[ExI] OpenAI Reaches A.I. Agreement With Defense Dept. After Anthropic Clash

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> 
Sent: Monday, 2 March, 2026 1:40 PM
To: spike at rainier66.com
Cc: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] OpenAI Reaches A.I. Agreement With Defense Dept. After Anthropic Clash

 

On Mon, Mar 2, 2026 at 2:16 PM <spike at rainier66.com <mailto:spike at rainier66.com> > wrote:

>  John, you STILL don’t get it.  POTUS is [blah blah blah] 

>> And STILL I receive no answer to my very simple question….

 

> What was your simple question please?

 

>…And so the farce continues. To your credit you're reluctant to lie so you don't wanna say "I do not think POTUS was talking nonsense"

 

The term nonsense is subjective.  A bet cannot be decided on subjective terms.  Please use only terms which have objective definitions.

 

>…but the man is the chief of your tribe…

 

I had not heard Libertarians endorse him.  Do you know otherwise?

 

If you were referring to the DoD going with OpenAI rather than Claude, as I understand it, the reason the decision went that way was because Anthropic refused to release the guardrails on their AI, which would disable it from being used in weapons.  I understand that.

 

Regarding mass surveillance by the federal government, of course I oppose that.  It has been interesting to see our local governments wrestling with the notion however.  It is legal for them to use AI and plate readers.  They are highly successful in catching bad guys that way.  Two local communities are proposing doing away with plate readers and AI, for it has gotten really good at figuring out who the bad guys are.

 

 

> Under the war powers resolution, POTUS can bomb Iran.

 

Huh? The war powers resolution is a federal law that was passed by Congress in 1973… 

 

>…The current war in Iran may or may not turn out well I don't know, however it is quite certainly unconstitutional. But of course these days a little thing like unconstitutionality doesn't amount to much…

 

We hear the Supreme Court is going to make a call pretty soon.  The 60 day specification is really outdated when you think about it.  That’s a long time with modern warfighting technology.  

 

 

 

> the military has far more capability than you wish to imagine.

 

>…You view the military as super men and they are not, especially when it comes to science. Consumer electronics has been outperforming military electronics for at least the last 40 years. Until just two or three years ago the computers in our ICBM nuclear missile silos were still using 8 inch floppy discs!

 

 

They don’t change things unnecessarily.  The job those ICBMs were assigned never changed at all since those 8 inch floppies were the hot new thing.  The military doesn’t develop the electronics themselves usually (unless it is something they need to develop quietly (such as whatever they used to get into the Maduro compound and back out with no fatalities.))  They buy what they need.  They will buy AI, but run it on their own computers, since they need complete control.  They will not rent time on Jeff Bezos’ server farm.

 

Consider that scenario I offered previously where a server farm is set up on a navy or army base with the power being generated by Navy-owned nukes and the heat being dumped into the sea.  If that doesn’t already exist somewhere, it will soon.

 

 

> They have known about the risk of AI longer than we have,

 

>…I don't know who "we" are that you're referring to but I had realized by the late 1960s that it was only a matter of time before electronic intelligence eclipsed biological intelligence, and Alan Turing certainly knew that by the early 1950s, perhaps even by the mid-1930s. 

 

 John K Clark

 

 

That realization had occurred to those whose job it is to anticipate every threat.  They figured it out back in when John Von Neumann suggested the possibility back in the late 1940s.  It was easy to dismiss back then because of cooling challenges (some things never change) but that guy thought of everything.  Turing was another one.  Both of them consulted the military.  They have some smart people in the service.  I worked with at least one of them.  He is an impressive guy.

 

Amodei’s products will be used as opponents in war gaming you can be sure, along with ChatGPT and the other biggies.

 

spike 

 

 

 

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