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htrp 3 days ago [-]
> CodePath, an Anthropic nonprofit partner and America’s largest provider of collegiate computer science education, will act as the fellows’ official employer of record and lead programming during the fellowship.
So your job is to be an FDE to sell Claude into non-profits.... but without ever actually working for Anthropic.
lukashoff 2 days ago [-]
This is just a very specific nasty thing they will do to you, but with extra steps (Rick n Morty reference)
mettamage 3 days ago [-]
That’s how it sounds
motbus3 3 days ago [-]
Why everything they do sounds shady?
mettamage 3 days ago [-]
I'm not saying it's shady.
> So your job is to be an FDE to sell Claude into non-profits....
Being forward deployed engineer is to work with a particular business helping them out with the solution that your tech company du jour makes.
> but without ever actually working for Anthropic.
I didn't really get the impression that they work for Anthropic as it is a 12 month thing and then it's done. So you're not seen as something long-term, nor do you get one of those juicy tech salaries (which I'd assume is something that Anthropic pays if they see you as a long-term fit).
Whether you find that shady is up to you. I didn't even think that far ahead mate.
collabs 3 days ago [-]
Probably because it is shady?
chasil 3 days ago [-]
To express deeper subtlety and nuance for Anthropic's position, they are riding the wave of the announced destruction of the white collar class.
This is their way of justification and assuagement.
It is a noble sentiment, but also a token gesture.
fragmede 3 days ago [-]
The contractor game has been played in Silicon Valley since basically there's been a valley.
apwheele 2 days ago [-]
I mean some of the orgs could be like that, but the one near me I looked up (Durham, not affiliated to be clear), is more like an entry level gig to work on various projects (so you work for non-profit, but the orgs they work for may be public or private sector).
They mostly built phone apps oriented to public good projects. (So would just be using Claude Code to build the app itself, they wouldn't be calling Anthropic APIs behind the scenes, at least for those projects.)
Think $85k for an entry level gig subsidized by Anthropic. What is so bad about that?
> We are not seeking job displacement. We are working to prevent or minimize it. Some amount of displacement, though we cannot say how much, may be an intrinsic consequence of the technology, and our responsibility is to prepare for it and respond to it. That is what this framework is for.
> Whatever happens, we are on the side of people. We are trying to solve these problems. We take no satisfaction in contributing to them, and we are not working to make them more likely.
The cognitive dissonance/doublespeak/hypocrisy (pick one) is absolutely insane.
They are concurrently:
1. creating and marketing products that are explicitly trying to automate, if not entire professions, at least big parts of them
2. edicting grand policy plans to limit the impact of massive job displacement that their products might cause
3. directly funding and coordinating missionary-type activities ("it's for a greater cause") to evangelize and propagate said products in areas of the economy that are usually underfunded and where job security is already quite bad (non-profits, NGOs)
ipdashc 2 days ago [-]
So what do you want them to do, then? Because I don't like it either, but they're right about their core tenet, which is that if they don't do it, someone else is going to. Even if we ignore the obvious other player in OpenAI, there's now dozens of labs in a handful of countries, the cat is thoroughly out of the bag.
Is it annoying? Yeah. Is it preachy and hypocritical? Yeah. And I've yet to hear anyone suggest something better.
anon373839 2 days ago [-]
> And I've yet to hear anyone suggest something better.
While I reject their basic premise and think it is more marketing garbage, the answer sure as shit isn’t to try to monopolize the technology so that Anthropic can extract maximum rents from it.
tpdly 2 days ago [-]
Right. Five years ago the idea was you needed the capitalism to fund compute/training. Now, its clear that open weight models could be a public good. If my PC takes my job I'm still empowered and can still capture that value, so if Anthropic were pursing that end it wouldn't seem so hypocritical.
alfiedotwtf 2 days ago [-]
> if they don't do it, someone else is going to
If I don’t rob my neighbour, someone else is going to do it
ipdashc 2 days ago [-]
No, not really?
basisword 2 days ago [-]
Keeping building models and tools. Sending out missionaries to speed along the process of job displacement is an unnecessary side quest.
pandoro 2 days ago [-]
Bingo!
pandoro 2 days ago [-]
Continue building useful models, tooling and products, market them to the people who could benefit and be realistic about their strength and weaknesses. Drop the messaging about job displacement, "transformative/dangerous AI", "significant disruptions" and "unprecedented abundance". They are the ones pushing and funding this narrative; just look at the phrasing in this announcement. And it's percolating down everywhere in the general public leading to AI psychosis.
They are proposing solutions to a hypothetical problem they are actively trying to manifest into reality to get more capital and funding.
That's what hypocritical about it. Not the development of the technology nor the effort to lobby for more regulations and policies.
The general discourse around AI could be much more sensible and pragmatic and lead to a more balanced, healthy rollout of the technology in society. But of course this means forfeiting at least part of the massive injection of capital in those companies and the ecosystem in the short-term.
torginus 2 days ago [-]
I don't understand this at a high level. Anthropic is going to go public, which means they are liable to act in the best interest of shareholders, so they cannot leave money on the table, much less do selfless handouts.
Yet at the same time, they are a public benefit corporation, and I'm not quite sure what that means? Is that a separate legal entity from the for-profit arm?
FinnKuhn 2 days ago [-]
Them being a public benefit cooperation means that Anthropic is legally required to consider both shareholder interests and the broader public good. At least that is how they explain it: https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust
There is also a separate legal entity (Anthropic Long-Term Benefit Trust) that owns some shares and has special powers, but shareholders can change that so I wouldn't trust the trust too much.
rayiner 2 days ago [-]
> economy that are usually underfunded and where job security is already quite bad (non-profits, NGOs)
If it works, using AI to cut jobs in the non-profit sector would be a good thing. Those jobs are overhead (necessary overhead, but overhead nonetheless) that reduces how much donor money actually makes it to the people it’s supposed to help. If AI can eliminate those jobs, that means a larger share of money that’s donated will actually get used for providing services.
gwbas1c 3 days ago [-]
Hey, think critically about where you are on the internet. You're on a message board run by YCombinator, who's stated goal is to teach people to run startups. Startups are inherently disruptive. When one business disrupts another, people lose their jobs.
Companies going out of business, either because of disruption, or because they ran themselves poorly, or other reasons, is part of the normal business cycle. Otherwise, we'd end up doing things like making digital cameras illegal because the people who worked in film labs lost their jobs. (Which is absurd!)
---
I don't see any cognitive dissonance in what you quote. Some people will lose jobs to AI. Anthropic wants to train people who lose jobs to AI.
pandoro 3 days ago [-]
I see your point, but in this case we are not talking about disruption at the scale of a product category, vertical, or even an entire industry. AI companies are trying to disrupt entire sectors of the economy at the same time: knowledge work/white collar jobs, creative work (design, photo, video, ...), medical professions, etc.
They are recognizing themselves in their economic policy framework that the lowest level of unemployment potentially caused would be 5% (they also mention 10% and "unprecedented levels of unemployment").
I don't think there is a precedent for this claim. It's hard to take the "we're a force for good for humanity" message seriously in this context.
b112 2 days ago [-]
AI companies are trying to disrupt entire sectors of the economy at the same time
Talk to news companies, which whether newspapers, magazines, radio or TV, are basically either literally gone, or a shadow of their former selves. The best way to compare this, as you say is to even larger constructs, to entire sectors of the economy.
Because you can harken this to desktop computers, or to the Internet. Sector after sector of people replaced, industries gone. Just the sheer amount of newsprint, recycled or not, which is now no longer manufactured affected an enormous amount of jobs. The entire forest industry, to sawmill, to shipping + printing and all the parts and maintenance and delivery and even the newstands which are basically now gone. Good for the environment or not, that's massive change.
I agree AI will do the very same. But it's not even really happening that much faster. We're 3 years in. It will take 10 to 20 years for it to play out.
But... back in 2008, would you have said the Internet was "bad" for humanity? No, you wouldn't. Back then, it was all about connecting people, it was about empowering people in totalitarian regimes, so they could connect and speak out. It was about old controls slipping, about people being able to speak directly to one another. Back then, 99.999% of people thought "awesome!".
And when I talk to the average Joe about AI today? I hear the same thing. Awesome!
The Internet has put countless people out of work. So has the computer. So has electricity. And machines. People have always complained. But if you're going to label AI companies as "They took my job!", then you'd better do the same for all those other industries. Otherwise?
It's a bit hypocritical.
pandoro 2 days ago [-]
I was not criticizing the technology in itself but the messaging and marketing around it. I agree with most of your points except perhaps the general sentiment outside of tech about AI. Most people I've talked to admire the technology but are genuinely scared or angry about the second-order effect of it on society. And I think, in part, it's because of the messaging, marketing and general psychosis about the technology that those companies are generating.
flextheruler 2 days ago [-]
Sure I'll do the same for those other industries. It took generations and many deaths after each industrial revolution to address the harms caused by the technology. People's complaints about economic disruption have been proven to be legitimate and require fighting. This will spill into violence if these criticisms are not taken seriously.
b112 2 days ago [-]
And yet unless you're a historian, most people are completely unaware of any of the violence which occurred as a result of prior disruption. Most aren't even aware there were protests, upset in the past, except perhaps due to a song about a miner, John Henry.
These prior points of 'fighting' and 'violence' are so inconsequential, that they don't even impinge upon the historical narrative of most nations. People know about war, civil war, even the hippy protests half a century ago.
And in the end? In every single case? Nothing happened to realistically slow that change. It happened regardless.
One of the issues with such change, is that we live in a world with national borders. This leaves individuals in nations with two choices. Improve efficiency (by replacing humans with more efficient methods), or alternative? Companies with more efficient methods, in other countries, will drive your local companies out of business.
Which means you lose any tax revenue, resource extraction revenue, "head office" revenue, and on and on. And of course, whatever humans are level after the reorg, "management", well those jobs go to that other country too.
Literally if you win in terms of preventing change, you lose.
In the context of all of this, legitimate or not isn't really relevant. And fighting or not is in that same category. Nothing will stop the changes coming. Nothing.
If we were in the same room, you would hear a typically exceptionally optimistic person, speaking in a very sad voice.
calgoo 3 days ago [-]
Also, they keep talking about the US like its the only country in the world. They where fine with Claude being used murder and spy as long as it was done to others. And again they are only talking about the US work force. Howany engineers in India will loose their jobs when the ai becomes cheaper? What about other Asian countries with low wage jobs that will be replaced?
gwbas1c 2 days ago [-]
> They are recognizing themselves in their economic policy framework that the lowest level of unemployment potentially caused would be 5% (they also mention 10% and "unprecedented levels of unemployment").
Every tech boom I've seen in my life includes people letting their imagination running away and greatly overestimating how adoption will take place. Often adoption is slower, but much more pervasive as younger generations use it when they become adults.
Translation: I believe AI's disruption will be much slower than a lot of people claim it will be; and the change will be (cough) "slow" enough that most people will be able to retire or change their careers before they are materially impacted.
watwut 2 days ago [-]
> Startups are inherently disruptive.
They are not, the disruption itself becoming the praiseworthy goal was not there initially. Initially, the rhetoric was about creating new things, building companies and booming economy.
It changed into disruption only later. At some point, disrupting became the praised thing, even if you was in the loss the whole time and did not really produced anything better.
> Initially, the rhetoric was about creating new things, building companies and booming economy.
The "new things" always disrupt something else. IE, a mechanized excavator disrupts people who made their living digging ditches.
BTW, were you around Silicon Valley in the 2005-2015 decade? The people making AI were easy to find and were very clearly "about creating new things, building companies and booming economy".
anon373839 2 days ago [-]
I actually think this happened around the time Silicon Valley stopped coming up with good ideas.
xg15 2 days ago [-]
What I never understood: If the goal is not reducing work (in the "effort to perform a task" sense), then why do AI at all?
MagicMoonlight 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
signatoremo 3 days ago [-]
Bad takes.
> edicting grand policy plans to limit the impact of massive job displacement that their products might cause
Your own job, assuming you're in the software industry, is to automate and eliminate people's jobs. How many jobs do you think it has eliminated? Do you feel you are responsible for your products? Is it ethical to do your job without thinking about and discussing its impacts?
My take: being also in the industry, software has created way more jobs, new businesses, new fields than the jobs it has eliminated. Nobody knows how AI will turn out, it being still at the beginning, although it will certainly have big impact and job displacement will be substantial. The hope is that it will be net plus for the society. At least Anthropic is talking about it. I never heard of, for example DeepSeek's position about the impacts of their products.
> directly funding and coordinating missionary-type activities ("it's for a greater cause") to evangelize and propagate said products in areas of the economy that are usually underfunded and where job security is already quite bad (non-profits, NGOs)
If you've volunteered for non-profits, you'd find that many of them are underfunded AND understaffed. Removing burdens on any part of their work, especially areas that aren't directly related to their core services, is hugely beneficial. It's easy to criticize from behind the keyboard.
Unfortunately opinions like yours scratch an itch of the HN crowd. Regardless of objectivity.
watwut 2 days ago [-]
> Your own job, assuming you're in the software industry, is to automate and eliminate people's jobs. How many jobs do you think it has eliminated?
Looking at my career, literally none. For real.
> Is it ethical to do your job without thinking about and discussing its impacts?
I am not saving the planet nor people. I am not social worker, doctor nor anyone like that. But, I am not harming them either.
> At least Anthropic is talking about it. I never heard of, for example DeepSeek's position about the impacts of their products.
No, DeepSeek is not trying to create FOMO and fear based sales. DeepSeek is not pushing insulting ads on me and scary ads on my CEO. I dont even think they are all that much more ethical as a business necessarily, but oh my god, they managed to avoid the most off-putting propaganda in places where I see.
elvis10ten 3 days ago [-]
> Your own job, assuming you're in the software industry, is to automate and eliminate people's jobs. How many jobs do you think it has eliminated? Do you feel you are responsible for your products?
This is a common trope from the LLM crowd. Places I have worked for as a software engineer have created more jobs (gig economy) or improved the human condition (edtech in emerging markets) or helped people in refugee camps in Kenya stay connected.
Even in questionable companies, I focus on work that makes sure the technology is accessible to any and everyone. I became a programmer because I thought I could help make the world a better place.
> The hope is that it will be net plus for the society.
Unfortunately, hope is not a strategy.
binary132 3 days ago [-]
“We are not seeking virtual torture caused by Roko’s Basilisk. We are working to prevent or minimize virtual torture caused by it. Some amount of virtual torture, though we cannot say how much, may be an intrinsic consequence of the technology, and our responsibility is to prepare for it and respond to it. That is what this framework is for.”
parodysbird 3 days ago [-]
I never know how earnestly to take any Roko's Basilisk mention
ChrisMarshallNY 3 days ago [-]
I always thought she liked bread a bit too much…
danishanish 3 days ago [-]
It is such a colossal self-report (when meant).
binary132 1 days ago [-]
How is it difficult to make the connection between a thought experiment about a world-eating AI monster, Anthropic marketing their AI as a world-eating monster, and Anthropic accelerating frontier development of their world-eating monster as hard as possible possibly being a little tiny bit icky and cynical when they tell us they’re totally trying to save us from it and stuff, bro?
TZubiri 3 days ago [-]
1. creating and marketing products that are explicitly trying to automate, if not entire professions, at least big parts of them
For example?
Most of the products they build seem to be tools rather than replacements.
fakedang 3 days ago [-]
I think I'd place less emphasis on the "creating" part and more emphasis on the "marketing" part. If Dario could shut up about how jobs are outdated, that would be nice. His quotes simply give more ammunition to incompetent CEOs trying to cut costs.
It also goes without saying that a certain segment of jobs are simply bullshit jobs that are prone to automation anyways. But without those jobs, you're also cutting off a segment of the population from the economy.
TZubiri 2 days ago [-]
But do you have any example of Anthropic products that aim to replace workers?
fakedang 2 days ago [-]
It doesn't matter if they can or cannot. Every marketing copy in Anthropic is about replacing workers. Even their job listings state "This position may be replaced by AI within a year.".
827a 3 days ago [-]
This seems like one way to saddle nonprofits with functional, but potentially very expensive systems, set up by someone who helps them for a year then disappears and leaves them with no expertise to do long-term cost control or functionality improvements.
noemit 3 days ago [-]
They've already done this through the 6m Anthropic API "unlimited plan" grants. Claude-only is getting embedded.
drcongo 3 days ago [-]
Having had to fix the messes of several green-washing consultants from PWC, JP Morgan Chase etc. I can confirm that this is absolutely guaranteed.
patcon 3 days ago [-]
I don't suppose you have experience with how badly small non-profits are fucked by every tech consultancy they ever work with? They are paying for a service at the very top of their budget, and receiving services perceived from the bottom, as almost "pro bono" by the consultancy, via intern labour.
They all have PTSD from the status quo.
Getting nonprofits into AI that feels even marginally more self-serve, that is a step forward. Again, even if it just feels more agentic, that's a step forward -- maybe even if they end up screwing things up more in the process -- because the lack agency with their tech is so demoralizing in the sector
torginus 2 days ago [-]
I used to volunteer for an animal shelter doing IT stuff. They didn't really have much money, and what they had they needed for actual, real-world problems like buying dog food and paying vet's fees etc.
They ran on ancient hand-me down Windows PCs, with a donated HP server, fully on-prem. The MS licences they got from some government/MS program for free (not sure).
It was kinda crappy, but it did the job, there were some databases, Active Directory, some CRUD stuff to manage the internal workings of the shelter, and a locally hosted website.
But it cost nothing to run besides the electricity, and it did the job.
If we were to replicate the same system on top of SOTA AWS hardware, it would cost thousands of dollars per month, which would be a significant part of their operating budget.
Considering how much they actually needed every cent, I shudder at the thought.
watwut 2 days ago [-]
Small non-profits I have seen did not worked with tech consultancies.
moregrist 3 days ago [-]
> I don't suppose you have experience with how badly small non-profits are fucked by every tech consultancy they ever work with?
Definitely with you here.
> Getting nonprofits into AI that feels even marginally more self-serve
Umm... so your plan to make non-profits less fucked is to give them yet another consultancy, but this one is AI!
I am dubious that this results in them feeling less fucked.
JumpCrisscross 2 days ago [-]
> yet another consultancy, but this one is AI
Eh, I bet an intern with AI could build some internal tooling stuff for the non-profit that they use for years. Same as they’ve been using, unedited, that one Excel sheet someone wrote in 1995.
3 days ago [-]
skybrian 3 days ago [-]
They know it's a temporary job going in, though. How is this different than having an intern?
If they're not using this opportunity to train other staff then that seems like a management problem.
saghm 3 days ago [-]
Interns don't typically have a job description that describes trying to push a specific software system from a vendor.
827a 3 days ago [-]
It certainly is a management problem, as non-profits are certainly not well known for having strong management.
I had to read this twice to understand what they're actually proposing here. The entire premise behind AI is that it can amplify (and in some cases) replace human workers. The blog seems completely backwards to what they're advertising to the enterprise in sales.
-- edit --
After more reading I find this really funny: "Enforcement and regulatory authority with teeth. The government should be able to block or deter the deployment of models that pose a significant risk of catastrophic harm. We must also avoid overly broad or heavy-handed regulatory power. Our framework proposes both a mechanism for blocking dangerous deployments, and concrete safeguards that would prevent that power from being misused. Policymakers could begin with a lighter-touch approach, then adapt this as model capabilities advance and the evaluation ecosystem matures." (They link to https://www.anthropic.com/policy-on-the-ai-exponential in this blog post)
roxolotl 3 days ago [-]
This is what always confuses me about the “keep up or get left behind” crowd. Either these tools are gods in boxes and we’re all going to be replaced or they are actually something that you can gain expertise around. If you can gain expertise around them then sure there’s value in keeping up. But those shouting we’ve all gotta keep up are mostly the same claiming they are building god boxes. It genuinely has to be one or the other. Something isn’t a god box if you have to learn how to best use it.
skybrian 3 days ago [-]
Seems like there is skill in knowing what to ask the genie for, no matter how powerful the genie is? How is that not going to be an issue?
That said, there are things people had to worry about last year with weaker models that aren't really a problem anymore, so some of the knowledge you get by "keeping up" becomes obsolete and could be skipped by waiting.
the_other 2 days ago [-]
Context: I vibe code most of my production code, but I come from a long FED career so I'm vibe-coding small things, constantly tweaking, refining prompts, picking work to do that fits with the existing work, etc. So I'm either "doing it wrong" or "being careful". Anyway, that's the perspective I have ATM...
So, it seems to me that there's quite a lot of skill to using these "god boxes": which models, connecting to your systems, hosting the code, running the model, running the code, not breaking your production pipelines, having a production pipeline in the first place.
Sure, the god boxes help with a lot of that. But they don't help setting up the accounts, connecting your code hosting to your production servers. You can't currently just give random people in your org access to an LLM account and have them safely make production changes w/out some engineering knowledge and oversight. In NGOs, especially the small ones, they already outsource all that to 3rd parties so they don't have to worry about it. But with "just the right amount" of in-house knowledge, gear, config (maybe one office computer hooked up with Claude, or a small GHCP account, with GH + hosting configured), it's possible that anyone in the company might be able to add to the company's suite of useful small tools, or add features.
(I also think there's more to "hey claude, make feature X" than we're capturing here, but as I said at the top, I might be doing it wrong.)
palmotea 3 days ago [-]
> This is what always confuses me about the “keep up or get left behind” crowd. ... But those shouting we’ve all gotta keep up are mostly the same claiming they are building god boxes. It genuinely has to be one or the other. Something isn’t a god box if you have to learn how to best use it.
I think the answer is the shouters are just telling people what they want to hear (a.k.a. lying), in the service of selling more. To the capitalists, they sell "god boxes" with the promise of one day being able to lay of most if not all those pesky, annoying workers. To the workers, they sell "something that you can gain expertise around" to defuse the intense opposition a job-destroying "got box" would create.
lkbm 3 days ago [-]
> The entire premise behind AI is that it can amplify (and in some cases) replace human workers. This seems completely backwards to what they're advertising to the enterprise in sales.
idgi. I'm pretty sure this is also exactly what they've been telling enterprise. This has been the line I've been hearing consistently from them (and everyone else).
imglorp 3 days ago [-]
> replace human workers
Plenty of charity nonprofits have no/few employees and depend on volunteers for office work. Think animal shelter, food bank, etc. Having a bot perform things like bookkeeping, volunteer coordination, etc would free up volunteers for other things. It wouldn't take many tokens.
If Anthropic wanted some serious PR karma they would include a light usage plan for five or ten years in addition to the engineer to get them started.
himata4113 3 days ago [-]
None of those generally need AI systems though that benefit from an arbitrary input chat box, majority of the work is physical. I might be bias because my experience already included modern systems with machine based OCR.
imglorp 2 days ago [-]
> arbitrary input chat box
Agents connect to your business software. A chat box alone can't "generate the monthly report, run the payroll, and contact these new volunteers."
signatoremo 3 days ago [-]
> ... things like bookkeeping, volunteer coordination, etc
Are they physical work? Maybe you're saying they aren't important?
clhodapp 3 days ago [-]
I believe this is an attempt to try out a possible answer to the problem of "If AI makes it non-viable for individual companies to pay junior devs, there will be no junior devs". The posited theory: Maybe the AI companies pay them off what is effectively a tax on the industry as a whole (that they can extract because every company has no choice but to pay their fees). It's pretty dystopian so I hope this isn't the future, but... maybe worth trying as an experiment?
himata4113 3 days ago [-]
I think I summarized it best: AI companies are taking money out of the developer salary pool and giving it to themselves. I personally don't mind since I don't have to work at a company to make money, but I do feel for people who do.
Isaackoz 3 days ago [-]
I did not have AI missionaries on my bingo card this year.
sph 2 days ago [-]
Send them all to Mars to build their Cult Mechanicus.
deadbabe 3 days ago [-]
Claude Corps, Forward Deployed Engineers, Strategic Token Reserves… what’s with all these military inspired naming conventions in AI? We’re just typing softly on keyboards…
dewey 3 days ago [-]
Time to deploy to the staging environment after discussing it in the war room.
mvdtnz 3 days ago [-]
"Staging" is not and has never been a military analogy. All kinds of workers have staging areas. Brick layers stage their work before laying. Builders stage materials. Staging is an area where you place your work before you begin deploying it.
camkego 3 days ago [-]
Well, according to Sonnet, the term "staging" refers to assembling troops and equipment at an intermediate location before moving forward into an operation.
I really didn't know, but was curious, so I used an LLM to research it.
3 days ago [-]
dude250711 3 days ago [-]
A trained AI operator will neutralise threats to your production.
yieldcrv 3 days ago [-]
Palantir had first mover advantage on FDE rebranding of sales engineer, and so its the term that stuck
sph 2 days ago [-]
Americans high on their own propaganda. It's cringeworthy.
brentm 3 days ago [-]
Reminds me more of Peace Corps.
wongarsu 3 days ago [-]
Which itself is named after a military term, and has been described in the terms of a military campaign, just for peace. Wikipedia begins the history of the Peace Corps with an article titled "A Proposal for a Total Peace Offensive". Followed later by 'In 1952 Senator Brien McMahon (D-Connecticut) proposed an "army" of young Americans to act as "missionaries of democracy"'
airstrike 3 days ago [-]
It goes hard in today's environment ig
rainprincess 3 days ago [-]
lmfao
chaseadam17 3 days ago [-]
Surprised how negative most of the comments are.
A lot of nonprofits could benefit from someone helping them implement AI and most are 1) competent enough to ensure the fellow hands off their projects before they leave, and 2) to decide if it’s worth continuing to pay for Claude or not.
It’s great the fellows are paid so they are at least somewhat accountable vs volunteers who are often unreliable.
All that said, I bet 80% of what these fellows end up doing is automating fundraising emails…
Shalomboy 3 days ago [-]
I'm negative on this proposal because it sounds like Anthropic put the cart before the horse. Today, at this very moment, 9 out of 10 non-profits and NGOs run of IT infrastructure wholly dependent on email servers, office software, and phone calls. For Anthropic to create a positive result from flooding the space with cut-rate FDEs, NGOS would need to have in-place the sort of infrastructure that could accommodate whatever widgets Sonnet generate, not to mention the right personnel to manage that infrastructure long-term. If an NGO's IT Department is already positioned properly to embrace a Claude Corps Missionary, they near-certainly wouldn't need a Claude Corps Missionary because they would need to publicly justify that department's existence year-after-year. So what does this actually look like for the chosen organizations, other than a sales pitch.
torben-friis 3 days ago [-]
This is an avenue I think will eventually be tried as a monetisation path: Models that are fully unavailable to company outsiders, you can just hire consultants that will be thin layers to the model. That way the costs that will come are more palatable since you pay for a hired person rather than a product/service.
htrp 3 days ago [-]
They already have a consulting partnership with KPMG as part of a Strategic Alliance
It's uncanny that they picked the term "Corps", which is exactly what Kurt Vonnegut used for the "Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps" in his 1952 novel, Player Piano. Also known as "Reeks and Wrecks" in the book, it's one of the two career paths, aside from joining the Army, for the workers displaced by machines and artificial intelligence. The irony seems to be lost on Anthropic.
I enjoyed Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle very much, so I've been slowly reading my way through his earlier works, and while his first novel is not as entertaining, it's surprisingly relevant today. There's Vonnegut's prescience about the impact of technology on society, of course, but even the description of a corporate retreat in the book, that he wrote with almost 75 years ago, hits too close to home.
philipwhiuk 2 days ago [-]
It's not uncanny. They read dark science fiction as an instruction manual.
peterdemin 3 days ago [-]
Well played, Anthropic.
- Nvidia gives AI labs money to run their models.
- AI labs give money to AI engineers to use the models.
- Companies are getting hooked on AI products.
- AI engineers are getting hooked on AI products.
- Regular Software Engineers are getting devalued/replaced by low-skill AI engineers.
- Their employers get more money to spend on AI.
6thbit 3 days ago [-]
This lands with religious undertones for me, as it sounds like a missionary deployment program, albeit with a paid salary.
twalla 3 days ago [-]
What are the odds these nonprofits were chosen due to proximity to communities with contentious datacenter buildouts?
willmeyers 3 days ago [-]
I guess this is no different than Google Summer of Code, Code for America, etc but with AI. If it actually helps these orgs and doesn't lock them into Anthropic pricing/models then sure, let it rip.
6thbit 3 days ago [-]
This is vastly different than SoC. This is an in-person full time year evangelizing Anthropics business.
skywhopper 3 days ago [-]
How does this not lock them into Anthropic? You think these folks are going to help set up Copilot?
watwut 2 days ago [-]
It is completely different then Google Summer of Code used to be. Google Summer of Code was not about selling google products and making organizations dependent on them.
This is pretty much opposite Google Summer of Code.
humblepie 3 days ago [-]
Claude Cringe (anthropic.com)
xg15 2 days ago [-]
Ignoring the hypocrisy and assuming they mean what they say, I'm missing some concrete proposals what the "fellows" are actually supposed to do in the host organizations.
Suppose a fellow at say, Brave, is confronted with a graduate who tells them they can't get a job because no one hires juniors anymore - there is AI for that now. What is the fellow supposed to say then? "I can't help you either, but I can show you how you can build a kickass CV with Claude"?
swader999 3 days ago [-]
They should name their next model Algernon.
jrflo 3 days ago [-]
Anthropic really has been in a PR freefall since Opus 4.7.
jp_sc 3 days ago [-]
So a software evangelist pretending to be humanitarian aid
egonschiele 3 days ago [-]
Neat throwback to Google Summer of Code, when tech felt so much simpler (at least to me). Anyone know anything about CodePath, Social Finance, or the nonprofits listed?
throwaway85825 2 days ago [-]
Non profits famously have large cash flow to fund expensive LLM use.
torginus 3 days ago [-]
Not sure how necessary is this.
From what I've gathered,, one thing the higher education system is good at is using GenAI to automate personal labor :)
kats 3 days ago [-]
Sounds like a nice, charitable thing. Of course it benefits the business too, nothing is free, duh. But it's still good. Cheers.
3 days ago [-]
penguin_booze 3 days ago [-]
Missing an 'e' at the end?
TZubiri 3 days ago [-]
I always thought of Anthropic to mean antropocentric, like human centered.
But is it also a play on Philantropic?
dancemethis 3 days ago [-]
That's a name choice...
krackers 3 days ago [-]
You start by becoming a Claude Boy [1], then eventually enlist into the Claude Corps
In a funny term of scale it's like applying a bandaid to a shotgun wound.
Animats 3 days ago [-]
Do you have to be a US citizen, so you can use Fable?
unictek 3 days ago [-]
Is that a Fable ?
3 days ago [-]
peterspath 3 days ago [-]
No it’s a myth
rektlessness 3 days ago [-]
KMPG and Palantir already use the FDE playbook to great success. And we've all found value in a free 12-month vendor trial, with no obligation to commit.
No idea what the fuss is about.
All non-profits need to do is demand model-agnostic deliverables, insist on handoff documentation, and budget for switching costs before the year ends.
yieldcrv 3 days ago [-]
so cheap FDE's for the non profit sector
alright
the_gipsy 3 days ago [-]
Are the Techbros drunk with power again?
Yeah.
arggjarvs 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Pranavsingh431 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
shimman 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
bpavuk 3 days ago [-]
this is obviously a way to try and get someone hooked, younger people and nonprofits alike. much like their Claude for Open-Source program, which gives a one-time 6-month Claude Max credit for maintainers of some super-popular open-source projects.
for reference, I've been using JetBrains All Products Pack and spent substantial amount in IDEs available under free non-commercial license, such as Rider and RustRover. if RustRover made things worse and I fell back to rustacean.vim, Rider and its ReSharper backend is fucking black magic and I swear I will outright refuse an employer who bans Rider and Visual Studio ReSharper extensions.
another theory: Adobe didn't hunt down pirates much because piracy bred new professionals whose companies would just have to pay for Creative Cloud.
thewebguyd 3 days ago [-]
> Adobe didn't hunt down pirates much because piracy bred new professionals whose companies would just have to pay for Creative Cloud.
Wouldn't surprise me. Microsoft had the same attitude for pirating Windows. Bill Gates said
> Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade
Adobe figured out how to collect once they went subscription only.
So your job is to be an FDE to sell Claude into non-profits.... but without ever actually working for Anthropic.
> So your job is to be an FDE to sell Claude into non-profits....
Being forward deployed engineer is to work with a particular business helping them out with the solution that your tech company du jour makes.
> but without ever actually working for Anthropic.
I didn't really get the impression that they work for Anthropic as it is a 12 month thing and then it's done. So you're not seen as something long-term, nor do you get one of those juicy tech salaries (which I'd assume is something that Anthropic pays if they see you as a long-term fit).
Whether you find that shady is up to you. I didn't even think that far ahead mate.
This is their way of justification and assuagement.
It is a noble sentiment, but also a token gesture.
They mostly built phone apps oriented to public good projects. (So would just be using Claude Code to build the app itself, they wouldn't be calling Anthropic APIs behind the scenes, at least for those projects.)
Think $85k for an entry level gig subsidized by Anthropic. What is so bad about that?
> We are not seeking job displacement. We are working to prevent or minimize it. Some amount of displacement, though we cannot say how much, may be an intrinsic consequence of the technology, and our responsibility is to prepare for it and respond to it. That is what this framework is for.
> Whatever happens, we are on the side of people. We are trying to solve these problems. We take no satisfaction in contributing to them, and we are not working to make them more likely.
The cognitive dissonance/doublespeak/hypocrisy (pick one) is absolutely insane.
They are concurrently:
1. creating and marketing products that are explicitly trying to automate, if not entire professions, at least big parts of them
2. edicting grand policy plans to limit the impact of massive job displacement that their products might cause
3. directly funding and coordinating missionary-type activities ("it's for a greater cause") to evangelize and propagate said products in areas of the economy that are usually underfunded and where job security is already quite bad (non-profits, NGOs)
Is it annoying? Yeah. Is it preachy and hypocritical? Yeah. And I've yet to hear anyone suggest something better.
While I reject their basic premise and think it is more marketing garbage, the answer sure as shit isn’t to try to monopolize the technology so that Anthropic can extract maximum rents from it.
If I don’t rob my neighbour, someone else is going to do it
They are proposing solutions to a hypothetical problem they are actively trying to manifest into reality to get more capital and funding.
That's what hypocritical about it. Not the development of the technology nor the effort to lobby for more regulations and policies.
The general discourse around AI could be much more sensible and pragmatic and lead to a more balanced, healthy rollout of the technology in society. But of course this means forfeiting at least part of the massive injection of capital in those companies and the ecosystem in the short-term.
Yet at the same time, they are a public benefit corporation, and I'm not quite sure what that means? Is that a separate legal entity from the for-profit arm?
There is also a separate legal entity (Anthropic Long-Term Benefit Trust) that owns some shares and has special powers, but shareholders can change that so I wouldn't trust the trust too much.
If it works, using AI to cut jobs in the non-profit sector would be a good thing. Those jobs are overhead (necessary overhead, but overhead nonetheless) that reduces how much donor money actually makes it to the people it’s supposed to help. If AI can eliminate those jobs, that means a larger share of money that’s donated will actually get used for providing services.
Companies going out of business, either because of disruption, or because they ran themselves poorly, or other reasons, is part of the normal business cycle. Otherwise, we'd end up doing things like making digital cameras illegal because the people who worked in film labs lost their jobs. (Which is absurd!)
---
I don't see any cognitive dissonance in what you quote. Some people will lose jobs to AI. Anthropic wants to train people who lose jobs to AI.
They are recognizing themselves in their economic policy framework that the lowest level of unemployment potentially caused would be 5% (they also mention 10% and "unprecedented levels of unemployment").
I don't think there is a precedent for this claim. It's hard to take the "we're a force for good for humanity" message seriously in this context.
Talk to news companies, which whether newspapers, magazines, radio or TV, are basically either literally gone, or a shadow of their former selves. The best way to compare this, as you say is to even larger constructs, to entire sectors of the economy.
Because you can harken this to desktop computers, or to the Internet. Sector after sector of people replaced, industries gone. Just the sheer amount of newsprint, recycled or not, which is now no longer manufactured affected an enormous amount of jobs. The entire forest industry, to sawmill, to shipping + printing and all the parts and maintenance and delivery and even the newstands which are basically now gone. Good for the environment or not, that's massive change.
I agree AI will do the very same. But it's not even really happening that much faster. We're 3 years in. It will take 10 to 20 years for it to play out.
But... back in 2008, would you have said the Internet was "bad" for humanity? No, you wouldn't. Back then, it was all about connecting people, it was about empowering people in totalitarian regimes, so they could connect and speak out. It was about old controls slipping, about people being able to speak directly to one another. Back then, 99.999% of people thought "awesome!".
And when I talk to the average Joe about AI today? I hear the same thing. Awesome!
The Internet has put countless people out of work. So has the computer. So has electricity. And machines. People have always complained. But if you're going to label AI companies as "They took my job!", then you'd better do the same for all those other industries. Otherwise?
It's a bit hypocritical.
These prior points of 'fighting' and 'violence' are so inconsequential, that they don't even impinge upon the historical narrative of most nations. People know about war, civil war, even the hippy protests half a century ago.
And in the end? In every single case? Nothing happened to realistically slow that change. It happened regardless.
One of the issues with such change, is that we live in a world with national borders. This leaves individuals in nations with two choices. Improve efficiency (by replacing humans with more efficient methods), or alternative? Companies with more efficient methods, in other countries, will drive your local companies out of business.
Which means you lose any tax revenue, resource extraction revenue, "head office" revenue, and on and on. And of course, whatever humans are level after the reorg, "management", well those jobs go to that other country too.
Literally if you win in terms of preventing change, you lose.
In the context of all of this, legitimate or not isn't really relevant. And fighting or not is in that same category. Nothing will stop the changes coming. Nothing.
If we were in the same room, you would hear a typically exceptionally optimistic person, speaking in a very sad voice.
Every tech boom I've seen in my life includes people letting their imagination running away and greatly overestimating how adoption will take place. Often adoption is slower, but much more pervasive as younger generations use it when they become adults.
Translation: I believe AI's disruption will be much slower than a lot of people claim it will be; and the change will be (cough) "slow" enough that most people will be able to retire or change their careers before they are materially impacted.
They are not, the disruption itself becoming the praiseworthy goal was not there initially. Initially, the rhetoric was about creating new things, building companies and booming economy.
It changed into disruption only later. At some point, disrupting became the praised thing, even if you was in the loss the whole time and did not really produced anything better.
> Initially, the rhetoric was about creating new things, building companies and booming economy.
The "new things" always disrupt something else. IE, a mechanized excavator disrupts people who made their living digging ditches.
BTW, were you around Silicon Valley in the 2005-2015 decade? The people making AI were easy to find and were very clearly "about creating new things, building companies and booming economy".
> edicting grand policy plans to limit the impact of massive job displacement that their products might cause
Your own job, assuming you're in the software industry, is to automate and eliminate people's jobs. How many jobs do you think it has eliminated? Do you feel you are responsible for your products? Is it ethical to do your job without thinking about and discussing its impacts?
My take: being also in the industry, software has created way more jobs, new businesses, new fields than the jobs it has eliminated. Nobody knows how AI will turn out, it being still at the beginning, although it will certainly have big impact and job displacement will be substantial. The hope is that it will be net plus for the society. At least Anthropic is talking about it. I never heard of, for example DeepSeek's position about the impacts of their products.
> directly funding and coordinating missionary-type activities ("it's for a greater cause") to evangelize and propagate said products in areas of the economy that are usually underfunded and where job security is already quite bad (non-profits, NGOs)
If you've volunteered for non-profits, you'd find that many of them are underfunded AND understaffed. Removing burdens on any part of their work, especially areas that aren't directly related to their core services, is hugely beneficial. It's easy to criticize from behind the keyboard.
Unfortunately opinions like yours scratch an itch of the HN crowd. Regardless of objectivity.
Looking at my career, literally none. For real.
> Is it ethical to do your job without thinking about and discussing its impacts?
I am not saving the planet nor people. I am not social worker, doctor nor anyone like that. But, I am not harming them either.
> At least Anthropic is talking about it. I never heard of, for example DeepSeek's position about the impacts of their products.
No, DeepSeek is not trying to create FOMO and fear based sales. DeepSeek is not pushing insulting ads on me and scary ads on my CEO. I dont even think they are all that much more ethical as a business necessarily, but oh my god, they managed to avoid the most off-putting propaganda in places where I see.
This is a common trope from the LLM crowd. Places I have worked for as a software engineer have created more jobs (gig economy) or improved the human condition (edtech in emerging markets) or helped people in refugee camps in Kenya stay connected.
Even in questionable companies, I focus on work that makes sure the technology is accessible to any and everyone. I became a programmer because I thought I could help make the world a better place.
> The hope is that it will be net plus for the society.
Unfortunately, hope is not a strategy.
For example?
Most of the products they build seem to be tools rather than replacements.
It also goes without saying that a certain segment of jobs are simply bullshit jobs that are prone to automation anyways. But without those jobs, you're also cutting off a segment of the population from the economy.
They all have PTSD from the status quo.
Getting nonprofits into AI that feels even marginally more self-serve, that is a step forward. Again, even if it just feels more agentic, that's a step forward -- maybe even if they end up screwing things up more in the process -- because the lack agency with their tech is so demoralizing in the sector
They ran on ancient hand-me down Windows PCs, with a donated HP server, fully on-prem. The MS licences they got from some government/MS program for free (not sure).
It was kinda crappy, but it did the job, there were some databases, Active Directory, some CRUD stuff to manage the internal workings of the shelter, and a locally hosted website.
But it cost nothing to run besides the electricity, and it did the job.
If we were to replicate the same system on top of SOTA AWS hardware, it would cost thousands of dollars per month, which would be a significant part of their operating budget.
Considering how much they actually needed every cent, I shudder at the thought.
Definitely with you here.
> Getting nonprofits into AI that feels even marginally more self-serve
Umm... so your plan to make non-profits less fucked is to give them yet another consultancy, but this one is AI!
I am dubious that this results in them feeling less fucked.
Eh, I bet an intern with AI could build some internal tooling stuff for the non-profit that they use for years. Same as they’ve been using, unedited, that one Excel sheet someone wrote in 1995.
If they're not using this opportunity to train other staff then that seems like a management problem.
-- edit --
After more reading I find this really funny: "Enforcement and regulatory authority with teeth. The government should be able to block or deter the deployment of models that pose a significant risk of catastrophic harm. We must also avoid overly broad or heavy-handed regulatory power. Our framework proposes both a mechanism for blocking dangerous deployments, and concrete safeguards that would prevent that power from being misused. Policymakers could begin with a lighter-touch approach, then adapt this as model capabilities advance and the evaluation ecosystem matures." (They link to https://www.anthropic.com/policy-on-the-ai-exponential in this blog post)
That said, there are things people had to worry about last year with weaker models that aren't really a problem anymore, so some of the knowledge you get by "keeping up" becomes obsolete and could be skipped by waiting.
So, it seems to me that there's quite a lot of skill to using these "god boxes": which models, connecting to your systems, hosting the code, running the model, running the code, not breaking your production pipelines, having a production pipeline in the first place.
Sure, the god boxes help with a lot of that. But they don't help setting up the accounts, connecting your code hosting to your production servers. You can't currently just give random people in your org access to an LLM account and have them safely make production changes w/out some engineering knowledge and oversight. In NGOs, especially the small ones, they already outsource all that to 3rd parties so they don't have to worry about it. But with "just the right amount" of in-house knowledge, gear, config (maybe one office computer hooked up with Claude, or a small GHCP account, with GH + hosting configured), it's possible that anyone in the company might be able to add to the company's suite of useful small tools, or add features.
(I also think there's more to "hey claude, make feature X" than we're capturing here, but as I said at the top, I might be doing it wrong.)
I think the answer is the shouters are just telling people what they want to hear (a.k.a. lying), in the service of selling more. To the capitalists, they sell "god boxes" with the promise of one day being able to lay of most if not all those pesky, annoying workers. To the workers, they sell "something that you can gain expertise around" to defuse the intense opposition a job-destroying "got box" would create.
idgi. I'm pretty sure this is also exactly what they've been telling enterprise. This has been the line I've been hearing consistently from them (and everyone else).
Plenty of charity nonprofits have no/few employees and depend on volunteers for office work. Think animal shelter, food bank, etc. Having a bot perform things like bookkeeping, volunteer coordination, etc would free up volunteers for other things. It wouldn't take many tokens.
If Anthropic wanted some serious PR karma they would include a light usage plan for five or ten years in addition to the engineer to get them started.
Agents connect to your business software. A chat box alone can't "generate the monthly report, run the payroll, and contact these new volunteers."
Are they physical work? Maybe you're saying they aren't important?
I really didn't know, but was curious, so I used an LLM to research it.
A lot of nonprofits could benefit from someone helping them implement AI and most are 1) competent enough to ensure the fellow hands off their projects before they leave, and 2) to decide if it’s worth continuing to pay for Claude or not.
It’s great the fellows are paid so they are at least somewhat accountable vs volunteers who are often unreliable.
All that said, I bet 80% of what these fellows end up doing is automating fundraising emails…
https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-kpmg
I enjoyed Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle very much, so I've been slowly reading my way through his earlier works, and while his first novel is not as entertaining, it's surprisingly relevant today. There's Vonnegut's prescience about the impact of technology on society, of course, but even the description of a corporate retreat in the book, that he wrote with almost 75 years ago, hits too close to home.
This is pretty much opposite Google Summer of Code.
Suppose a fellow at say, Brave, is confronted with a graduate who tells them they can't get a job because no one hires juniors anymore - there is AI for that now. What is the fellow supposed to say then? "I can't help you either, but I can show you how you can build a kickass CV with Claude"?
From what I've gathered,, one thing the higher education system is good at is using GenAI to automate personal labor :)
But is it also a play on Philantropic?
[1] https://blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/the-claude-boys
All non-profits need to do is demand model-agnostic deliverables, insist on handoff documentation, and budget for switching costs before the year ends.
alright
Yeah.
for reference, I've been using JetBrains All Products Pack and spent substantial amount in IDEs available under free non-commercial license, such as Rider and RustRover. if RustRover made things worse and I fell back to rustacean.vim, Rider and its ReSharper backend is fucking black magic and I swear I will outright refuse an employer who bans Rider and Visual Studio ReSharper extensions.
another theory: Adobe didn't hunt down pirates much because piracy bred new professionals whose companies would just have to pay for Creative Cloud.
Wouldn't surprise me. Microsoft had the same attitude for pirating Windows. Bill Gates said
> Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade
Adobe figured out how to collect once they went subscription only.
Anthropic can take their system cards and shove them up their ass in my opinion.