- by Peter Farmer
- The Guardian
- Issue #2192
Is there an ethical way to do AI? People looking for one might prefer a company that won’t work with the US government’s ‘Department of War.’ Step forward Anthropic, the company behind an AI service called Claude.
QuitGPT, a campaign for people to leave OpenAI’s ChatGPT urged internet users to leave ChatGPT and take up paid subscriptions to Claude. The campaign was spearheaded by historian Rutger Bregman who described Claude as “simply the good guys.” Bregman approvingly quoted a social media message from self-styled US ‘Secretary of War,’ Pete Hegseth criticising Anthropic for “arrogance and betrayal.” Being bagged by Hegseth is a real feather in the cap for anyone marketing themselves to progressives, but it’s not clear that Anthropic are really “the good guys.”
For one thing, it turns out that Anthropic is fine with working with the Pentagon. They just wanted to put conditions on the use of their technology so that it wouldn’t be involved in violence against US citizens.
For another thing, Anthropic did a deal with one of the most polluting fossil-fuelled data centres in the US. As climate researcher Ketan Joshi writes, if you signed up for a paid subscription to Claude, “you can be confident that the dark-background green-font vibe-coded website no one besides you is going to use is being written in a facility that is globally notorious for choking a black community in Memphis.”
The data centres Anthropic has made a deal with are not merely polluting. The fleet of data centres planned for ‘Colossus’ will emit so much greenhouse gas pollution, they will probably undo the entire emissions saved by Tesla’s global fleet of electric vehicles.
Colossus is owned by none other than Elon Musk.
As Joshi points out, there’s nothing about the concept of a building full of computers that means they have to cause “choking air pollution, water impacts and climate change. The industry is choosing to build and run data centres that way.
The takeaway from this episode is that having an AI industry that doesn’t also worsen climate change and devastate nearby communities is going to take a lot more than simply clicking on Claude.
