The guy who authorized the Manhattan project:

- had four [!] terms, a move so anomalous it was subsequently patched by constitutional amendment

- threatened court-packing until SCOTUS backed down and stated rubber-stamping his agenda

- ruled entire industries by emergency decree in a way that contemporaries on the left and right compared to Mussolini

- interned 120k people without due process, on the basis of ethnicity

- turned a national party into a personal patronage system

- threatened to override the legislature if it didn’t start passing laws he liked

Not even saying any of this is even good or bad, clearly in the official history it was retroactively justified by victory in WWII. But it’s a bit rich to say that the bomb wasn’t developed under authoritarian conditions.

If my grandma had wheels she'd be a bicycle

I agree that the risk of an accidental strike was a huge problem with the theory of nuclear deterrence, but the question is: compared to what? In expectation or even in a 1st percentile scenario, was MAD worse than a world where the USSR is a unilateral nuclear power? For that matter, what would it have taken to get a stronger SALT treaty sooner?

I think you need to have people thinking through this stuff at a nuts-and-bolts level if you want to avoid getting dominated by a slightly less nice adversary, and so too with AI. Does a unilateral guarantee not to build autonomous killbots actually make anyone safer if China makes no such promise, or does that perversely put us at more risk?

I’d love to know that the “no killbots, come what may” strategy is sound, but it’s not clear that that’s a stable equilibrium.

> If Anthropic does give the DoD what they want, does that magically stop China, Iran, Russia, etc from advancing in AI arms development?

No

> If Anthropic doesn't give the DoD what they want, does that mean that China, Iran, Russia, etc magically leapfrog not only Anthropic, but the entire US defense industry, and take over the planet?

The risks are high, so if you're the US, you want a portfolio of possible winners. The risks are too high to not leverage all the cutting edge AI labs.

Why are you assuming that people in China, Iran, Russia etc are not having these exact same conversations, and perhaps a powerful example from the USA, along with some belief that the USA will not be able to easily get this technology, help inspire them to abstain as well?

However horrific the regimes in these countries are, the people behind the technology there are just as likely to be intelligent and moral human beings as the people in the USA and Europe working on these are.

Its not just the atomic bomb im talking the usa had the best production of fighter jets, bombers, all kinds of communication technology, deciphering technology all the ammunition, all of those together beat the Nazis and they were trying their best to develop better and more advanced technologies than usa!

The only two atomic weapons ever deployed weren't even targeting Nazi Germany, but Japan. Dark but true: they were both deliberately and knowingly targeted at civilian populations.

> making AI killing machines

What’s an example of a company that’s making killing machines that a typical consumer or someone HN might be buying product or services from?

What if I told you that it's way too late for that?

Also trivially naive and useless. Evil exists. Conflicts will happen. If evil was at your doorstep, threatening people you love, you absolutely DO want money you spend to have blood on it, if it means keeping yourself and your loved ones safe. Trivially simple.