Both their stances are flawed because their ethics apparently end at the border - none of them have a problem being unethical internationally (all the red lines talk is about what they don’t want to do in the us)
I don’t think deploying “80% right” tools for mass surveillance (or anything that can remotely impact human life) counts as lawful in any context.
Just because the US currently lacks a functioning legislative branch doesn’t magically make it OK when gaps in the law are reworded into “national security”
The tools are not good enough to be ethically deployed, least of all for surveillance.
Just because Congress is failing to do its job doesn’t mean the executive branch should simply do what it wants under the guise of “national security.”
I think there's a notable distinction between "domestic mass-surveillance" and use in international intelligence gathering.
The poster said:
> Both their stances are flawed because their ethics apparently end at the border
It seems like Anthropic is ethically concerned about use of autonomous weapons anywhere, and by surveillance by a country against its own citizens. Countries spy on each other a lot, but the ethical implications and risks of international spying are substantially different vs. a country acting against its own citizenry.
Therefore, I think Anthropic's stance is A) ethically consistent, and B) not artificially constrained to the US (doesn't "end at the border"). There's room for disagreement and criticism, but I think this particular hyperbole is invalid.
Some people feel that mass surveillance is wrong whether it is domestic or not. For those people, being ok with mass surveillance as long that it is not done to your kind is a morally wrong stance.
No other country should dictate what our military is or is not allowed to do. As they say all is fair in love and war, and if we want to break some international treaty that is our choice to do so. Both are based of domestic decisions of what should be allowed.
