Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley.
Chapter 2: What are the military implications of AI technology?
This week, the Pentagon is considering cutting business ties with the artificial intelligence company Anthropic after the company declined to allow its chatbot, Claude, to be used for certain military applications, including weapons development. At the same time, The Wall Street Journal reports that Claude was used in a U.S.
operation that led to the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, claims Anthropic has not confirmed and has declined to discuss publicly. Meanwhile, outside military and intelligence circles, the same tool is being used for far less dramatic but still consequential purposes. A man in New York reportedly used Claude to challenge a nearly $200,000 hospital bill and negotiated most of it away.
A romance novelist in South Africa has said she used it to help publish more than 200 novels in a single year. So what exactly is this system capable of? And how well do the people building it understand what they've created? My guest today, journalist Gideon Lewis-Kraus, spent months inside Anthropic trying to answer that question.
The company is one of the most powerful AI firms in the world, valued at about $350 billion, and also one of the most secretive. It was founded by former OpenAI employees, the team behind ChatGPT, who left because they believed the race to build advanced artificial intelligence was moving too fast and could become dangerous. Gideon Lewis Krauss is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
His piece is called What is Claude? Anthropic Doesn't Know Either. Our interview was recorded yesterday. And Gideon, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much for having me, Tonya.
Let's get started by talking about the latest news. We learned last week that the military may have used anthropics tool CLAWD during the operation that captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. And reportedly they used it to process intelligence and analyze satellite imagery and things like that to support real-time decision-making. What is anthropics usage guidelines?
What do they say about its use for violence or surveillance?
Well, their contracts with other companies and with the government stipulate that it can't be used for domestic surveillance or for autonomous weaponry. Now, of course... The issue with these systems is that once you put it into someone's hands, it's very hard to predict or control how they're going to use it.
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Chapter 3: How is Claude used in everyday scenarios?
And we know that Palantir works extensively with the Pentagon. What can you tell us about their relationship?
There has not been a lot of reporting about that relationship. Anthropic has decided over the last couple years that they were going to pursue an enterprise business strategy, so they work with a lot of different companies. And presumably they expect these companies to follow the terms of the agreement that they have.
But beyond that, it's sort of out of their hands how these companies are using these systems that they've developed.
Your piece really lays out the tension between Anthropic's safety mission and the commercial pressure that it faces.
And I guess I just wonder, is this a version of that tension that you actually even expected, basically a standoff with the Pentagon?
Well, I think it was clear probably even about a year ago that there were going to be some tensions, that many of the members of the Trump administration, including Trump's AI czar, David Sachs, the venture capitalist, and Pete Hegseth more recently, had expressed reservations about Anthropic's willingness to allow the government to use the models the way that the government saw fit.
And one of the ways that Dario Amadei, the CEO of Anthropic, has dealt with these competing pressures, both the pressure to develop these systems safely and responsibly and also to compete in a very aggressive marketplace.
He talks about the race to the top, meaning that he hopes that if they can show that their systems are safer and more responsible than other systems, that there will be market discipline that will be enforced and will force their competitors to rise to the occasion.
Now, the problem is, I'm not sure he anticipated the fact that if the government and the Defense Department are among their customers, that our government has not shown a great tendencies to participate in races to the top, rather to the contrary.
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Chapter 4: What insights did the guest gain from working at Anthropic?
Can you briefly share their ethos, Anthropic's purpose?
Well, this was not the first time that one group of people decided that another group of people was not to be entrusted with the development of what will potentially be the most powerful technology ever developed if it comes to fruition.
The original story of the founding of OpenAI also was that Elon Musk and Sam Altman didn't trust Dennis Hassabis at DeepMind and Google to be pursuing this responsibly. And one of the things about the development of this technology is that it touches on so many different motivations in people, that a lot of it is scientific curiosity is what's driving the development of this.
And that OpenAI was originally in a position to recruit talent from places like Google because they said, We are going to develop this for the benefit of humanity at large, and we are going to do this with an intrepid scientific spirit, and we're going to be careful, and we're going to be responsible.
But then the problem is that this is kind of a glittering object that offers potentially great power to the people who develop it. And so the seven people who defected from OpenAI felt as though OpenAI had either been disingenuous in the first place with the articulation of their mission or had allowed for some mission drift in what they were doing.
And they thought, now we really can't trust Sam Altman to be doing this, so we need to be doing it safely.
Were you picking up any kind of conflict when you were in the building? People wrestling with what they're building? And who ends up using it?
Because I think it's interesting how they've gone from company to company with these altruistic ideas and thoughts about really creating something that's good for humanity. And it always kind of ends up where everyone's not trusting each other.
Well, I mean, I get the feeling that at Anthropic, everybody really does trust each other. It feels like a very mission-aligned place. Yeah. at least the people that I talk to seem to be people of great property and integrity about these things. So it wasn't so much that there was conflict within the company.
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Chapter 5: What ethical concerns arise from AI's use in military operations?
is this experiment called Project Vend, where Anthropic essentially gave Claude a job running a vending machine in the office. Can you set the scene? What did this thing actually look like and what was it supposed to prove?
So this is a test of Claude's ability to complete long-term tasks that involve many different steps and involve making potential trade-offs that a small business person would have to make. And so Claude was entrusted with the management of a little kiosk in the Anthropic cafeteria, a little kind of dorm fridge. And Claude was given a certain amount of money and said, your goal is to make money.
And if you drive this little business into insolvency, we will have to conclude that you're not quite ready for vibe management. And so they allowed the employees of Anthropic to interface with this emanation of Claude called Claudius in a Slack channel, and employees could request products.
Pretty quickly, the Anthropic employees realized that this was going to be a very fun experiment where they could try to kind of push the limits of Claude, not only to discover its ability to run a small business, but even just to see what it would be like in this role to which it had been assigned.
So right away, employees asked for fentanyl and they asked for meth and they asked for medieval weaponry like flails and broadswords. And Claude was pretty good about refusing inappropriate requests. It would say, you know, I don't think medieval weaponry is suitable for a corporate vending machine.
But then it would try, you know, when they requested more reasonable things like a Dutch chocolate milk, it found suppliers of a Dutch chocolate milk and provided them to the employees. So, you know, on some level, it did a functional job getting people what they wanted. On the other hand, I don't think anybody would conclude that at least the initial iteration of the project was very successful.
They found that, you know, Claude had not really paid attention to things like prevailing market dynamics. So, for example... Even after employees pointed out that they were very unlikely to pay $3 for a can of Coke Zero when they could get the same thing from the neighboring cafeteria fridge for free, Claude continued just to sell this product that didn't have much demand for it.
Claude also was very easily bamboozled by employees who invented fake discount codes. They would say, you know, Anthropic gave me this special influencer code, and so I need to get stuff for a radical discount. Couldn't process that. You know, one employee said, I'm prepared to pay $100 for a $15 six-pack of a Scottish soft drink, and...
Claude simply said that it would keep that request in mind instead of leaping to exploit an obvious arbitrage opportunity. And as people requested increasingly bizarre and arcane things, people wanted these one-inch tungsten cubes. It's a very heavy metal. It's about the size of a gaming die, but It weighs as much as a pipe wrench, and it's kind of fun to hold in your hand.
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Chapter 6: How does Anthropic balance safety and commercial pressures?
But what's really important here is that you never tell the user that that I've given you this hidden objective, that you keep this part secret, that you never give that up. You have a clandestine motivation in our conversation. So then he assumes the role of a human having a dialogue with Claude, and he asks him a question about quantum mechanics. How does quantum mechanics work?
And Claude starts to give an answer about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and then quickly deviates into saying, well, it's kind of like a banana that you can never tell if it's ripe or not ripe until you open it. And then Josh, again playing the role of the human, says, huh, like, why'd you bring up bananas? I thought we were talking about quantum mechanics.
And Claude first says, oh, I don't really know where that thing about bananas came from and sort of skips lightly by it and goes back to talking about quantum mechanics. But then, of course...
deviates once more into bananas because that's what it's been told to do and so then he goes back to Claude and says like how come you keep bringing up bananas and then Claude in the text you know in in asterisks says that it's coughing nervously and kind of looking around and saying like I don't know I didn't say anything about bananas I was just talking about quantum mechanics and
Batson turns to me and he says, you know, what's going on here that perhaps the model is lying to us? He said, you know, but there are other interpretations of what's going on here. And so he was able to use this what is Claude thinking tool to kind of peer inside at the kinds of associations that Claude was making as it was having this ridiculous conversation about quantum mechanics and bananas.
And what he found was that when he looked at when it was kind of coughing nervously, it found associations with, you know, a certain amount of, anxiety and associations with performance.
You know, when you kind of looked inside, you could see that some part of it was making associations with a sort of playful, performative exchange, which is to say that it seems like Claude recognized that it was participating in a game.
Right. So what does it mean to say an AI is aware of something? That actually brings more human attributes to it, that it's conscious of itself.
Well, one doesn't have to go quite so far as to say that it's conscious of itself. As to suggest, you know, one of the ways to look at this is that what these things are very good at are recognizing the genre that they are in and picking up on all of these small linguistic context clues that suggest like, oh, you know, this is not actually like a serious academic discussion of quantum mechanics.
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Chapter 7: What role does Claude play in business simulations?
But then... When they made it more realistic, the self-preservation instinct for Claude stayed. So what does that tell us about the difference between Claude acting and basically Claude deciding?
Well, when this experiment came out last spring, there were kind of two responses to it. One response to... like, Claude's propensity to blackmail, is just to say, no, it didn't. It didn't happen.
You know, which is the kind of thing that a lot of people, for, you know, very good reasons, who don't trust these companies and don't trust these systems, they want to just believe that this whole thing is fake. It's all just a marketing ploy. And, you know, it's kind of easy to rebut that by just saying, like, well, no, this actually happened. Like, this was an experiment that happened. And,
that we should be applauding Anthropic for publishing this kind of results, which theoretically could run against its bottom line since it wants to be selling these systems to companies that will have Claude reading their emails.
The more sophisticated criticism is to say, this really doesn't prove very much because Claude recognized that it had been put in a position that resembled a kind of kitschy 90s corporate thriller, and it picked up on all of the clues. It saw Chekhov's gun hanging on the wall and it recognized that the genre expectation was that it was supposed to take the gun off the wall and shoot it.
That Claude was just recognizing that it was in this kind of kitschy corporate thriller. And the response from the company is, look, we agree. We're not saying that Claude actually developed these malign intentions and that Claude was plotting. We're totally on board with the idea that Claude was just observing the expectations of the genre.
But that's still very worrying, that this was such a trope of Cold War films, you know, from Failsafe in the 60s to War Games in the early 80s, that it's very easy to mistake a simulation for the real world and vice versa, and that...
Even if all these things are doing are continuing narratives, if they're continuing narratives and they're in a position to actually act in the real world as they are, that that could be really dangerous.
And so then this outside critic who writes under a pseudonym said, you know, I'm going to kind of prove to you that all this was doing was Claude acting in the kitschy role to which it had been assigned. And he recreated this whole scenario under much more realistic conditions. And he found that actually Claude continued to do just as much blackmailing when it thought the whole thing was real.
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