Well yeah, Anthropic's statement said as much. And they already had a contract with the DoD. This isn't a gotcha.
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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When mainstream media and various celebrities have cast Anthropic as the "good guy", it's important to point out.
I mean, yeah. They're the only ones trying to hold out some reasonable constraints.
No. They aren't the "good guy," and they don't need to be lauded as such.
Anthropic has been willing to throw away so many reasonable constraints, and they always have. The companies are disturbingly similar, and Anthropic is worse in some ways.
The CEO was VERY clear about this in his interview with Larry Ellison's CBS News.
My understanding is that it's not military use broadly that they object to but the use of their systems for the development of fully autonomous drones.
This is incorrect.
Anthropic contradicts this, showing an aggressive willingness to work with the Trump department of "War."
Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense... We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems
Is there a "good-ish" AI chatbot? I uninstalled chatgpt and started using claude over the weekend 🤡
I don't use it that much, maybe a couple of questions a week and some help understanding Japanese grammar
check huggingface, it's got all the open models. inference is pay as you go, though most models are insanely cheap
I'm quite happy with Mistrals LeChat. I have not done much research on Mistral but from the headlines I read they don't seem like bad guys.
The general quality of the answers is slightly worse than chat gpt (IMO). But I like some features like agents and document libraries in the free tier
If you can't validate the answers it gives, I would recommend not using it. It could be giving you complete nonsense in Japanese and you'll have no way to know until years later someone looks at you funny when you say something and you explain "I learned Japanese from chatgpt".
Depends on your definition, Anthropic has been the somewhat less evil on the scene, doing a lot of research to actually understand what they're building instead of just making bold claims whenever they launch a new model, but it's still relative to huge AI companies. The more ethical choice would be local models, again depending on what you see as the ethical issues of AI
Depends on your definition of "good-ish". Do you mean:
- performance/accuracy?
- ethical origin?
- ethical ongoing operation?
- privacy/future data harvesting concerns?
Running one locally on your own hardware would likely reach "good-ish" with some sacrifices against performance/accuracy (unless you've got a lot of expensive hardware to run very large models). As far as ethical origins, there are few small models trained on public domain/nonstolen content, but their functions are far more limited.
I mean good-ish in the lesser-evil type of thing. I don't expect any of those to be 100% ethical but there are some that are a lot worse than others
I don't really have a computer capable of running a local AI. I have an i3 laptop from around 6 years ago with 12gb of RAM and integrated graphics
I mean good-ish in the lesser-evil type of thing. I don’t expect any of those to be 100% ethical but there are some that are a lot worse than others
Ethics are subjective. "Good-ish" to you may mean you're fine if its trained on copyrighted works as long as it wasn't done with electricity from diesel generators belching exhaust into the local Memphis atmosphere (I'm looking at you Grok). Llama doesn't do the diesel generator thing, but its a product of Facebook corporation. So is that "good-ish" to you or not? I don't know. That's up to you.
It may not be fast, but your i3 laptop with 12GB of system RAM can absolutely run a local LLM. This is where that "performance/accuracy" question I raised comes in. It won't be very fast, and you won't be able to run the most common large models like GPT-5 etc. However, if your needs are light, light models exist. Give this a read
If you have a decent GPU, Ollama lets you run them on your own hardware
If by "good" you mean one that more reliably answers your questions correctly, then no. That's not really what these systems are good at. They're fully capable of giving a solid, accurate answer, but you can simply never trust it to be correct. They're great for chit-chat and bouncing around ideas if you're into that, but it's not an oracle.
When it comes to translating languages, that's one of the few things LLMs are actually somewhat decent at, and I don't think there's much difference between them in that regard.
No, I mean good in the sense of less evil. I don't ask any question to a bot where I need complete accuracy
They had a long standing contract with the Pentagon. There was a weeks long fight between said Pentagon and Anthropic on how the software is licensed.
And you realize just now that Claude is used by the Pentagon?