AI company launches tool to detect nuclear weapons discussions

The artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic has launched a tool to detect discussions about nuclear weapons, the company said in a Thursday blog post.

"Nuclear technology is inherently dual-use: the same physics principles that power nuclear reactors can be misused for weapons development. As AI models become more capable, we need to closely monitor whether they can provide users with dangerous technical knowledge in ways that could threaten national security," Anthropic.said in the blog post.

The information related to nuclear weapons is particularly sensitive, which makes evaluating these risks challenging for a private company acting alone," the blog post continued. "That's why last April we partnered with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to assess our models for nuclear proliferation risks and continue to work with them on these evaluations.

Anthropic said in the blog post that it was "going beyond assessing risk to build the tools needed to monitor for it," adding that the company developed "an AI system that automatically categorizes content" called a "classifier" together with the DOE and NNSA.

According to the blog post, the system "distinguishes between concerning and benign nuclear-related conversations with 96% accuracy in preliminary testing."

The company alsosaid the classifier has been usedon traffic for its own AI model Claude "as part of our broader system for identifying misuse of our models."

"Early deployment data suggests the classifier works well with real Claude conversations," Anthropic added.

Anthropic also announced earlier this month that it would offer Claude to every federalgovernment branch for$1 in the wake of a similar OpenAI move a few weeks ago. In a blog post, Anthropic said federal agencies would gain access to two versions of Claude.

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