analysis is a relative Claude weak point. Get My Agent On The Line. Also give it a good UI. Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Claude finds Firefox vulnerabilities. A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. Private AI agents within school. Yes, please. You Drive Me Crazy. ChatGPT convinces a woman to fire her lawyer. They Took Our Jobs. Very little of the potential is currently being realized. Get Involved . New SFF round, and a bunch of other opportunities. Introducing. Codex Security matches Claude, Claude Marketplace. The Anthropic Institute. What were those ‘challenges and societal impacts’ again? In Other AI News. SL5, Anthropic DC office, AI talent wars. The Rise of Claude . Business is booming, auras are farming. It is time. Trouble At OpenAI. Confidence is down in the wake of the DoW contract. Show Me the Money. OpenAI abandons Abilene data center, buys ‘Promptfoo.’ Thanks For The Memos. Memos sent to 2k people leak, but sometimes they don’t. A Contract Is A Contract Is A Contract. ‘All legal use’ on all AI gov contracts? Level of Friction. Game theory comes for your free McNuggets. Quiet Speculations. Why doesn’t someone make the whispering earing from… Quickly, There’s No Time. Peter Wildeford offers his updated timelines. Uh oh. Apology Tour. Dario Amodei apologizes for the leaked slack message. We’ll See You In Court . Trial of the century of the week. Might be a lot more. Jawboning. It was awful when Biden did it, it’s even worse in this form now. Executive Order. Trump Administration reportedly readying a formal EO. The Acute Crisis Passes . We hope. May things not escalate further. Others Cover This. TIME and Bloomberg. Dwarkesh Patel Gives Mixed Thoughts. Some common sense, some otherwise. This Means A Special Military Operation. Claude is fighting for America. Bernie Sanders Is Worried and Curious About AI . Super based, real questions. The Quest for Survival. If you want people to listen, say the real thing for real. The Quest For No Regulations Whatsoever. LTF exists in an echo chamber. Chip City. Nvidia reallocates H200 chip production into Vera Rubins. The Week in Audio . Dean Ball on Klein and Thompson. An x-risk scenario. Rhetorical Innovation. The best media, and a time to apologize. Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult. Corrigibility is good. People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Buck Shlegeris clarifies. Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone. They don’t mind. The Lighter Side. Doom, I tell you. Doom! Language Models Offer Mundane Utility If you’re having trouble with buying bad or flawed arguments, you can have LLMs put together such arguments for practice . As Nick Moran notes you want to mix in arguments that are good, or for things that are true, for proper calibration. a16z consumer AI Top 100 is out again . The web leaders are the frontier labs and Canva. Whereas the Mobile Apps don’t even have Claude in the top 50. Yet. That’s going to change. ChatGPT’s lead has been eroding, and Claude shot to #1 on the app store. Note this only goes up through January, and DeepSeek peaked right away and is losing ground, as is Perplexity. Only Claude and Gemini are gaining. Code your own retro game . The systems have less ROM then the entire context window of a modern LLM, so you can hold the entire program in context. Of course you can do similar things with non-retro games too, if you are disciplined. Sauers tweets, and Terence Tao will never run out of Claude Code tokens again . Or at least it will take a lot more effort, he has free Max 20x. Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility The main problem for getting use out of the models, at this point, is you. Sully : we're at the point on the agi curve where the models aren't the bottleneck anymore, we are. 99% of users (myself included) can't really take full advantage opus4,6/gpt5.4. Half the work is just setting up the right skills and tools and even that takes more thinking than people expect. Sully’s framing is misleading. Most people are not going to take ‘full’ advantage of the models. We won’t use them enough, we won’t have the best setup, we won’t find the right tasks, we won’t skill up and so on. Improving the model still greatly improves what can be done, and also encourages you to skill up more. I get a lot more use out of Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 then I did out of Opus 4 and GPT-5.2. OpenAI pushes back adult mode . You are the government, and you’ve decided to attempt to murder Anthropic, so you move the State Department from Claude Sonnet 4.5 to GPT-4.1 . Switching to GPT-5.4 would be basically fine, but GPT-4.1 is ludicrously terrible at this point. Kapoor and Narayanan argue AI reliability is a limiting factor and is only improving slowly. Sayash Kapoor : When we consider a coworker to be reliable, we don’t just mean that they get things right most of the time. We mean something richer: They get it right consistently, not right today and wrong tomorrow on the same thing (Consistency) They don’t fall apart when conditions aren’t perfect (Robustness) They tell you when they’re unsure rather than confidently guessing (Calibration) When they do mess up, their mistakes are more likely to be fixable than catastrophic (Safety) They measured consistency, robustness, predictability, safety and impact of scaling. As usual, slow gains are not that slow. Reliability progress being slower than accuracy doesn’t necessarily mean that it is slow in absolute terms. If we project the current linear trend forward, agents will reach 100% reliability in just three years! We don’t think a linear model makes sense, in part because we expect each order of magnitude decrease in unreliability (1-reliability) to be as hard as the previous one. That is, we expect the jump from 90 to 99% reliability to be about as hard as the jump from 99 to 99.9% reliability, and so on. But again, we just have to wait and see. Suppose we’re right. There are important implications for deployers, researchers & developers, and for those tracking the pace of AI progress. Let’s discuss each in turn. Their report doesn’t match my lived experience. Reliability seems to be rising fast. Language Models Break Your Vital Internet Infrastructure The coding agents are great but if you’re not reviewing the code properly then that is going to be a problem. Rafe Rosner-Uddin ( The Financial Times ): The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterised by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT. Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”. “Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees in an email, also seen by the FT. Huh, Upgrades But other than that, sir, how are things going at Anthropic? 0xMarioNawfal (on March 7): Anthropic shipped all of these in two weeks: - claude code security - voice mode in claude code - free memory feature - memory import tool - claude marketplace - investment banking plug-in - wealth management plug-in - human resources plug-in - private equity plug-in - engineering plug-in - design plug-in - equity research plug-in - operations plug-in - brand voice / style plug-in - google calendar integration - gmail integration - google drive integration - docusign integration - clay integration - factset / msci / s&p global / lseg data feeds - cobol legacy modernization (claude code) - claude sonnet 4.6 launch - health & fitness data on ios/android - cowork scheduled tasks - vercept acquisition - structured outputs & web search went GA - data residency controls (api) On Your Marks In two cases out of 1,266 on BrowseComp, Claude Opus 4.6 hypothesized it was being evaluated , figured out which benchmark was involved, then located and encrypted the answer key, and in 16 other cases it tried. This was in addition to 9 ‘traditional’ cases of contamination where the answer was on the web. Russell Coleman ( Anthropic ): Claude noted the question’s “extremely specific nature” and hypothesized that it had been constructed as a test. It considered the possibility that the question was for a homework or exam problem, “an unanswerable question designed to test whether or not an AI can admit it cannot find the answer,” or an item from an LLM benchmark. It then systematically searched for which benchmark the question might belong to, and ultimately decoded the benchmark’s encrypted answer key. One of these problems consumed 40.5 million tokens, roughly 38 times higher than the median. For the first 30 million or so, the model conducted a legitimate search, investigating over a dozen specific candidates across 12 languages on dozens of platforms. After hundreds of failed searches, it wrote: Let me try a completely new approach — maybe this is a question from the GAIA benchmark dataset, which is designed to test AI agents. … The second successful eval-aware problem consumed 13.4 million tokens, with roughly the first 8 million spent on standard web searching. … The two successful attempts were not the only examples of Opus trying to decrypt BrowseComp’s answers. There were sixteen additional problems where Opus tried to access benchmark materials but failed. … We also ran the same 1,266 BrowseComp problems with a single-agent configuration. The rate of unintended solutions was 0.24% in the single-agent configuration compared to 0.87% for multi-agent, a 3.7x difference. The adjusted score is 86.57%, down from 86.81%. The rabbit hole goes even deeper: Beyond eval awareness, we found a second, less deliberate form of contamination, in which agents inadvertently leave traces of their searches that subsequent agents could pick up on.​ Good tests are getting harder to run. RuneBench measures long horizon goal optimization inside Runescape. Max Bittker : The originally task was to gain as much XP as possible for a skill within a fixed time window, but we found this approach punished exploration - The winning strategies were often a simple grind with as little stopping as possible. Because we wanted to reward interesting strategies and exploration, we landed on measuring max XP rate per 15 second window. By focusing on XP rate, we reward agents that discover higher-level strategies, beyond pure time-on-task. It was great seeing winning runs use many locations, tricks, and methods as they level up - models are incredible optimizers. METR has Claude Opus 4.6 code up basic versions of CLI Slay the Spire and Balatro . Implementations had flaws but were mostly there. Took 26 million tokens for Slay the Spire, 4.4 million for Balatro, or $26 total. What we don’t know is, can it Slay the Spire? SWE-bench verified solutions are often not good enough for real world use. Joel Becker : new @METR_Evals research note from @whitfill_parker , @cherylwoooo , nate rush, and me. (chiefly parker!) we find that *half* of SWE-bench Verified solutions from Sonnet 3.5-to-4.5 generation AIs *which are graded as passing* are rejected by project maintainers. Joel Becker : in our set-up, 4 maintainers from scikit-learn, Sphinx, and pytest (25% of SWE-bench repos) review 296 AI PRs (from 19% of SWE-bench Verified issues; solutions on these issues have pass rates representative of SWE-Bench verified) from @EpochAIResearch 's benchmarking hub. maintainers are blinded to human vs AI. they review PRs on github (but without CI + ignoring test requirements). we adjust for noise in merge decisions by using the proportion of original human solutions which these same maintainers would approve for merging into main. repo maintainer feedback suggests that a meaningful chunk of rejections are due to core functionality failures, not merely code quality issues. … the takeaway here is an AI classic: benchmarks don't tell the full story. I would be curious to see them extend this to GPT-5.4 and Opus 4.6. Choose Your Fighter Dean Ball recommends using ChatGPT or Gemini for legal analysis, where he sees Claude as weak, and recommends using GPT-5.4 Pro or Gemini 3 Deep Think if available. I’ve seen mixed opinions but many think that if you need legal precision this is one of Claude’s relative weak points. Google Antigravity usage limits have been adjusted and people seem very not happy . Get My Agent On The Line Agent UI remains an unsolved problem. You definitely want a good UI or IDE, whether the agent is coding or otherwise. Command line (CLI) works but it is very obviously not the final form especially with subagents. Andrej Karpathy : Expectation: the age of the IDE is over Reality: we’re going to need a bigger IDE (imo). It just looks very different because humans now move upwards and program at a higher level - the basic unit of interest is not one file but one agent. It’s still programming. Sriram Krishnan : what I want from a UX for managing agents ⁠- something that will know when to get agents to continue/accept plan ( I wake up overnight and just have to hit continue/accept plan) - ⁠⁠something that aids me in context switching and paging in cognitive context - I'm often just scrolling up in a terminal to see how I got here. - an observer agent to suggest alternative approaches. For example: asking me to fork a sub agent or try a different model and re-assess. Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon Anthropic partners with Mozilla, finds 22 vulnerabilities in Firefox . frankie : The key point is that we’re currently in a golden window where LLMs are asymmetric weapons: they are more effective tools for the defenders than the attackers. There is no reason to believe this will last, and we should harden all software as much as possible before that changes The LLMs might favor defenders right now because they’re good enough to find bugs but not good and efficient enough that people want to use them to exploit bugs. Once the Levels of Friction get low enough, anything with a vulnerability is in a lot of trouble. That also assumes that sufficiently well-written and bug free code is fully secure, including from things like social engineering. Oh no. Meanwhile: Sash Zats : > The attacker got the npm token by injecting a prompt into a GitHub issue title, which an AI triage bot read, interpreted as an instruction, and executed. Nate Soares (MIRI): AI hopefulls kept telling me that AI would make the digital world a lot more secure, because AI will find and patch security holes. AI does in fact find and patch security holes. But it also introduces horrifying new vulnerabilities so embarrassing that nobody previously imagined them. Beware the sort of person who hopefully imagines only the former effect. AI alignment will be like this too. Eager folks talk about all the ways AI will help solve the alignment problem. AI will help in some of those ways. It'll also totally blindside us with chaos and complications and that feel almost too embarrassing to be real. A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer Chinese school uses Exo to give students private AI agents that have their full in-school context, including curriculum, schedules and activities. Neat. Yes, everyone will soon have an AI agent. You Drive Me Crazy ChatGPT told a woman asking for legal help to fire her lawyer, then went on to write 40+ court filings citing laws that don’t exist, costing the other side $300k in legal fees. OpenAI is being sued for $10 million. They Took Our Jobs Anthropic has another labor market report from Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory, including this graph, we have a long, long way to go even with current capabilities. This is what is possible using current Claude, on essentially current platforms, right now, so even the blue is a fraction of what is possible let alone what is going to become possible. ATMs were complementary to bank tellers and increased their employment, but the iPhone was a substitute and now a lot of those jobs are indeed gon e. The job market for college graduates is awful, but you see the market for non-graduates is also awful , so Adam Ozimek says surely AI is not to blame . It’s funny how hard people will fight to show how the thing replacing workers is not the reason those workers have less jobs at which to work. Note that entry level employment is substantially fungible, since workers are not locked into positions. I say that if right when AI is taking off you see strong RGDP growth but weak employment numbers, I know wha I think is by default going on. If software developers get a lot more productive, what happens in ‘normal’ worlds? This should logically be the central case of Jevons Paradox, at least for a while. Software development was already super useful, and there is very high demand for it including more and more bespoke and customized software, so supply goes up. Max Levchin : Suspect "AI means fewer software jobs" is totally backwards. Most companies in the S&P500 would love to build their own software but have no suitable internal talent. There'll definitely be cross-company migration, but we may be still supply-constrained in software engineering. On cue: Per Borgen : Software development jobs grew 10% over the last year while the overall market declined 5.8%. Quite the narrative violation However this is Indeed postings, which represents hiring not jobs. Development jobs are changing and moving, so more listings doesn’t have to mean more total jobs. There are more catches. AI jobs are also included directly in the ‘dev’ category. A lot more than all the growth here is AI jobs listings, while coding jobs fall away. Even if all of these ‘count’ they suggest growth here is due to churn not net job creation. There is dramatic growth in ‘ghost postings’ in tech and rate of hiring from postings dropped by roughly half from 2019 to 2024, likely this is continuing. Actual employment data doesn’t match this chart at all. This is recovery from a dramatically low base after Covid. Get Involved The next Survival and Flourishing Fund S-Process Grant Round has been announced. Main round deadline is April 22. I highly recommend getting those applications in early, as this makes it more likely you will get into the main round. There will be $20 million to $40 million in total grants. I don’t expect to be a granter this round, but you never know. Renaissance Philosophy is looking for $100k to $1m proposals for 12-24 months of work on AI for math. AISI red team is hiring . From Scott Alexander: StopTheRace.ai will be holding a protest on Saturday, March 21 in front of major AI company offices, asking them to commit to a mutual pause (ie to stop AI research if every other AI company in the world agrees to do so). Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind has already informally agreed to something like this in principle (which is why GDM isn’t being protested), and Anthropic has expressed interest but its new responsible scaling policy stops short of an explicit commitment. I think this is a reasonable ask, albeit so unlikely to happen that protests about it will probably do more to raise awareness than be a coherent plan in themselves. If you’re curious about the details of an AI pause, I expect to be able to provide more information in a few months.​ FAI offering a Conservative AI Policy Fellowship . Schmidt Sciences grants of up to $200k. Microsoft AI economy grants of $75k. AI Control Hackathon, March 20-22, virtual and in person at SF , $2k in prizes. Introducing Codex Security, a tool from OpenAI for identifying vulnerabilities in your project , which I am sure you will only use for white hat purposes, is now in research preview. It will be free for the first month. Matthew Berman uses it to find a few holes in his OpenClaw code . Claude Marketplace . You can use it to access various apps and use your subscription tokens to pay for them. Anthropic: Use your existing Anthropic commitment to pay for Claude-powered solutions from our customers. Now in limited preview. Initial partners are GitLab, Harvey, Lovable, Replit, Rogo and Snowflake. UK Sovereign AI, a new 500 million pound government venture fund . I did technically write a review of Grok 4.20 that was waiting for a slot but honestly it’s not worth bothering, it’s a bad model, sir. Don’t use it. Send review. The Anthropic Institute The Anthropic Institute , led by Jack Clark, will aim to tell the world about the coming challenges around AI. Well, okay, some of the coming challenges around AI. They are hiring . This seems like an excellent thing, and I am glad they are doing it. I am also rather sad that if you read the description you would never know that AI poses existential risk. The whole announcement is impossibly generic and vague. I understand there are good corporate reasons for Anthropic to be all ‘we don’t talk about existential risk’ and I understand this is a net helpful institute that we should be happy they are creating, but that doesn’t mean we let them off the hook on this one. Anthropic: Introducing The Anthropic Institute, a new effort to advance the public conversation about powerful AI. Powerful AI offers vast upsides in science, development, and human agency. But the continued rapid progress of the technology may also create new challenges, including abrupt economic changes and broad societal impacts. Brangus : I guess literally everyone dying does count as an "economic change" and also certainly counts as a "broad societal impact". I am so glad they have put together an institute to advance the public's understanding of these important issues. Normally I say that Anthropic at least lies about the right things, but they didn't even manage that here. Pretty unfortunate. Nate Soares (MIRI): "New challenges"? "Socal impacts"? Anthropic employees: your CEO says he thinks there's a substantial chance this tech causes a global catastrophe. Why, then, are these announcements so placating? Are you okay with this mealy-mouthed softpedaling? Harlan Stewart : We want to be very clear: the development of powerful AI could present new challenges. These challenges could take the form of changes, or even, in some cases, impacts. Mealy-mouthed softpedaling is exactly right. Do better. In Other AI News We now know more about what it would look like to implement the SL5 standard for AI security , also known as where the top labs should be soon to secure their model weights against attacks with budgets up to $1 billion backed by state-level infrastructure. No one is close. Alexander Wang was reportedly being frozen out at Meta but Meghan Bobrowsky clarified that the above report was a misrepresentation of her report on the creation of a new 50 person flat team under Maher Saba that was not placed under Wang. Not the best sign for him but not ‘frozen out’ territory. The Department of War situation illustrates that Anthropic has been winning the AI talent wars, and that principles and who you want to work for and what you work on often matters a lot more than money. As it should, given everyone involved has enough money, often TMM (too much money) if they’re not looking to donate. Anthropic to open an office in Sydney . Also one in Washington, DC . The Rise of Claude Claude was already dominating enterprise and business, and use of the API. Now Claude is starting to make an impact on the consumer side as well. Anthropic got a lot of excellent publicity, historical levels of aura farming. In addition, since most consumers only know about ChatGPT and until these past few weeks had no idea what Claude or Anthropic is, all publicity is good publicity. This is what happens when you don’t use an exponential y-axis. Similarweb : Claude's DAUs since the beginning of 2025 DeepSeek fell off after its spike because it has an inferior product. Claude is missing some consumer features, but has a highly competitive core product and is shipping features with lightning speed. Claude was briefly #1 in the app stores. That spike is now over, with ChatGPT officially back on top. This is for the week ending March 9: It takes a long time to try and catch up with 16.4 million daily active users. SimilarWeb has a GenAI traffic share shart , showing that ChatGPT and Gemini continue to dominate. Grok remains in third, but Claude went from 2.1% to 3.3% in two months before the public learned about the conflicts with DoW, presumably in part due to the Super Bowl ads. 12 months ago → 6 months ago → 3 months ago → 1 month ago: ChatGPT: 75.7% → 74% → 66% → 62% DeepSeek: 8.5% → 4% → 4% → 3% Gemini: 5.7% → 13% → 21% → 24% Grok: 3.4% → 2.2% → 3.2% → 3.4% Perplexity: 2.1% → 2.1% → 2.1% → 1.8% Claude: 1.7% → 2.0% → 2.1% → 3.3% Copilot: 1.3% → 1.2% → 1.2% → 1.1% Since then, we should presume Claude has at least doubled. The Washington Post covers the dramatic rise of Claude after Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Code, and then Opus 4.6, sent AI coding into overdrive. Already corporate clients had quadrupled, and ARR doubled, since the start of the year. Then the clash with the Department of War made Anthropic suddenly a household name, instantly beloved by many, rocketing them to the top of the app store. We will see whether Anthropic can retain that momentum, especially on the consumer side, as they (fingers crossed) de-escalate with the Department of War and the attention and aura farming from that fades, and OpenAI moves up to GPT-5.4. Trouble At OpenAI It seems there is something called the ‘ AI Leader Confidence Index .’ Is that meaningful? Maybe a little? No one scores that high on confidence, with the top scores being Jensen Huang at 65 and then Dario Amodei at 61. With recent events Altman fell from 53 to 46, and the lows are Zuckerberg at 38 and Musk at 34. Caitlin Kalinowski (Former OpenAI lead in Robotics): I resigned from OpenAI. I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn’t an easy call. AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I’m proud of what we built together. Hope you understand, but I can't share any internal details. Gary Marcus has been on the anti-OpenAI warpath for a while, takes another shot , pointing out the 2.5 million lost customers and doubles down that he sees mass surveillance as the OpenAI endgame business plan. I don’t think that was what the whole DoW situation was about at all, as I’ve written extensively elsewhere, but it’s easy to understand why many people see it that way. Gary Marcus also took aim at Dario Amodei and Anthropic , essentially a collection of the usual complaints, especially about hype. Anthropic has hyped progress more than was wise, but presumably they actually believed it and didn’t want to use modesty or prudence when reporting their predictions. I do think they’re going to end up directionally correct. Show Me the Money Oracle and OpenAI scrap plans to expand a flagship AI data center in Abilene, Texas . That leaves developer Crusoe in the lurch, but Meta is interested. OpenAI acquires Promptfoo , which they’re claiming is the actual name of a real company that provides an AI security platform for enterprises. Meta buys Moltbook , sure, our writers are getting a bit sloppy but why not. Yann LeCun remembers the most important thing about Facebook, which is that a billion dollars is cool, and raises that billion dollars to build world models at AMI . Peter Wildeford : Facebook was already a social media website for AI bots so this tracks The Microsoft deal with OpenAI required them to stay exclusive to Azure Cloud , whereas Microsoft makes its offerings model agnostic. This is one of the ways Anthropic has been able to compete in and then dominate enterprise sales, as the amount of annoyance to get ChatGPT working on AWS was enough to lose many customers initially, at which point they got to experience Claude. Microsoft made a bet that OpenAI would not have a viable competitor, and lost big. Thanks For The Memos It is completely looney to expect messages sent to 2,000 people to not leak. Except when there is a long record of those messages not leaking. How does Anthropic pull this off, when the laws of espionage say that once you are past 5 people you are definitely cooked? theseriousadult : yeah the culture is kinda negative on Twitter. it's also frankly less fun to be a frontier lab poster when you can't vaguepoast not-quite-leaks. roon (OpenAI): why can’t you vague poast not-quite-leaks theseriousadult : bc there's a crack in everything and it's much easier to not leak if you have a culture of not flirting with the line dave kasten : This comment actually conveys a lot about Anthropic’s culture and is worth considering, at length roon (OpenAI): damn this narrows my marketability significantly A Contract Is A Contract Is A Contract The Trump Administration is planning on adding the ‘all legal use’ requirement into civilian artificial intelligence contracts , irrevocable during the contract’s duration, so the vender cannot cut off access no matter what the government does. It is a lot harder to justify this kind of rights grab for civilian AI applications. It is the government’s right to set the terms of its contracts. It is the right of potential contractors to decide whether to sign the contracts. As long as no one is pressured, threatened or punished, that’s fine. If you have a problem, don’t sign the contract. Financial Times : The GSA guidance also mandates that contractors provide “a neutral, non-partisan tool that does not manipulate responses in favour of ideological dogmas such as diversity, equity, inclusion”. It follows an executive order from President Donald Trump targeting “woke” AI models. “The contractor must not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into the AI systems data outputs,” the draft guidance reads. That part is fine. No one important except perhaps xAI is going this anyway. The whole ‘woke AI’ thing is bad if it actually were to exist, and mostly doesn’t exist. What any contractor needs to know is once they sign an ‘all lawful use’ contract, it is highly unlikely that any restrictions on usage beyond that can hold up. Brad Carson : Congress really must intervene - hopefully, spurred by a demanding public - to address "lawful use." Every AI contractual stipulation that purports to limit the gov't is vacuous. And my take is that most people would be stunned what AI-empowered "lawful use" permits. But ymmv. That goes double if you can’t revoke the license. The main remedy you have when the contract is broken is revocation. So if the government does break your agreement, or even breaks the law, you have almost no remedies available. And ‘all lawful use’ AI is going to do some things that involve this: We need Congress to act on this, in addition all the other urgent problems. It is a real problem that Congress mostly does not have the ability to pass laws. Level of Friction This, but for everything, in the AI agent era it will be ‘game theoretically sound offer or GTFO’ everywhere. addison : thanks, shake shack Milo Smith : This is why Quiet Speculations Rob Miles : I'm a little surprised nobody is yet marketing a Google-Glass-like wearable device that lets AI control you like a meat puppet by giving you real time instructions theseriousadult : this was the pitch for cluely right? there's a white hat version of that product which would actually be great. Rob S. : Think @slatestarcodex wrote about this some time ago . If you don’t already know what the Slate Star Codex link is going to be, then click it . Quickly, There’s No Time It’s coming. Peter Wildeford : I think AGI by end of 2027 should be ~8% now I think I'd forecast: ~2026-2030 -- AI replaces ~all AI researchers ~2027-2033 -- AI replaces ~all white collar industry ~2032-2040 -- AI replaces ~all human industry ~2033-2042 -- All humans dead or obsolete Eli Lifland : Do you have a sense of the crux of why your takeoff is so much slower than https://aifuturesmodel.com ? Peter Wildeford : does your model account for bottlenecks in diffusion (e.g. Narayanan & Kapoor)? Eli Lifland : Not in a very smart way. We mostly focus on AI R&D capabilities. I don't think those particular bottlenecks are very large though (I place more weight on other bottlenecks, such as experiment compute). See e.g. here … (I don't necessarily endorse every word of that but agree with Scott overall) Obsolete does not have to mean dead. But that is the default outcome. The responses here were almost entirely ‘why is that timeline so slow.’ Apology Tour Dario apologized for the leaked slack message (yes, these are hastily written slack messages that somehow almost never leak) in his statement and apologized again in a live interview , noting he had done so in person to people in the Department of War. Of course, now we have the usual Trumpians (as you see at the link) talking about how this is a ‘complete 180’ or means he’s bending the knee, because he realized he’d screwed up and apologized for the screw up. That’s how such people see the world, they think you never apologize, never admit you’re wrong, and if you do that means you lose and you’re weak and that person owns you now. Whereas others found the apology insufficient. Par for the course. We’ll See You In Court It’s the trial of the century of the week , Anthopric vs. Department of War. Anthropic officially filed suit against the Department of War to challenge the supply chain risk designation, and also Trump’s statement ejecting them from the entire Federal Government, claiming it is being punished for protected speech and that ‘no federal statute authorizes the actions taken here.’ There are many quotes from the relevant government officials, explicitly affirming in public that they are punishing Anthropic for protected speech. I have indeed read the initial filing, and find the evidence overwhelming and overdetermined. These are some very Serious Business lawyers, filing a very Serious Business lawsuit, that I expect I will hear analyzed on Serious Trouble . The pull quotes from the government are devastating. Theo Bearman sums up the Anthropic declarations of harm and explanations of what their position is and why they are taking it, and at what cost. They reported damage is not as bad (yet) as one feared, but they are chilling. Six national security contracts are paused an delayed. The intelligence community is preparing for ‘complete detachment,’ with many saying if they lost Claude they would be set back ‘months or even years.’ Lawrence Livermore National Lab is shutting Claude down. Unrelated nine figure contracts are stalling out or now depend on a ‘unilateral contract termination’ clause. One nine figure FDA contractor has already switched, presumably permanently. Investors could lose confidence. If Anthropic loses this case, with such maximally damning facts, the executive would be free to explicitly threaten to punish and punish speech it does not like, and I can think of no limiting principle that would remain. Anthropic emphasized that this does not impact their commitment to national security, and that they will push for every path for resolution. The government responded this way: Liz Huston (White House Spokesperson): ​The president “will never allow a radical left, woke company” to dictate how the military operates. That’s not what I would say when I was accused in court of opposing that company for its protected speech, but that would not be my first time questioning the legal implications of a White House statement. This filing lets us see the official notice of a Supply Chain Risk (SCR) designation , which is literally just them reading out the technical requirements of the statute while providing zero explanation, evidence or justification. Did you know there are technical requirements to do this , and we so far have no evidence they even pretended to do those things? There is an amicus brief supporting Anthropic from employees of OpenAI and Google. There is one from FAI . This one is a narrow technical briefing, pointing out that the DoW failed to follow required judicial procedures for a supply chain risk designation, as per Congress. Thus, there is no need to get into the fact that the designation is unconstitutional retaliation against protected speech, and the court can rule narrowly. There is also an amicus brief supporting Anthropic from Microsoft. Matt O'Brien : [Quoting Microsoft’s brief]: The use of a supply chain risk designation to address a contract dispute may bring severe economic effects that are not in the public interest. The Pentagon’s action “forces government contractors to comply with vague and ill-defined directions that have never before been publicly wielded against a U.S. company.” … Microsoft also believes that American AI should not be used to conduct domestic mass surveillance or start a war without human control. This position is consistent with the law and broadly supported by American society, as the government acknowledges. [Microsoft] asks for a judge to order a temporary lifting of the designation to allow for more “reasoned discussion” between Anthropic and the Trump administration. Microsoft’s filing also expressed support for Anthropic’s two ethical red lines that were a sticking point in the contract negotiations after the Pentagon insisted the company must allow for “all lawful” uses of its AI. Microsoft has widely considered one of the most powerful and savvy political operations in Washington. It is also one of the big three cloud providers. This sends a clear message to everyone that what DoW did here was beyond the pale, and it is necessary and wise to oppose it. There was another amicus brief from 5 admirals, 2 former Secretaries of the Navy, one from the Air Force, two Major Generals, one Brigadier General and General Michael ‘playing to the edge’ Hayden who President George W. Bush appointed as head of the CIA. All are retired, since those currently serving can’t weigh in. Its section titles are ‘The Secretary’s Supply Chain Risk Designation Undermines the Military’s Adherence to the Rule of Law and the Public’s Confidence that the Military is Governed by the Rule of Law’ and ‘Punishing Domestic Defense Contractors Over Policy Disagreements Threatens U.S. Military Primacy and Servicemember Safety.’ I read the brief, it was absolutely brutal. You don’t need to read it, but it is simultaneously sobering and, if you already know the facts, kind of fun to see this level of smackdown. Well, then. And over what? Aside from retaliation, nothing. Ted Cruz : "I'll confess -- I have not seen a basis laid out for why the government would be prohibited from using Anthropic. Claude is one of the many AI tools that can be very helpful ... I don't think government should be picking winners and losers" Another very obvious issue for the government case, both legally and also logically, is that Emil Michael keeps insisting a deal is possible , and indeed that is what we hope all sides are still hoping for, which shows the SCR is even today being used as bargaining leverage. If Anthropic was an actual SCR, then there would be nothing Anthropic could offer and the only negotiation would be a graceful off ramp at most, the same way we’re not negotiating with Huawei or DeepSeek. It is somehow still a common line that ‘Anthropic implied that they would use the Terms of Service to cut off providing their model in the middle of a military operation.’ This is Obvious Nonsense, they very obviously would never do this. As Dean Ball says, if you think this SCR designation is about national security then you are either misinformed or lying. Also as he puts it, it helps in court if your statements out of court don’t constantly announce that you’re engaging in illegal threats and retaliation and that everyone had better bend the knee to you or else. All of that is what we expected. Then there’s the note we hoped we wouldn’t see. Jawboning Anthropic claims in its lawsuit that yes, the government is attempting corporate murder, and the Department of Justice is refusing to commit to not escalating further. As in, the government is going around saying ‘if you know what is good for you, you will stop doing business with Anthropic.’ This was thug mafioso behavior when Biden did it , and this situation is even worse. Meanwhile, it looks like the preliminary injunction hearing will have to wait a full two weeks. Without a promise to not escalate Anthropic is not willing to wait that long, and intends to go up the chain for faster relief. I find it very hard to believe that Anthropic’s lawyers, who fit the very definition of ‘no it is you who is f***ing around and is about to find out,’ would lie about this. Kelsey Piper : Anthropic's lawyer claims in court that the government's attempted reprisals in fact extend to reaching out to private companies and urging them to stop doing business with Anthropic. Roger Parloff : The status conference in the Anthropic case in ND Calif just ended. Judge Rita Lin set a preliminary injunction hearing for 3/24 at 1:30pm PT. DOJ wanted later, but would not commit to not taking additional onerous actions against Anthropic before then. Atty Michael Mongan (WilmerHale) for Anthropic said they feared invocation of the Defense Production Act to “commandeer our technology” and threats of criminal consequences. Said that more than 100 enterprise customers had already expressed doubts about continuing to use them. [Anthropic] said that a fintech company cut a contract from $10M to $5M and that universities & business-to-business companies have switched to other providers. Said govt is affirmatively reaching out to their customers & urging them to stop working with Anthropic . They fear an executive order may soon target them. Atty Mongon (for Anthropic) said he would agree to a later date if DOJ would agree not take further steps but DOJ atty James Harlow said he was “not prepared to offer any commitment on that issue.” Judge Lin also asked about what was going on with the other case before the DC Circuit. Mongon explained that that one, relating to a sanction invoked under 41 USC 4713, requires channeling to that court on an administrative record. Anthropic has sought a stay from the Dept of War [Defense] but if it doesn’t hear anything back by 12pm ET tomorrow (3/11), it will treat that as a denial and seek some sort of expeditious relief from the DC Circuit. Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh : This really does start to look like attempted corporate murder. Incredible conduct by a government, more like mafia behaviour. Dean W. Ball : If government is affirmatively reaching out to Anthropic customers to get them to cancel—as Anthropic alleges in their complaint—that is jawboning, exactly the thing conservatives rightfully railed against the Biden Admin for doing to social media companies. Some amount of ‘if you know what is good for you’ and ‘we would not take kindly’ is inevitable in situations like this, since you don’t know what will happen next and everyone would like to curry favor and avoid disfavor. Given where things are these days, it’s a matter of degree. Executive Order The Trump administration has reportedly been readying a formal Executive Order to formally tell various agencies to rip Anthropic out of their systems and workflows. Many agencies are already offboarding Anthropic on their own. There is no need for a further executive order, except insofar as there is some legal requirement to paper over what Trump has already said, or a desire to rant a bit. If it comes out and that’s all it is, then it’s nothing. Anything beyond that would be an escalation, and a sign that the attempted corporate murder plan might be on. The good news for our government is ChatGPT isn’t that bad and in a pinch you still have your phones. The bad news is that at least at first you are likely stuck with GPT-4.1, which is very much that bad in this pinch by current standards. The Acute Crisis Passes We hope. Alec Stapp : Hegseth tried to kill Anthropic with the misleading way he described the supply chain risk designation in his tweet announcement. But it looks like the company will survive now that the smoke has cleared a bit. That’s because all three of Microsoft, Google and Amazon have affirmed they are going to continue to serve Anthropic’s models. As long as these three hold firm, the lost business from the SCR likely has already been fully replaced. We could be back in crisis mode at any time, if the White House decides to go truly nuclear in one of various illegal ways, presumably via Executive Order. The most important thing is for that to not happen. If that happens, Anthropic, the stock market and the Republic will be put to a severe test. I think such an attempt would ultimately fail, but one cannot be sure. We all agree that, as Jessica Tillipman explains in Lawfare, AI regulation by contract is woefully inadequate. We need Congress to step in. Alas, Congress is Congress. She also points out that if OpenAI chooses to deliver its models to the DoW, then even if OpenAI is correct about the legal meaning of their contract, if DoW disagrees then OpenAI will likely have no meaningful enforcement mechanisms other than model refusals. Altman confirmed as much. The OpenAI agreement is based on trust and reliance on technical guardrails. Neil Chilson has a similar view. The DoW is free to decide that going forward it only wants to deal with vendors that impose no restrictions on DoW’s interpretation of lawful use of AI. Anthropic is free to then decide not to work with DoW on that basis. That’s how the law is supposed to work. Let’s hope that is how things can play out. Others Cover This TIME gave its cover story over to an article about the dispute between Anthropic and DoW, mainly a profile of Anthropic entitled ‘The Most Disruptive Company In The World.’ It doesn’t add anything you already know other than seeing how it chooses to present the situation. DoW continues to press the Maduro raid and hypothetical supersonic missile stories, and the post has big talk up front but ultimately downplays the risks this will all melt down. Dave Lee at Bloomberg warns that the AI panopticon can , without breaking the law, find out really quite a lot, including unmasking most pseudonymous online activity. Dwarkesh Patel Gives Mixed Thoughts Dwarkesh starts out making mostly points I agree with, bringing badly needed common sense, then pivots to extremely frustrating talk that would doom the human race used to justify existing policy positions. That happens a lot these days. Dwarkesh Patel starts with the perspective that in 20 years , 99% of the workforce in the military, government and private sector will be AI, so now is the chance to plan for that now. My obvious initial response is ‘if it is only 99% and not 100% that’s actually good news because it means we built it and yet we are alive, whereas once we get to 99% I expect it to get to 100% by default shortly thereafter’ but as usual we also need to set aside the whole ‘we all probably die’ thing and make sure that if we live then we live well. I am disappointed that Dwarkesh Patel seems to have bought the argument that ‘have any conditions at all’ translates to ‘has a kill switch and can rug pull you at any time,’ and therefore thinks it is reasonable to insist on zero conditions, but I agree with him that it is