What we know about the OpenAI-DoW deal: OpenAI agreed to the terms Anthropic rejected. The terms include an "all lawful use" clause. The contract "references certain existing legal authorities" which the govt claims prove that domestic mass surveillance is already illegal. There are "certain mutually agreed upon safety mechanisms" — we don't know the precise details of these, but it looks like that includes a "monitoring harness" and Forward Deployed Engineers, which, per one OAI employee, "seem to offer broad powers for openai to interpret the law." Perhaps! But ultimately OpenAI isn't in charge of how this model is used, and it has signed a contract that allows the Pentagon to use the model for all lawful uses. The Pentagon may claim that domestic mass surveillance is illegal, but that is on a very narrow definition of domestic mass surveillance — the Snowden files showed that the Pentagon is very willing to play word games to pretend that domestic mass surveillance isn't what it is. I think the default assumption should be that OpenAI's "safety mechanisms" won't actually do anything, because ultimately they've agreed that their models can be used for anything lawful. Which is, in effect, the same thing as letting the Pentagon use their models for domestic mass surveillance.

We have more control that you’re giving us credit for. We made sure our people and our safety tech stack is here and -in the loop. No “naked” models that we have no control over. If someone attempts to use the model(s) in a way they’re not supposed to— our models will refuse (like they do today).

@TheRealAdamG I’m sorry, but I simply don’t think these protections will do anything. As you know, it’s incredibly easy to jailbreak models. The backstop appears to be “the DoW doesn’t want to use them for this”, which is frankly laughable.

@ShakeelHashim @TheRealAdamG I think this is an argument for why people are needed in the room along with the agreements. Our approach includes engineers involved, prior proposals from Anthropic did not (to the best of my understanding)

@AndrewGinns @TheRealAdamG But those engineers can’t actually do anything. They can’t stop anything from happening.

@ShakeelHashim @AndrewGinns @TheRealAdamG If Anthropic and Dario win the contract, can they stop anything from happening?