> My understanding is that the OpenAI deal disallows domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons,
In that case, what on earth just happened?
The government was so intent on amending the Anthropic deal to allow 'all lawful use', at the government's sole discretion, that it is now pretty much trying to destroy Anthropic in retaliation for refusing this. Now, almost immediately, the government has entered into a deal with OpenAI that apparently disallows the two use cases that were the main sticking points for Anthropic.
Do you not see something very, very wrong with this picture?
At the very least, OpenAI is clearly signaling to the government that it can steamroll OpenAI on these issues whenever it wants to. Or do you believe OpenAI will stand firm, even having seen what happened to Anthropic (and immediately moved in to profit from it)?
> and that OpenAI is asking for the same terms for other AI companies (so that we can continue competing on the basis of differing services and not differing scruples)
If OpenAI leadership sincerely wanted this, they just squandered the best chance they could ever have had to make it happen! Actual solidarity with Anthropic could have had a huge impact.
It looks most likely like Anthropic wanted the ability to audit model usage, where as OpenAI was fine with just an agreement.
Hegseths tweet strongly alluded to this, and the general terms of the agreement are not public, just the hot button ones.
Am I wrong to think that such an agreement is basically meaningless? OpenAI gets to say there are limits, the government gets to do whatever it wants, and OpenAI will be very happy not to know about it.
Bingo. You don’t have to read much into this if you remember how the DoD uses the word trust. In their world, a "trusted" system is one that has the power to break your security if it goes wrong. So when they say "unrestricted use," the likely meaning isn’t just fewer guardrails it’s that the vendor doesn’t get to monitor or audit how the system is being used. In other words, the government isn’t handing a private company visibility into sensitive operations.