Is the US military actually afraid of Claude? A new theory of why Anthropic was labeled a supply chain risk.
We recorded 10 claims from this post. 3 were checked against evidence. 7 can’t be checked. 5 more are held. Read the post at its source.
Claims from this post (10)
In the order they appear in the post. Each quotation is the speaker’s words in this post. A label such as “Supported” or “Can’t be checked” is the claim’s current assessment; its page has the evidence and the reasons.
Assessment: SupportedSaid
Observation
“It is a misapprehension of LLMs to confuse the things they say with what is true.”
Our reading: What LLMs say should not be taken as true just because they say it; treating their statements as truth misunderstands them.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The benchmark uses one person's biography and that person's manual judgments; it cannot establish a general error rate.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“They mimic things humans say, but we shouldn’t take them as veridical descriptions of anything happening on the inside.”
Our reading: LLMs mimic human speech, so their statements should not be treated as accurate descriptions of their internal states.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“Claude is next-word predictor, not an authority on its own internal states. It’s silly to take its estimates seriously.”
Our reading: Claude is a next-word predictor and not an authority on its own internal states, so it is silly to take its estimates of its own consciousness seriously.
No horizon
Scope: its estimates of its own probability of being conscious
Assessment: SupportedSaid
Observation
“the fact that LLMs hallucinate (patently true)”
Our reading: LLMs hallucinate.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The evidence is a manufacturer's internal evaluation.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“If you actually believed that Claude was sentient and that sentience was de facto a supply chain risk, you would have to think that essentially every LLM is a supply chain risk. In which case the right choice is to stop using LLMs altogether, not to selectively punish Anthropic.”
Our reading: Anyone who actually believed that Claude was sentient and that sentience was de facto a supply chain risk would have to think that essentially every LLM is a supply chain risk, in which case the right choice would be to stop using LLMs altogether rather than selectively punish Anthropic.
No horizon
Only if: if you actually believed Claude was sentient and that sentience was de facto a supply chain risk
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“But there is no more reason to think that Claude is sentient than to think that Google’s now long-obsolete system LAMDA was.”
Our reading: There is no more reason to think Claude is sentient than to think Google's LaMDA was.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“If you are worried about systems having guardrails, you shouldn’t be using LLMs, because you certainly shouldn’t be using them without guardrails.”
Our reading: LLMs should never be used without guardrails, so anyone worried about guardrails should not use LLMs at all.
No horizon
Qualifier: if worried about systems having guardrails
Assessment: SupportedSaid
Observation
“Essentially the same argument applies to Claude’s constitution, which amounts to a set of built-in guardrails. OpenAI has those, too!”
Our reading: Claude's constitution is basically a set of built-in guardrails, and OpenAI's models have guardrails too.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The outcome depends on reading guardrails broadly and amounts to as shorthand.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“If you think it is bad to use hallucinating LLMs to autonomously choose targets (I certainly do), you shoudn’t use any of them.”
Our reading: No hallucinating LLM should be used to choose military targets autonomously.
No horizon
Qualifier: for autonomously choosing targets
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“Which is to say we shouldn’t be putting our probabilities before our definitions, or even putting specific probabilities on things we can’t define.”
Our reading: People should not put specific probabilities on AI model consciousness before defining what consciousness means.
No horizon
Held from this post (5)
These records did not pass every check, so nothing about them is published. Held is not a finding.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: Putting hallucinating LLMs into war machines can be dangerous, and this danger is in no way specific to Anthropic.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews read the claim differently