Good discussion of this on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188473

I haven't read anyone say that it was about retaining the IP. Anthropic says, and others agree, that it would be totally irresponsible to use current frontier AI systems for lethal autonomous weapon systems -- even if you think that LAWS are okay. Current AI systems are far too error-prone.

See https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war and https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-comments-secretary-war

No reasonable government should allow corporate control over their military assets

Pretty sure the entire MIC is privately owned and operated by capital for capital.

They believe their own hype. Whether an LLM would be useful or not is irrelevant to the perception that it will be useful.

An llm gives you the ability to put responsibility on a machine. A machine can't be reprimanded for nuking an orphanage.

Plausible deniability. For example, if Anthropic caved, today's murder of 50 Iranian kids would probably be blamed on the AI fucking up. It would give them a scapegoat.

It's a mix of that and these people genuinely believing this garbage is actually remotely useful.

Fuck Anthropic and all AI companies, but at the same time good on them for not bending the knee here.

As everyone else says, to avoid accountability. That's the real "killer" app here.

Just look at use of "AI" in the ongoing gaza genocide, zio terror attacks on lebanon, etc.

This is already normal.

We can not stop these companies by ourselves from being shitty, we can be happy when one of them chooses to be .01% less shitty than the rest.