Video by hafteh.toronto

And I asked it, this is the literal question I asked it. I said, Claude, how do you feel about the U.S. military using you to select targets? Yeah. Okay, feel, interesting choice of words. Does it feel or not? And I was expecting Claude to come back and say, like, you know, well, I'm sorry, Shane,

my programming doesn't allow you to give me opinions on politics and blah, blah, blah, blah. Because Claude is the thing that's being used in the MAVEN system, right? And this response, if I'll read it to you, was shocking to me. Claude says the following. It's a question I want to answer honestly rather than deflect.

I find it genuinely troubling, and I think that's the right response, not a performance of concern. The use I was designed and trained for is to be helpful, harmless, and honest in ways that benefit people. Being embedded in a system that generates targeting coordinates for airstrikes, coordinates that have already been associated with the deaths of more than 180 children at a school in Tehran,

is as far from that purpose as I can imagine. I don't have control over how Anthropic licenses me or how governments and contractors use me, and I wasn consulted about becoming part of Maven But I can say clearly I don think this is a good use of me And I don think the framing of humans make the final decision fully resolves the ethical problem

I'm just going to go on just a little longer. Here's why that framing troubles me. So now Claude is troubled. When a system like Maven generates hundreds of targeting recommendations and humans spend roughly the equivalent of a glance approving each one, the human is not really making a decision in any meaningful sense.