In Anthropic We Trust

Over the past few days, we have witnessed a series of announcements highlighting generative AI firms partnering with the US government to infuse AI technology into their military and defence sectors. Leading the pack is Anthropic. The company has not only secured substantial backing from industry giants, but also cemented its place within public sector and government organisations.

Recently, Anthropic teamed up with Palantir to offer Claude to the US government to enhance data analysis and tackle complex coding tasks in projects crucial to national security. Interestingly, this partnership comes with an IL6 accreditation—just one tier below the top-secret classification.?

Ethical Dilemmas and Virtue Signalling?

This move has ignited debates about Anthropic's commitment to building AI responsibly. CEO Dario Amodei is renowned for his strong stance on AI safety and ethics, which has raised eyebrows about this partnership. So, is Anthropic compromising its ethical standards by aligning with government defence projects?

Just days before this announcement, the company released a statement urging governments to implement regulations ensuring the safe and ethical use of AI. “Governments should urgently take action on AI policy in the next eighteen months. The window for proactive risk prevention is closing fast,” it stated.

Interestingly, Anthropic recently hired a full-time AI welfare expert to delve into the moral and ethical implications of AI technologies. However, in light of their collaboration with the government, critics were quick to question whether Amodei’s and Anthropic’s public commitments were merely lip service.

Timing is Everything

The announcement coincides with the US election results as Donald Trump prepares to take office as the 47th President. Concerns are mounting because of Trump’s inclination to loosen AI regulations. His allies have already drafted orders to rapidly maximise AI usage for defence purposes.

This development has led to apprehensions about AI potentially being steered toward controversial wartime activities. Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir and a known Trump supporter, holds a 7% stake in the company.        

Transparency from the Start

Before jumping to conclusions, it’s important to note that Anthropic has been transparent about its intentions from the get-go. Amodei has openly expressed his ambition to utilise Claude in supporting the government and safeguarding national security interests.

“We are making Claude available for applications like combating human trafficking, rooting out international corruption, identifying covert influence campaigns, and issuing warnings of potential military activities,” said Amodei at the AWS Summit 2024 in Washington, DC.

In his recent essay, ‘Machines of Loving Grace’, he wrote: “On the international side, it seems very important that democracies have the upper hand on the world stage when powerful AI is created.”

Back in June, Anthropic made Claude models available on the AWS marketplace for the US Intelligence Community. “Government agencies can use Claude to provide improved citizen services, streamline document review and preparation, enhance policymaking with data-driven insights, and create realistic training scenarios,” the company noted.

Enjoy the full story here.

The CUDA Killer

Could AMD's ROCm—once built for NVIDIA GPUs—be the “CUDA Killer” that challenges NVIDIA’s dominance? Or will CUDA's entrenched ecosystem keep it at the top? The story delves into this unfolding rivalry. Read more here.?

AI Bytes >>?

• Stanford researchers recently unveiled convolutional differentiable logic gate networks (LGNs) that integrate logic gates with deep learning to achieve inference speeds as fast as four nanoseconds.?
• Nutanix has launched Nutanix Enterprise AI, a platform that enables organisations to securely manage, deploy, and scale large language models (LLMs) across any Kubernetes environment.?
• Genpact has appointed Jinsook Han as its chief strategy and corporate development officer, leveraging her extensive experience in AI, data analytics, and corporate strategy from roles at PwC and Accenture.?
• Amazon is all set to roll out its Trainium 2 chip, tested by partners like Anthropic and Databricks. It aims to scale AI model training on AWS with significant cost savings as part of its strategy to enhance data centre performance and compete in the AI hardware market.
• AI4Bharat has launched BhasaAnuvaad, an extensive speech translation dataset with 44,400 hours of audio across 13 Indian languages. It is designed to tackle India-specific linguistic challenges and enhance machine translation accuracy for Indian languages.
• Shiprocket has launched Shiprocket Copilot, an AI-powered assistant tailored for over 1 lakh MSMEs in India. It offers multilingual support and tools to streamline e-commerce operations, enhance productivity, and empower small businesses with accessible, up-to-date guidance on managing digital retail.