I’m sure there’s some good money in it but Anthropic signed this deal around 8 months ago, when they were making substantially less money. I’m just not sure it’s worth the fight when other frontier labs have comparably performant models and substantially less moral qualms—why risk the walkouts and resignations?
I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about this, but I suspect a couple reasons to continue pursuing this contract beyond the present revenue include (1) retaining relationships and a reputation that provides option value for (especially defense-related) future contracts and (2) increasing the likelihood that safer models are used in high-stakes settings, especially ones that could carry some non-negligible AI-related risks. While those are plausible (and plausibly right) lines of reasoning, I’m writing them without taking a stance on specific details that have central importance to their truth (e.g. are Anthropic’s models “safer” than competitors’? Seems quite likely based on reputation, but I’m not well-informed enough to make that claim confidently). If you’re right and the alternative is the use of another lab’s models for the same jobs, and if the article is right that Anthropic’s models are the only ones being used on classified networks, then I don’t think there are good reasons for Anthropic to intentionally cede that space to competitors.
I’m sure there’s some good money in it but Anthropic signed this deal around 8 months ago, when they were making substantially less money. I’m just not sure it’s worth the fight when other frontier labs have comparably performant models and substantially less moral qualms—why risk the walkouts and resignations?
I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about this, but I suspect a couple reasons to continue pursuing this contract beyond the present revenue include (1) retaining relationships and a reputation that provides option value for (especially defense-related) future contracts and (2) increasing the likelihood that safer models are used in high-stakes settings, especially ones that could carry some non-negligible AI-related risks. While those are plausible (and plausibly right) lines of reasoning, I’m writing them without taking a stance on specific details that have central importance to their truth (e.g. are Anthropic’s models “safer” than competitors’? Seems quite likely based on reputation, but I’m not well-informed enough to make that claim confidently). If you’re right and the alternative is the use of another lab’s models for the same jobs, and if the article is right that Anthropic’s models are the only ones being used on classified networks, then I don’t think there are good reasons for Anthropic to intentionally cede that space to competitors.