We Will Not Be Divided

turning point? The episode is literally playing out the AEC's (read: war-footed government) 1954 Oppenheimer security-clearance hearing in real-time for a fresh modern-day audience.

> much broader implications

Setting aside the spectacular metastasis of a lawless kakistocracy that is literally rewriting the facts on record...

Anthropic's leadership has wisely attempted to make it clear that its product is not fit for the US DoD's purpose/objective, which is automated killing at scale.

It would be (is) grossly, historically negligent to operate weapons with LLMs. Anthropic built systems for a thuggocracy that only understands bribery, blackmail, and force.

this entire administration has been a constant stream of "important turning point for the US" moments

Yep, where does your trust lay now? It's been a minute of pretending it'll be okay.

Rather it's business as usual.

The turning point happened when Trump was reelected. One could argue the turning point happened Jan. 6 2020 and nobody truly cared. The consequence should have been for all insurrectionists and Trump himself to be tried for treason and be imprisoned indefinitely. Yet here we are.

The same is true about Meta and US antitrust law, or the GDPR and DMA in Europe.

Governments should not be permitted to introduce regulations against companies of this kind if the regulations can be enforced selectively and with regulator discretion, as the GDPR and antitrust definitely are. The free-speech implications are staggering.

Trump was threatening Netflix for having a democrat on the board last week. They seized 10% of Intel. They forced Nvidia to tithe 25% of China revenue into a slush fund. The FCC has been used to censor comedy. The ship has sailed and the only consequence has been hand-wringing.

Its called corporatism and is a part of classical fascism.

Corporations learn about “first they came for [Apple Inc.] but I am not [Apple Inc.] so I didn’t do anything”.

outside of just the tech sector, this country has already crossed MANY irreversible turning points. also, good luck with your midterm elections. we have started war with Iran. cheers from Barcelona from this American refugee.

Not really a turning point, the US has been turning for months, ever since the felatio of inauguration. This is just another rung on the ladder

This isn’t new. Maybe some people are just now realizing it.

Take the stated tool for this action, the Defense Production Act ("DPA") [1]. It was passed in 1950. What does it cover? Well, lots of things. The DPA has been invoked many times over 76 years.

Notably in 1980 it was expanded to include "energy", I guess in response to the 1970s OPEC Oil Crisis.

Remember during he pandemic when gas prices skyrocketed? As an aside, that was Trump's fault. But given that "energy" is a "material good" under the DPA, the government could've invoked it to tackle high energy prices and didn't.

So, the government is willing to invoke the DPA to protect corporate and wealthy interests, which now includes military applications of AI for imperialist purposes, but never for you, the average citizen. IT's weird how that keeps consistently happening.

The US government has consistently acted to further the interests of US corporations and the ultra-wealthy. You probably just haven't been paying attention until now.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950

[deleted]

I would argue we're miles away from an important turning point, it's been turning so much since then, its basically a full circle now

Im sorry to say the turning point has well passed. The US is a facist country with leaders who will flaunt the rule of law.

Please memorize the 14 points of fascism, you will see examples of this multiple times a day. Its ecerywhere.

https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html

i genuinely do not understand why anyone is acting like this is something new; has this not been the status quo since forever?

futhermore this is kind of a naive framing painting the state as somehow separate from majority of the capital...

Americans always think they're exceptional so they have the divine right to do things that the rest cannot.

I would feel much better about other countries mass surveillance than the US. China for instance can’t do nearly as much to me as the US justice system can.

The way the anthropic statement was written really stood out to me. How they posture themselves in favour of surveillance for foreign countries or the existence of fully autonomous weapons if they don't threaten US citizen lifes.

I wonder if this is how some non minority of American thinks or was just worded like that to try to appeal to the "most radical patriots"

I don't think it will feel even remotely tolerable in the US. I've been heavily critical of Trump on a regular basis on the public internet ever since he showed up 10 years ago. I doubt a government surveillance AI would miss this. Of course, there are probably millions of people like me, but given the behavior of the government recently, I really have to wonder what they might do to people like me once we've been put on a list.

The bad news for American people is that "others" are pretty good at these technologies. When I read an important AI paper chances are all the names on it are non-American, even for papers from American labs. In a real war, this becomes problematic.

Every nation has some bias but I think Americans have power poisoning for being the dominant power for so long. They think they are entitled to do anything and believe they are the good guys in the history. Well...

It’s especially ironic considering the title and the fact that many employees are not US citizens.

It is absolutely unsafe to depend upon American companies, and I can guarantee you that all over the world, people are actively looking for alternatives already. You never know what happens next, things that used to take years happen in a single Truth Social post now, and no matter how twisted your worst nightmare scenarios look, this ridiculous band of crooks in charge of the USA manages to one-up them.

When you put it like that, it makes me almost want to wish for Anthropic to die from this. But the blow to the field in general would be huge, and I benefit from their service as well.

Unfortunately, every country has a law somewhere saying it can take private property at will if it is in the national interest.

It's not only the US being special in this case.

The problem is pretty simple: there is money to be made and someone will do what the Pentagon wants. Will it be worse in capabilities than Anthropic? Probably, but as long as it can be used to wage autonomous war wherever the US military decides, it will be good enough.

Anthropic can stick to their beliefs as much as they want, but it will not change the outcome, maybe just postpone it a bit.

On an unrelated note, I think the Pentagon erred when it labeled them a supply chain vulnerability, they should have used the DPA to make them do what they need. Less drama and much cheaper compared to replacing them with a whole different company.

Anthropic will just move out of the US. A lot of scientists fled Nazi Germany in the early stages. A lot of them fled to USA and end up being part of the Manhattan project that gave the Abomb that helped US win and end the war. We are going to bleed a lot of AI researches and engineers.

Oh come on. Saying “no” is not eroding trust, it’s taking a stand.

When the US banded human embryo research did that erode trust? I didn’t hear anything about that at the time.

I don't see how public policy is being "forced" on anyone here? It seems like the system is working as intended: government wants to do X; company A says "I won't allow my product to be used for X"; government refuses to do business with company A. One side thinks the government should be allowed to dictate terms to a private supplier, the other side thinks the private supplier should be allowed to dictate terms to the government. Both are half right.

You can argue that the government refusing to do any business with company A is overreach, I suppose, but I imagine that the next logical escalation in this rhetorical slapfight is going to be the government saying "we cannot guarantee that any particular use will not include some version of X, and therefore we have to prevent working with this supplier"...which I sort of see?

Just to take the metaphor to absurdity, imagine that a maker of canned tomatoes decided to declare that their product cannot be used to "support a war on terror". Regardless of your feelings on wars on terror and/or canned tomatoes, the government would be entirely rational to avoid using that supplier.

Sweet summer child, the purpose of government is a monopoly on forcing things down people's throats. When people lose control of their government that monopoly doesn't go away, especially when the Don running the show has blackmail on every influential person in society taken from a decades long intelligence operation by offing it's leader.

A vast number of people in positions of responsibility right know have their life at the mercy of the redaction pen and are ultimately going to do whatever it takes to keep that pen out of the "wrong hands"

> I’m sure nothing good can come out of strong-arming some of the brightest scientists and engineers the U.S. has

And where would they emigrate? Russia? China? UAE? :-)

You all want to feel safe just because you are a US citizen but this is a mass surveillance technology on global level. It’s nothing like some secret agent spying on a KGB asset in Berlin like in the old days. We are writing on HN, are we on American soil? Not really. No one asked me for passport. This is not a “domestic” space. Everything here can be automatically and legally spied on. And this applies to everything digital. Spy bots don’t have the concept of “domestic” or any way to identify citizenship. And if Google or TikTok can spy on you, your government and ChatGPT/Grok’s agentic secret agents can definitely spy on you. I’m sure they have better loopholes than the Eyes thing, if they really need one.

It is relevant. Anthropic would have argued the US military could not use its tools to process data gathered by foreign agencies when it applied to US citizens or soil.

So there you have it

> We hope

No. Hope is not a strategy. Too much of the techno optimist future narratives we use to coat over the increasingly screaming cognitive dissonance as we see what keeps us civil, from each other's throats, decline, smothered by the rise of the broligarchy.

What's happening here is not about AI. It's a loyalty test, administered to every major actor in the economy, the more influential, the more ruthless and earlier.

Your core values, in exchange for taxpayer money access and loyalty to the Don, an offer few can refuse.

And the choice will come for everyone. It's a distillation attack to filter the

- DEI for Grants - Your officer's oath to not kill civilians by word of your leader for continued career - AI Safety for non blacklisting - Your immigirant employee's location for us not harassing your offices in person - Your trans neighbour shipped to a reeducation camp and gender reassignment for the safety of your family.

Becoming complicit is the ultimate loyalty

So stop hope. Stop asking. Demand, Force, Resist.

``` Do not go gentle into that long night, The righteous should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light ```

The point that I've not seen someone making: do you even need LLMs for domestic surveillance? I can grab a copy of EmbeddingGemma or Qwen3-embedding or a similar model and do semantic clustering of existing data, since the "retrieval" is the most important part for such applications, not its integration into a LLM.

if it doesn't matter, why is the DoD pushing for it?

The citation for your quote appears to be an unsourced Reddit post.

The agreement at the heart of 5 Eyes is to not surveil the other nations - this must be up there for most persistently misunderstood fact among techies (probably why AI spits it out)

There's obviously gaps in domestic mass surveillance they've gotten from allies or else they wouldn't care so much about using Anthropic for it.

That's always been the loophole. But it involved an extra step so they are just trying to get rid of that one annoyance.

Here is an interesting thing to think about which country spies on Americans the most and how? Are there New Zealand commandos sneaking around the shores tapping cables? Moles working in the AT&T for the Canadian government? What happens if one of those individuals get caught, are they quietly allowed to leave, and if they commit any crimes do the charges get erased magically? Otherwise, if that doesn't happen there is danger they'll grab our spies in their countries in turn. Or they just blatantly pass lists around of who works for whom so they don't interfere with each other as that would preclude getting the data back through the loop to the NSA.

There is of course another loophole and that is private entities collecting data. The Constitution doesn't say anything about that, so the government figures it's fare game if they just pay a company to collect the data and then they query later. They didn't collect it so it's not "spying".

Despite this comment focusing on "domestic", because it highlights workarounds I read it as reinforcing the tone-deaf implication in the letter that using the models to spy on non-Americans is ok.

The US would not be net negative growth without government spending. Other components of GDP grow a lot, outside of recessions.

Sure if you immediately stopped government spending today we'd have negative growth today but that's not because other things aren't growing, it's because you just removed part of the base that existed last year. That would be true of literally pretty much any economy ever, or anything that's growing and you decided to remove a chunk of the base from.

And yes I absolutely believe the government does not have better generative AI than Anthropic or its competitors.

At some point in the not so distant future, it seems entirely likely for the US to bail out OpenAI / Nvidia / etc using national security as justification. Democrats and Republicans really can get along as long as their donors get what they want. No matter how the regime changes in the coming years, the DoD will keep getting funding, and that funding will increasingly go to vendors who don't mind killing people.

Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, and 60 years later it's eating everyone's lunch.

> who are by far the largest budgetary expense for the tax payer

not even top 3

>or admitting they spend money on routine BS with zero frontier war fighting capabilities.

Trying to imagine somebody that doesn’t know that the military buys dumb stuff and for some reason a human doesn’t come to mind. I keep picturing a horse

> The USA showed itself to be a Command Economy that uses 'private enterprise' as a fascade of legitimacy during Covid.

This is the case for every government/nation in the world. The difference between communism and capitalism, is that the Politburo in capitalism allows the natural selection of elites based on their performance on an open economy. At least that was the case until 2011.

Altman says OpenAI agrees with Anthropic’s red lines in Pentagon dispute - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47187488 - Feb 2026 (8 comments)

Tech companies shouldn't be bullied into doing surveillance (eff.org) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160226 (160 comments)

Sam Altman tells staff at an all-hands that OpenAI is negotiating a deal with the Pentagon, after Trump orders the end of Anthropic contracts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188698

Interesting. George hotz has said his motivation to start tinygrad was the worry that nvidia would be nationalized.

Horseshoe theory applied to nationalization of companies. It would be cathartic if it weren’t so grim.

Mankind is doing what it does best at scale: sprinting mindlessly into problematic scenarios because the species is fragmented and has arbitrarily established concepts of groups defined by region, race, ideology, etc.

As a species, this is just natural selection.

If they're truly principled, and these are true red lines, given no other recourse, I would be impressed if Anthropic decided to shut down the company. Won't happen, but I would be smashing that F key if they did.

The other two definitely never would in a million years.

Tech leaders are a joke

Yeah, it's a nice gesture, but having watched Google handle the protests in recent years and their culture inching a step closer to Amazon, I do not foresee their leadership being swayed by employee resistance. They'll either quietly sign an agreement and discreetly implement it, or they will go scorched earth on their employees again.

So much for the hope with leaders such as Sam and Dario

Needs a union. With strikes and all that jazz.

There are other valid use cases than war for AI.

I’m torn. On the one hand it’s nice that the rank and file take a stand against extreme overreach. On the other hand these rank and file scientists, engineers, whatever are fostering a technology which has so many at-best questionable effects on all of society.

Idealists who “genuinely”[1] want to change the world “for the better”[1] will just move on to the next Interesting Problem if it ends up making the world worse.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47179649

They put their names to their position publicly. That is meaningful action.

Quitting their jobs? How is that the pragmatic or effective response?

Maybe their union will call a strike

about as much as all the people who signed the petition to stop/slow the rate of ai advancement - nothing other than pointing to it in the future when all has gone to shit and say, "told you so"

It’s about punishing a company that is not complying. It’s a show of force to deter any future objections on moral grounds from companies that want to do business with the US gov.

My understanding is that it’s about the contract allowing Anthropic to refuse service when they deem a red line has been crossed. Hegseth and friends probably don’t want any discussions to even start, about whether a red line may be in the process of being crossed, and having to answer to that. They don’t want the legality or ethicality of any operation to be under Anthropic’s purview at all.

you mean beyond this: [0]

>In 2025, reportedly Anthropic became the first AI company cleared for use in relation to classified operations and to handle classified information. This current controversy, however, began in January 2026 when, through a partnership with defense contractor Palantir, Anthropic came to suspect their AI had been used during the January 3 attack on Venezuela. In January 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote to reiterate that surveillance against US persons and autonomous weapons systems were two “bright red lines” not to be crossed, or at least topics that needed to be handled with “extreme care and scrutiny combined with guardrails to prevent abuses.” You can also read Anthropic’s self-proclaimed core views on AI safety here, as well as their LLM, Claude’s, constitution here.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160226

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.

to better understand what this may result in, see Person of Interest Season 3 Episode 20 - Death Benefit: https://personofinterest.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Benefit

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

>AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.

So they're saying anthropic is lying or what? Because Sam Altman is saying that DOW agrees with no mass surveillance and no autonomous drone killing. Also if not, how safety is their priority?

Looks like the letter itself appears to be behind a piece of Javascript. I was not able to to see the letter's text with noscript turned on and had to find it elsewhere online. I don't want to discourage these companies employees from banding together to fight this abuse, but this is something to consider.

Looks like it supports alternative proof of employment. They don't require disclosing identity as long as they are convinced you work for these companies.

I think it's an important call-out though. Can never be too safe in this landscape.

let a thousand flowers bloom

It is a rough precedent that the government can force private citizens to build weapons for them.

Anthropic's public statement declared their intent -- and in fact desire -- to allow their use of technology against me, as I'm not a US citizen.

Why should I stand with them? They only believe US citizens have democratic rights.

I'm sure Anthropic's hands are tied in so many ways, but that's no concern of mine.

I'll get by with GLM-5 and running Qwen locally.

> 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

Although it would be nice to have some high-level signees there, I think we shouldn’t minimize the role of lay employees in this matter. Without having someone knowledgeable enough to build and operate them, AI models are worthless to the C-suite.

> It's incredible how quickly we've devolved into full-blown sci-fi dystopia.

It's pretty bad, but at least the AI industry is still run by humans. Wait a decade or two, when the AI lobby is run by AIs, and the repressive apparatus of the day uses autonomous weapons to do what ICE and friends do today but perhaps focused on "alignment" of the ... humans. You know, if they sufficiently worship AIs in the way they express themselves. Forget about Anthropic and OpenAI; we will look back and rue the day mathematics was invented.

Or just reincorporate in Finland or something. If the US is going to be this hostile to business, time to gtfo.

> Grok/X

Head(s) will of course agree with the administration. And employees will likely be making themselves a target if they sign this letter. All anonymous from said company is not a good look at all.

Speculation of course; let's see what really happens.

I don’t have any particular insights, but I’m curious to learn the antitrust implications of how the execs can/cannot coordinate.

> It's incredible how quickly we've devolved into full-blown sci-fi dystopia.

How so? The steps towards where we are now have been gradual over the last 2 decades, at least. This recent step has opened the door for those in power to grab onto even more power and wealth, and they're naturally seizing it. All of this was comically predictable. Oh, and BTW, the people on this very website have brought us here. :)

You know what will happen next? Absolutely nothing. A vocal minority will make a ruckus that will be ignored, partly because nobody will hear it due to our corrupted media channels, and partly because the vast majority doesn't care and are too amused by their shiny toys and way of life.

This dystopia is only different from fictional ones in that those in power have managed to convince the majority of people that they're not living in a dystopia. It's kind of a genius move.

Honestly though, would it help if those in charge voiced their honest opinions?

The current political climate is this is the kind of thing that will get you "investigated" and charged with crimes.

And the government has already threatened that it will commandeer these companies whether they like it or not.

If someone in charge wants to make a difference, there might be more effective things to do than to speak out in this instance.

I don't think people get to those positions by having firm principles

Is it really incredible?

Only if you're naive. I guess most here are.

Governments are paranoid, particularly about losing control and influence over its subjects. This is expected behaviour.

I wouldn't call senior AI researchers / scientists laypersons. In fact in this sense politicians are laypersons.

There are already several comments here showing xAIs involvement. Please save clutter and read before posting.

> This is why you can't gatekeep AI capabilities.

What is why?

You never actually say that part, unless it's "It will eventually be taken from you by force" which doesn't seem applicable to this situation or this site?

What use are weights without the hardware to run them? That's the gate. Local AI right now is a toy in comparison.

Nukes are actually a great example of something also gated by resources. Just having the knowledge/plans isn't good enough.

I'd prefer something akin to the Biological Weapons Treaty which prohibits development, production and transfer. If you think it isn't possible you have to tell me why the bioweapons convention was successful and why it wouldn't be in the case of AI.

Open Source here is not enough as hardware ownership matters. In an open source world, you and I cannot run the 10 trillion param model, but the data center controllers can.

A "world where millions of AGIs run on millions of gaming PCs, where each AI is aligned with an individual human" would be a world in which people could easily create humanity-ending bioweapons. I would love to live in a less vulnerable world, and am working full time to bring about such a world, but in the meantime what you describe would likely be a disaster.

If it's taken by force, it will stagnate. It makes no sense at all.

When have US corporations (or simply "the US" really) ever done the right thing for humanity?

This letter and all of this is meaningless.

If they actually wanted to do something they wouldn’t have sat back and funded Republican political campaigns because they were pissed about the head of the ftc under Biden.

But they didn’t. They gave millions to this guy and now they’re feigning ignorance or change ir wherever this is.

It’s meaningless. Utterly meaningless.

Get what you pay for, I suppose.

They control the compute.

> This is why you can't gatekeep AI capabilities. They will eventually be taken from you by force.

Some form of US AI lab nationalization is possible, but it hasn't happened yet. We'll see. Nationalization can take different forms, not to mention various arrangements well short of it.

I interpret the comment above as a normative claim (what should happen). It implies the nationalization threat forces the decision by the AI labs. No. I will grant it influences, in the sense that AI labs have to account for it.

They can actually. Hence why they had it in their AUP.

This is the only careful comment. Everything else here is trying to mentally push away the inevitable. You can argue if it is noble to perform resistance in the face of what is pretty much fate, but I would not put any cent on that.

Actions like these often lead to unions. Look into the history of how the Kickstarter union came to be.

It often starts as collective action in response to a blatant disregard for the values of the workers

> it's no longer a matter of choice, you have to do it too

You know, there are plenty of examples where people in positions of power choose different paths of escalation. I doesn't always need to be liner tit for tat. Some times you need to step back and look at the larger picture and decide of the escalation is worth the risk for all of humanity.

There is a video about game theory [0] that describes this problem very clearly. You have better outcomes when you make decisions outside the direct course of escalation.

Please don't talk in absolutes about these things, you have an opinion. I accept that, but its not as black and white as you think

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM

The same could be said of mass producing chemical and biological weapons.

Well, for one, they haven’t invoked the Defense Production Act.

“no concern of repercussion”

Your worldview is outdated. There are obviously risks to signing this. Get your head out of the sand.

Now that Sam has already ignore this, it's time for OpenAI employees who signed to actually do something https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189650

it's the first step towards actually organizing. Reminds me of how the Kickstarter union came to be

Any collective action should be encouraged

This came up in my noncooperation training recently[0]. Thank you for posting this.

[0]: https://freedomtrainers.net/

For companies / billionaires obeying in advance means they are buying their subscription to a period of favors like better contracts, lesser scrutiny over mergers, lighter enforcement of all laws.

I’d like to think that they are scared/obeying, but they’re likely just joining an organization.

It's fun seeing both of these posts on the main page of hackernews at the same time.

Anthropic does not object to its use for war. In fact Anthropic explicitly allows its semi-autonomous use in war, e.g. for identifying targets. They just won't permit its use for full autonomous war, yet, because they don't believe it's safe enough.

It's a clear enough moral issue that whichever side of it you end up on is likely to have life-shaping consequences 5 or 10 years down the line. It's predictable that there will be domestic or international conflict with a high cost in lives and political coherence over that timescale, and being someone who 'was in AI' at a government scale vendor is qualitatively different from being a database admin o font designer or UX specialist.

Substantively, individual employees of these firms may have little or no actual impact on this. But AI is ubiquitous enough and disruptive enough that being professionally connected with it at a time of great geopolitical instability has the potential to be a very very bad look later.

>If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Would this "open letter" be covered on TV news?

Yes. Dang mentioned explicitly that he’s been removing the flags from certain political posts. The result is the site has become filled with left wing activism.

What's uninspiring is your ignorance of game theory.

Anyone who puts their name on that list might potentially be a target. On the flip side, there is no signaling value in putting your name on the list anonymously. Therefore anonymous names on the list believe in it (tho some people might make the calculation that they can't handle being a target but they might still resist and obstruct in other ways.)

So: It's inspiring that a lot of people are ready to obstruct or delay even if they're not ready to deal with personal consequences.

Would you like to see this extended globally? Could such a spirit exist multinationally? It’s asking a lot, because you’d be asking for a lot of courage from places like China, India, Russia, Middle East … anywhere that’s not Europe basically.

> We need key AI researchers at these companies to speak out ...

See this[0] article from Business Insider dated 2026-02-16 titled:

  The art of the squeal

  What we can learn from the flood of AI resignation letters

  This past week brought several additions to the annals of 
  "Why I quit this incredibly valuable company working on 
  bleeding-edge tech" letters, including from researchers at 
  xAI and an op-ed in The New York Times from a departing 
  OpenAI researcher. Perhaps the most unusual was by Mrinank 
  Sharma, who was put in charge of Anthropic's Safeguards 
  Research Team a year ago, and who announced his departure 
  from what is often considered the more safety-minded of the 
  leading AI startups.

They've already been using Signal - which is "commercial" app, meaning it's not meant to be used like that - for top-secret (or at least highly sensitive) military communications during the military strikes on Yemen. If that was fake, I apologise, I was deceived. I wouldn't be surprised if things turned out that way again, to be honest. That's something to be expected, actually (IMO).

The legal name of the department is still the Department of Defense. The "Department of War" is a preferred name by the administration.

They are after the models without post training guardrails.

XAI has already announced they are 100% in

https://x.ai/news/us-gov-dept-of-war

Everyone knows anyone who signs this from xAI will be a former employee by tomorrow.

There is a specific kind of person that joins xAI over the other companies and it is definitely not a moral one.

[dead]

[flagged]

That's what taking a stand looks like... if any of these employees lose their job, they are welcome to come crash at my place for as long as they would like; they will have a roof over their head and I will cook them 3 meals a day.

Not all tech employers are total weenies who would refuse to hire someone for taking this stance.

Most are, but not all.