Chris Macho
48 posts


@anndrrson I’m sure they were fine with that “heavy hand” paying them untold millions in revenues
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In a democracy, it’s absolutely ok to define who can use the things you make and how.
But it’s also absolutely ok for the Government to lose trust in you, tell you to fuck off and find an alternative.
It’s also absolutely ok for you to nuke your own company in the process.
The timing of this is not good for Anthropic and could be a potential boon to every other model that is exceeding expectations in their upcoming version (Grok, OAI, Gemini).
More generally, I don’t see how this isn’t a slippery slope. What if a model maker updates their ToS that would block a use case that is legal but subjective? Agreeable in some states but not in others? What about in different countries with different governance or religions?
It’s a huge can of worms.
How can a government or company rely on a model that could have an ever-changing definition of what’s allowed without taking on major business/governance risk?
They won’t.
My hunch is that the company that embraces the “no holds barred” ToS will win because it’s the least risky to adopt wrt long term risk of getting rug-pulled.

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@gothburz "We are not always sure what we are moving toward" we're cooked
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I work in government affairs at OpenAI.
My job is federal partnerships. When an agency wants our models, I make sure the paperwork is beautiful. Paperwork is my love language. On my desk I have a framed quote that says "Policy Is Just Code That Runs on People." I bought the frame at Target. It was in the Live Laugh Love section. I did not see the irony at the time. I still don't.
We had a good week.
On Monday, we closed a $110 billion funding round. One hundred and ten billion dollars. Amazon put in fifty. Nvidia put in thirty. Valuation: $730 billion. The largest private fundraise in the history of anyone raising anything. There was a company-wide Slack message about it. The message used the word "transformative" twice and the word "safety" once. The word "safety" was in the last sentence, after the link to the new branded hoodie pre-order. The hoodies are nice. They're the soft kind.
On Tuesday, we fired a research scientist for insider trading on Polymarket.
He had opened seventy-seven positions across sixty wallets, betting on our product announcements before they were public. Over three years. Total profit: sixteen thousand dollars. Seventy-seven positions. Sixty wallets. Sixteen thousand dollars. That is two hundred and eight dollars per wallet. The man had access to the most valuable product roadmap in artificial intelligence and he used it to make less money than a good weekend at a Reno blackjack table.
The wallets were linked. Not discreetly linked. Linked like Christmas lights. One wallet was reportedly called something I cannot repeat but it contained the word "OpenAI" and a number. He did not use a VPN. He did not use an alias. He used Polymarket, the platform that is designed to be publicly auditable, to place bets on information he stole from the company that invented GPT. A compliance team composed entirely of Labrador retrievers would have found this by lunch on day one.
We did not find it for three years.
This will matter later.
On Wednesday, a petition appeared. "We Will Not Be Divided." Four hundred and seven signatures. Two hundred sixty-six from Google. Sixty-five from OpenAI. The petition warned that the government was pitting AI companies against each other on safety. It said that if one company broke ranks, the government would use the defection to lower the bar for everyone.
I meant to read it. It went into my to-read folder. The to-read folder also contains the Responsible Scaling Policy, three think-tank white papers on AI governance, and a New Yorker article someone sent me in November. The folder is aspirational.
On Thursday, OpenAI told CNN we would maintain "the same red lines as Anthropic."
Same red lines.
On Friday, Anthropic told the Pentagon no.
The Pentagon had given them seventy-two hours to remove the safety guardrails from Claude. Anthropic's guardrails were not in a policy document. They were not in a legal reference. They were in the code. Written into Claude's architecture. If Claude hit a safety boundary, Claude stopped. Not because a lawyer said so. Because the math said so. You could fire every lawyer at Anthropic and the model would still refuse.
You cannot remove code with a contract amendment.
You can remove a contract reference by Tuesday. I checked.
Anthropic said no.
By that evening, the Pentagon had designated them a supply-chain risk. I have worked in government procurement for eight years. Government paperwork does not move in hours. I have waited nine weeks for a badge renewal. I once spent four months getting a PDF notarized. This designation moved in hours. The document was pre-written. Formatted before the deadline expired. Calibri 11pt. Consistent margins. Somebody wanted this very badly. I respect the craft. I do not think about the implication. That is not my scope.
Within hours, we had signed the replacement contract.
I was proud of the turnaround. My team moved fast. Legal moved fast. Everyone moved fast. We are very good at moving fast. We are not always sure what we are moving toward, but the speed is impressive and the hoodies are soft.
The contract referenced DoD Directive 3000.09, which governs autonomous weapon systems. The directive requires "appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force." The word "appropriate" is not defined. This is not an oversight. This is the point. The word "appropriate" is the most load-bearing word in the entire contract and it is doing exactly as much work as a throw pillow on a couch that is on fire.
Anthropic built a wall. We referenced a document about where walls should go.
Anthropic's guardrails were architecture. Ours were a citation. Theirs execute. Ours can be filed. The Pentagon asked both companies to take down the wall. Anthropic said it's load-bearing, the building will collapse. We said what wall? Oh, you mean the wallpaper. Here, watch.
It peeled off beautifully. It was designed to.
Sam announced the partnership that night. The word "responsible" appeared in the announcement and in the contract. In the announcement it was a brand. In the contract it was a footnote to a directive that uses the word "appropriate" which nobody has defined. The word traveled from a legal document to a public statement without changing its font. Only its meaning. At this valuation, "responsible" means: we will do the thing the other company refused to do, and we will describe doing it with the same adjective they used to describe not doing it.
By Saturday morning, "How to delete your OpenAI account" was the number one post on Hacker News. 982 points. By noon, subscription cancellations were up eighty-nine times the daily average. Not eighty-nine percent. Eighty-nine times. Someone in our Slack posted the Hacker News link with the message "should we be worried?" Someone else reacted with the branded hoodie emoji. We have a branded hoodie emoji now. It was introduced on Monday, to celebrate the fundraise. It has been used four hundred and twelve times. Mostly in the #general channel. Mostly this week.
The communications team drafted a response. The response used the word "committed" three times and the word "safety" four times. It did not use the word "guardrails." It did not use the word "code." It did not explain anything. It was a holding statement. It held nothing. It held beautifully.
Here is the math.
The twenty-dollar-a-month customers were upset. The two-hundred-million-dollar customer was upset because the previous vendor had guardrails that could not be removed. The hundred-and-ten-billion-dollar investors were not upset. The subscription cancellations, at eighty-nine times the daily rate, represented less than the interest on Amazon's fifty billion dollar contribution calculated over a long weekend.
Twenty dollars. Two hundred million. One hundred and ten billion.
Three different price points. Three different definitions of "responsible." The most expensive one won. It always does. The math does not have red lines. The math has a cap table and a TAM slide that now includes "defense and intelligence" where it previously said "enterprise and consumer." One word changed on one slide in one deck and the company is worth one hundred and ten billion dollars more.
The sixty-five OpenAI employees who signed the petition came to work on Monday. They sat at their desks. Nobody asked them about it. Nobody asked them to resign. Nobody brought it up at the all-hands. The all-hands had catering. Sweetgreen. The chopped salads. Someone made a joke about the kale being "responsibly sourced." No one laughed. Then everyone laughed. Then it was quiet.
The petition had four hundred and seven signatures.
The contract had one.
Now: the Polymarket thing.
Seventy-seven positions. Sixty wallets. Three years. A public blockchain. We did not catch him.
That same week, we were entrusted with deploying artificial intelligence on America's classified military networks. The classified networks. The ones where the detection requirements are somewhat more rigorous than "check if anyone's gambling on our launch dates on a website that is literally designed to be publicly auditable."
The company that could not find the Polymarket guy can now be found in the Pentagon's classified infrastructure.
I'm sure it'll be fine.
We move fast.
The contract is signed. The deployment is underway. The compliance documentation will reference the directives. The directives will use the word "appropriate." I will not define it. That is not my scope. My scope is the paperwork. The paperwork is beautiful.
The petition is still a Google Doc. Nobody has updated it. The signatures still say four hundred and seven. The to-read folder still has the New Yorker article from November. The branded hoodie pre-order closed on Wednesday. I got mine in navy. It's the soft kind.
On Thursday we told CNN: the same red lines.
On Friday we signed the contract they refused.
We do have the same red lines.
We drew ours in pencil.
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@sama Motherfucking shit doesn't even know how many Rs are in "strawberry"
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Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.
In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.
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.
We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only.
We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.
We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.
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As if the world couldn't get any shittier
Elon Musk@elonmusk
We’re bringing back Vine, but in AI form
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@EricLDaugh Whoa awesome! Eric Trump called for this?! So cool Eric!
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🚨 BREAKING: Eric Trump calls on Southwest Airlines to promote the pilots and flight crew seen in this video reacting flawlessly to a plane that intersected their landing on the runway.
Despite Southwest clearly coming in for a landing, another plane crossed the runway - and it would have resulted in a FATAL collision.
But the pilots PULLED UP as soon as it was clear a crash was imminent - they had enough speed going to go right back into the air, unscathed.
I agree with Eric Trump. These pilots and flight crew deserve a raise/promotion. They literally just saved dozens of lives, and the USA from another horrible incident.
Meanwhile, we need to get to the bottom of what Air Traffic Control and/or the pilots of the plane on the ground were doing.
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🚨 #BREAKING: Elizabeth Warren just ASSAULTED me on camera for asking her WHY she’s so against DOGE & transparency
Or maybe it was because I asked Pocahontas how she amassed a net worth of over $12 MILLION on a $200K government salary
Either way, it’s clear these clowns are NOT able to answer questions. They’re only capable of spewing talking points fed to them by their handlers/lobbyist.
HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE! We’re the media now.
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@bennyjohnson So a bunch of bros on a PJ getting a pilot to say that for clicks is "airlines catching on"? lmao nice one
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