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Anthropic Employees Accuse Trump Administration of Targeting Them

Slashdot
2 weeks 6 days ago
Anthropic employees say they remain confused and increasingly convinced that the Trump administration is singling out the company after officials gave it less than 90 minutes to disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 over alleged national security concerns. Cybersecurity experts, however, argue that the cited behavior of helping to identify vulnerabilities in software is also available in rival models and is more valuable to defenders than attackers. The New York Times reports: Inside the company, employees' private group chats immediately lit up. Managers were instructed to prepare customers for a potential service disruption to the models, called Fable 5 and Mythos 5. But the messaging kept changing, with workers initially being told that the security problem was the ability of foreign companies to gain access to the systems, and later that a major vulnerability had been discovered in the models. In employee chats, Anthropic engineers asked one another if the company's plan to go public this year would be harmed by the White House directive. Many shared news reports that offered conflicting information about why the White House had ordered Anthropic to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals. "What are you telling your clients?" one employee asked in a chat viewed by The New York Times. Another said, "Does anyone know what to believe?" In another message, a worker said, "I don't understand what the issue is." Six days later, Anthropic's roughly 3,000 employees still have few answers. The San Francisco company is continuing to grapple with internal confusion as Dario Amodei, the chief executive, and some of his lieutenants meet with the Trump administration to try and resolve the situation. But after discussions on Monday and Tuesday, there was no breakthrough over ending the U.S. order to limit access to the company's new A.I. models. In a statement on Monday, Anthropic said it would continue meeting with government officials and pledged its "ongoing commitment to working alongside the administration." The dispute highlights how singular Anthropic has become in Washington. It was the second time in six months that the fast-growing A.I. start-up has become embroiled in a fight with the Trump administration over its powerful technologies, even as other A.I. companies offer similar models that have not received the same attention. And it has left Anthropic's employees in what they described as a holding pattern, with some wondering if they were being picked on by President Trump. "Are we being bullied based on bad vibes?" one employee asked in a chat viewed by The Times. Yesterday, TechCrunch's Zack Whittaker argued that the move sets a troubling precedent: the government can unilaterally disrupt American software products without court approval, potentially undermining trust in U.S. AI providers.

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AI Will Lead To Labor Shortages, Bezos Says In Optimistic Talk

Slashdot
2 weeks 6 days ago
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Artificial Intelligence will lead to labour shortages, not the replacement of humans, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted in a highly optimistic appearance at the VivaTech technology conference in Paris on Wednesday. Bezos put forward a rosy vision of how technology will help humanity, speaking about projects including his space venture Blue Origin and his new AI startup Prometheus, which is aimed at speeding up physical manufacturing. "I know there's a lot of concern that many people have, including many smart people, that AI is going to make humans redundant and so on," Bezos said. "I totally disagree with this point of view. And I think, in fact, AI is going to create a labor shortage." Half of Americans fear the rise of AI could put them or someone in their household out of work, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found this month. Bezos, the world's fourth-richest person with a net worth around $250 billion, argued that people have "endless" things to do, and are currently limited by barriers that he said AI would lower. One goal of space exploration is to move polluting industries off Earth, said Bezos, whose Blue Origin aims to compete with trillionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX in rockets. "If space travel gets reliable enough and inexpensive enough, and we can get materials from asteroids and near-Earth objects and the moon, then this garden planet can be returned to its pre-Industrial Revolution state," Bezos said.

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