Part of what's going on here is that people distinguish between: 1. Someone who has principles they disagree with, but who appears to hold to those principles under pressure 2. Someone who does not appear to have any meaningful principles, or who will not actually hold to them under pressure Let's say there's politician X. And let's say that I disagree with her on a vast range of policy questions. But one day, she faces a choice: She can oppose some piece of corruption vigorously, but doing so will end her very successful political career. And she makes the choice to go down fighting against the corruption. In this scenario, I'm going to respect X, even if I disagree with her about almost all normal policy questions. Anthropic has been very clear that they support classical western democracy, and that they believe that this includes providing AI to the military for a wide variety of uses. This includes spying on other countries, and supporting human-in-the-loop weapon systems. This might not be the position I'd choose, in their shoes. But apparently they do have hard limits, and they're willing to forgo significant amounts of revenue and risk official retribution rather than cross those limits. Similarly, they refuse to sell to companies linked to the Chinese military. This is a positive update for me: I figured that Anthropic would bend more readily under pressure, mostly because most US organizations have chosen to do so in the past. Similarly, Anthropic's viewpoint seems to the be that someone is going to build superintelligence, and that while this is insanely risky, it's better if they're the ones who choose to gamble with all our lives (as opposed to, say, Sam Altman or a Chinese company). I personally think that racing is a terrible plan, because I expect us to almost certainly lose control of superhuman intelligence in the medium-term. But the recent events involving the DoD updated me towards thinking that Anthropic is at least sincere about their