We Will Not Be Divided
notdivided.org2399 points by BloondAndDoom 19 hours ago
2399 points by BloondAndDoom 19 hours ago
This has much broader implications for the US economy and rule of law in the US.
If government procurement rules intended for national security risks can be abused as a way to punish Anthropic for perceived lack of loyalty, why not any other company that displeases the administration like Apple or Amazon?
This marks an important turning point for the US.
> much broader implications
Setting aside the spectacular metastasis of a lawless kakistocracy that is literally rewriting the facts on record...
Anthropic's leadership has wisely attempted to make it clear that its product is not fit for the US DoD's purpose/objective, which is automated killing at scale.
It would be (is) grossly, historically negligent to operate weapons with LLMs. Anthropic built systems for a thuggocracy that only understands bribery, blackmail, and force.
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Anthropic isn’t the inventor here, they are a service provider. The government can easily go find a different service provider, or if none of them will allow their service to be used for war, then the government should develop their own tech.
Saying the government can just nationalize any company purely because they want to use the tech to kill people has pretty big implications and his historically against what this country stands for.
>That’s not their call to make. Inventors of technologies that could be used for war have never had the right to deny access to those technologies to the elected civilian government.[1]
>[1] The government can make you go over to southeast Asia and kill people personally.
Is this a normative statement? In other words are you simply claiming "the government has men with guns and therefore can force people/companies do whatever they want", or are you claiming that "the government should be able to commandeer civilian resources for whatever it wants"?
It’s a descriptive statement about the law. But you’re mischaracterizing the normative principle underlying the law. It’s not based on power, but rather the moral duties incumbent on citizens.
>but rather the moral duties incumbent on citizens.
Is it a "moral duty" to aid your government, especially in the current social/political environment? Conscription is theoretically still allowed in the US, and you're theoretically supposed to register for the SSS, but nobody has been prosecuted for failure to do so in decades. That suggests the "moral duty" aspect has significantly weakened. Moreover if we're making comparisons to the draft, it's also worth noting the draft allows for conscientious objection. That makes your claim of "that’s not their call to make" quite questionable.
> That’s not their call to make.
Whether they participate voluntarily in a commercial transaction or participate only when compelled to by law (setting aside the question of whether the government does or should have that power) is certainly their call to make.
Just as any individual can decide whether to volunteer, whether to wait until drafted, or whether to refuse to be drafted and face the consequences.
(History shows these decisions, and the rights to make them, are meaningful at scale!)
Finally, governments who expect their leading scientists to do groundbreaking work simply out of fear of imprisonment are NGMI against governments whose scientists believe in their cause.
If anyone thinks the moral justification for selective service has diminished, they should launch a campaign to repeal it and see how it goes over. I suspect that the non-prosecution more reflects the public’s leniency in the absence of major threats since the fall of the soviet union than a change in the underlying normative view.
Conscientious objection still puts the ball in the government’s court. You have to make your case to the government that you have a deeply held religious or moral belief that precludes participation in war, and then the government decides what it wants to do. It’s not clear to me how a corporation would prove the existence of such a belief. But even if that was possible, it wouldn’t give the company the right to decide unilaterally.
The moral duty of a citizen is to sabotage their country when it becomes immoral.
> It’s not based on power, but rather the moral duties incumbent on citizens.
People largely tend not to believe in this kind of jingoistic bullshit nowadays.
Anthropic can certainly make the call to deny access this way, but then the US govt can choose not to make contracts with Anthropic. So what's the issue?
The whole reason this is a story is that the government won't just refuse to contract, it will put the equivalent of soft sanctions on the company because Anthropic refuses to contract.
Hang on, companies dont get to have the rights of a person and not be conscripted.
That’s my point. It would be odd to say that a corporation has a broader right not to be compelled to aid war efforts than a person does.
I have seen a lot of your posts on here about political topics, and they are always disingenuous, misleading, and geared towards providing a thin veneer of reasonability over any form of morality.
> If Congress doesn’t want AI-powered killing machines, they’re the ones who have the right to make that call.
You have it backwards, and you know it. If Congress wants to invoke natsec concerns to force companies to sell to the federal government, then they have to explicitly say so, and any such legislation and exercise of execute power pursuant thereto would be heavily litigated.
> The government can make you go over to southeast Asia and kill people personally. It’s totally incompatible with that to say companies should be allowed to veto the use of their technologies in war.
Yes, it's legal to have drafts, but that's not relevant, and also includes certain exceptions for conscientious objectors. It doesn't matter if its paradoxical or ironic that an individual could be pressed into military service whereas a private company doesn't have to sell stuff to the federal government.
this entire administration has been a constant stream of "important turning point for the US" moments
I think most, perhaps all of those "important turning points" aren't really important turning points but just business as usual.
i genuinely do not understand why anyone is acting like this is something new; has this not been the status quo since forever?
futhermore this is kind of a naive framing painting the state as somehow separate from majority of the capital...
Are you claiming it has been status quo for the US government to king make companies through the usage of the defense protection act when one entity refuses to remove safeguards? Do you have any examples or is this just the worldview that aligns with your own?
Sure, the state has always had theoretical power to do this, but when was the last time something remotely like this actually happened?
Yep, where does your trust lay now? It's been a minute of pretending it'll be okay.
Nothing has changed in decades regarding this. People just like to pretend something new is happening, because they're extremely desperate to proclaim a fundamental turning / ending of the US (which is why every single event brings out those claims: this time is different! America will never recover from this! etc).
US tech companies were previously forced into compliance with PRISM or threatened with destruction (see: escalating fines to infinity against Yahoo, forcing their eventual compliance).
You know what's new? This administration is doing out in the open what used to go on quietly.
> Nothing has changed
> You know what's new? This administration is doing out in the open what used to go on quietly.
So this administration has got bold and the behaviour has become overt.
The turning point happened when Trump was reelected. One could argue the turning point happened Jan. 6 2020 and nobody truly cared. The consequence should have been for all insurrectionists and Trump himself to be tried for treason and be imprisoned indefinitely. Yet here we are.
It was when the supreme court judged he could act like a king, the summer before he was elected, inventing things the constitution never said and setting the example of lawlessness Trump now follows up on confidently.
And continuing to pull on that thread, when the Senate refused to vote on Supreme Court nominees for the president in 2016.
Call it the pebble that started the landslide but I lay it at the Patriot Act, which was passed in October, 2001. The passing of the law was bad enough but the subsequent extensions of the law by both parties cemented the government's intent.
In other words we might have killed Osama Bin Laden, but he won. The U.S truly is a "shadow of it's former self."
> The consequence should have been for all insurrectionists and Trump himself to be tried for treason and be imprisoned indefinitely.
People have this intuitive sense that there's some kind of authority of truth or justice, an available recourse that we could've and should've used.
But that sense is incorrect.
What we actually have the political and justice systems that Trump and his adherent have, so far, quite successfully subverted.
I'd agree - Trump fulfils the criteria of treason.
It's interesting to see that nothing happens despite this. Now he started another war to distract from his involvement in the huge Epstein network. Also, by the way, quite interesting to see how many people were involved here; there is no way Ghislaine could solo-organise all of that yet she is the only one in prison. That makes objectively no sense.
Another flawed democracy just sentenced their ex-president who attempted a insurrection (and similarly claimed broad presidential powers and immunity) to life in prison. Interesting contrast.
e: Americans seem to be surprised to learn that their democracy is indeed classified as a flawed democracy for more than a decade by The Economist due to decades of backsliding (the more rapid regression lately is not yet accounted for, but I wouldn't be surprised if the outcome of the 2026 elections results in a hybrid regime assessment in 2027).
You'd have a job arguing it's treason legally. In the US that's "levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort".
They were going to do him for conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, re. the 2020 stuff before he got reelected.
That’s funny because I was raised to believe that the consequence for treason was a hanging.
That it should’ve been the death penalty for every single person on the Capitol lawn.
That they signed their own death warrants.
Your take is a call for civil war. You're obviously wrong about "treason" since even larger majorities voted for Trump in 2024.
The US is already in a state of civil war, that war was declared in 2016.
Half the country just hasn't accepted the reality that the other half refuses to share a society with them and wants them dead.
The same is true about Meta and US antitrust law, or the GDPR and DMA in Europe.
Governments should not be permitted to introduce regulations against companies of this kind if the regulations can be enforced selectively and with regulator discretion, as the GDPR and antitrust definitely are. The free-speech implications are staggering.
outside of just the tech sector, this country has already crossed MANY irreversible turning points. also, good luck with your midterm elections. we have started war with Iran. cheers from Barcelona from this American refugee.
Its called corporatism and is a part of classical fascism.
Isn’t there some kind of term for when the government controls the means of production. I’ll think about it. It’s one of those terms that’s been thrown around so loosely by this regime you knew they were going there.
I don't see a good reason to downvote you, though that's a pattern here these days. But I do have a question about your statement. This move certainly has the hallmarks of fascism. But how is it corporatism when it's the elected government that's trying to punish a corporation? Granted that this regime is deep in the pockets of the corporations and billionaires. But it looks like they would have spared Anthropic if they capitulated to the regime's demands and bent their back over. This seems more like retribution for refusal of loyalty rather than corporate sabotage.
> But it looks like they would have spared Anthropic if they capitulated to the regime's demands and bent their back over.
Yeah dude, that's the point.
That's the opposite of corporatism. Corporatism would be if the corporations made demands of the government, and the government bent over backwards.
The US government has lots of corporatism, but this isn't an example of that.
There are always winners and losers in political discussions not every corporation could have control over decision making. But that doesn't mean companies aren't playing a major rool in decisions. I'd imagine companies owned by Larry Ellison (fox and soon cnn) have a much larger role in decision making and agenda setting that most people are comfortable with.
Corporatism/corporatocracy is about representative groups from industries being embedded in the state and their interests shaping state policy.
The current US administration's relationships with corporations is more seeking to maximise how much bribe money it can extract from them, whilst undermining them with counterproductive policies no matter how big the tax breaks are.
I'm not sure I fully understood your point, but about the question "how fascism if elected?": the Nazi Party won (i.e., it was the most voted party) in multiple elections in the late 20s/early 30s.
Corporations learn about “first they came for [Apple Inc.] but I am not [Apple Inc.] so I didn’t do anything”.
Trump was threatening Netflix for having a democrat on the board last week. They seized 10% of Intel. They forced Nvidia to tithe 25% of China revenue into a slush fund. The FCC has been used to censor comedy. The ship has sailed and the only consequence has been hand-wringing.
Yeah the passivity of the US population will be remembered for generations. Of course it's the people talking about freedom the most that do the least, as usual, big mouths are antithetical to actions.
The US educational system has been manufacturing these dual career specialists that are competent in their careers and believe that makes them specialists in all other area, but they get played like fools constantly. The level of discourse, of public conversation, is like 7th graders. Until you get to politics, then it's "sports talk" with "winning" being all that matters, even if winning means the destruction of law and of completely corrupt forever future.
And, I believe, a sufficiently comfortable population isn't motivated to act. With social media and streaming, people aren't bored enough/are too engagingly distracted to bother.
It’s not passivity - it’s active approval. 40% of people actively cheer everything he is doing
I was checking Trump approval ratings yesterday. I didn’t have high hopes but I thought it had to be under 35% at this point (I think in a sane country it has to be <10% or at least <20% after the nonstop madness dropping everyday). But nope, every poll places him at >40% approval or ever so slightly below 40%. To me that’s definitive confirmation that “it’s on Trump and his cronies, not the American people” is nonsense. It’s on at least 40% of American people. They weren’t blindsided by false promises, they want this.
Exactly. The Trump Show is primarily a media production. Bombing Iranians is a special effect that happens to get people killed. Dead Iranians won't be on camera. The media backers, Fox and now CBS and Paramount (the Weiss empire), will support this and make sure the American people like the war. Americans enjoy their propaganda, it tells them they're the white heroes.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/23/politics/trump-approval-r...
A recent report shows the approval numbers, for all americans it's at 36%. For white americans, its at 45%
I didn’t see that one, I think I saw 41% on NYTimes, 41% on Reuters, 39% on The Economist, 42% on YouGov, and 43%, 40% elsewhere I don’t recall.
Even 36% is sky high for what he did.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/donald-trump-appro...
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/TRUMP-POLLS-AUTOMATED/APPRO...
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
Utter idiocy at election day is not passivity.
History will put Trumpers and Confederate at the same level of despicability.
You mean have a holiday for him? 4-8 states have a Confederacy Memorial Day.
Okay, if you have big actions to show off, then show us how it’s done.
You step up and start shooting at the heartless monsters running the first (US armed forces) and second (ICE) most well-funded militaries in the world. Go ahead. We’ll be right there behind you.
(Yeah, I’m burning some hn karma for this, I imagine.)
Thank you for giving an example of what I’m talking about. You’re there fantasising about armed conflict when there are a million different actions one can take.
But nope, only words, words and more words.
It's part of the dismal/pathetic form of American exceptionalism that's taken root in the last decade.
"We mustn't consider dealing with problem x because it wasn't considered important by our founding fathers"
"China are catching up, so we need to cower behind a tariff wall rather than risk losing an open competition"
"Other countries with similar legal systems have successfully reformed their supreme courts, but there's nothing we can learn from them"
"We shouldn't constrain rogue leaders because of, er, something to do with King George III"
...and now "we can't push back against the regime, because they'll shoot us if we do".
It's so weird - a huge shift in such a short period of time. As an outsider who wishes America well, it's really sad to see.
None of this is entirely new. Americans have always fetishised their constitution or founding fathers. While there has been an era of free trade, that is over, and I think the west in general is in a difficult position (ultimately as a result of believing the "end of history" BS).
As for getting shot, while the chance of getting shot in the US for opposing the government is much higher than in similar circumstances in somewhere like the UK (which is far from perfect - but rarely actually shoots people), its also much, much lower than in Iran or China or Saudi Arabia.
Pushing back against the US government is a lot safer than taking part in something like the 2022 protests that ousted the Sri Lankan government, and lots of normally apolitical people took part in that (which was why it succeeded).
It’s 5am on a Saturday. What millions of actions do you suggest, O just-as-wordy-yet-holier-than-thou HN commentor?
Assuming this is in good faith: think about it yourself, are you seriously waiting for people to tell you what to do? Use your critical thinking skills, read history about similar situations. If you can't, find someone OFFLINE that will. And don't go telling your plans on the web.
Get organized. Join a mass movement, a local group or a union. There are many people doing things. Stop complaining then excusing yourself for not being one of them.
No one can do everything but everyone can do something.
If you are in law enforcement, do not follow clearly unlawful orders. The president is not your boss. This is a functioning democracy.
If you are a librarian, do not hide otherwise lawful books that the current administration dislikes.
If you are in logistics, do not collect obviously unconstitutional taxes. Make sure to challenge them in courts first.
If you are in a university, stick to what is true and scientifically sound. Do not hide inconvenient truths.
If you are a baker, do not refuse to make a rainbow colored cake just because you are worried what the people wearing metaphorically brown shirts might say.
The list goes on and on and on. This has been well documented throughout history. Fascism needs a seed to thrive, and that seed is people complying in advance. Not with actual laws, but with the idea what direction the law will take, just because it's easier for them. People not helping other people because immigration is not in vogue right now and who knows what the neighbors might say.
https://commonslibrary.org/198-methods-of-nonviolent-action/ here's some to get you started
The first 17 of those are all variations on “make words”. :P
Do you know how the deadliest conflict of the XXth century eventually came to be? The words of one Adolf Hitler.
Don't dismiss words: they are the necessary link between (individual) thoughts and collective deeds.
PS. Trump also got there with words: speeches, slogans, imprecations
It's just weird that whenever a shooting happens anywhere else in the world, or they pass some draconian surveillance law, Americans criticize that country for not having a Second Amendment and rising up in violence against their government.
And that whenever a mass shooting happens in the US, Americans reassure themselves that gun violence is a price worth paying for the Second Amendment. And there is a run on pawn shops and gun stores because mass shootings are the best form of advertising America's billion dollar gun lobby has.
And that Americans will wax poetic about watering the Tree of Liberty with the Blood of Tyrants and Patriots any time gun control comes up, because they believe their Second Amendment is an absolute vouchsafe against tyranny and because of that, they and they alone are the only truly free country.
And they were willing to rise up in Portland.
And they were willing to rise up during COVID.
And they were willing to rise up on Jan 6th.
And they're willing to shoot up schools and black churches and gay nightclubs and mosques so often it no longer makes the news.
But now, with blatant and undeniable tyranny in their face and shooting them dead in the streets... nothing.
Not that violence would necessarily be productive (although historically speaking no social or political progress happens without it)... but it's weird that the most violent society in human history, born of genocide and bathed in blood, with more guns than people and gun violence enshrined as its second most important and fundamental virtue, the land of "give me liberty or give me death" is all of a sudden the most timid.
Like goddamn throw a Molotov cocktail or something.
This is just a (bad) caricature of Americans, it’s not even very accurate of rural Americana or even Deep South rural. Most Americans just wake up, go to work, feed the kids, go to bed until they die, like most any other “first world” nation.
That's true but when specifically talking about gun ban laws they said it shouldn't be done because of being able to oppose a tyrannical government
You’ll find people here who are in America and are surprised by a comment like yours. They have guns, they don’t read the news and aren’t troubled by what’s occurring.
It's the image America has always projected of itself - aggressive and defiant, a nation of cowboys with Bibles in one hand and six-shooters in the other, rebels against any authority but God. I live in the South and have all of my life. I've had countless arguments with gun owners and gun rights people, and I know the arguments they use, and how proud they are of the image.
You're making the mistake of assuming an attribute of a culture cannot be accurate unless it's 100% accurate about every member.
I think it's perfectly valid to call Americans to the carpet when they won't live up to their stated principles, if only because of how obnoxious they've been about their own sense of exceptionalism, and how their guns serve as an absolute vouchsafe against tyranny.
History is going to note that the only times Americans attempted a revolution against their government was first in defense of slavery and second in defense of fascism, and that isn't a good look. Replying with #notallamericans doesn't help.
edit: OK partial mea culpa as the US had anti-slavery revolts[0], but the two events that will stand out for their lasting impact and scope are the Civil War and Jan. 6th. The Revolutionary War doesn't count because they were British at the time.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion_and_resistance...
But the Dow is over 50,000!
That is, the money doesn't care so long as it's still profitable. When the recession comes a Democrat will be allowed back in to fix things.
See Liz Truss.
No one after Liz Truss fixed anything in Britain.
I think the fix was reversing the idiotic tax cuts that Liz Truss promised. It doesn't fix every single problem ever for England but nothing ever does.
I think the solution is also obvious for the United States — higher taxes and lower government spending. We need to do both. However, you can't get elected if you promise both those things.
Not really a turning point, the US has been turning for months, ever since the felatio of inauguration. This is just another rung on the ladder
This isn’t new. Maybe some people are just now realizing it.
Take the stated tool for this action, the Defense Production Act ("DPA") [1]. It was passed in 1950. What does it cover? Well, lots of things. The DPA has been invoked many times over 76 years.
Notably in 1980 it was expanded to include "energy", I guess in response to the 1970s OPEC Oil Crisis.
Remember during he pandemic when gas prices skyrocketed? As an aside, that was Trump's fault. But given that "energy" is a "material good" under the DPA, the government could've invoked it to tackle high energy prices and didn't.
So, the government is willing to invoke the DPA to protect corporate and wealthy interests, which now includes military applications of AI for imperialist purposes, but never for you, the average citizen. IT's weird how that keeps consistently happening.
The US government has consistently acted to further the interests of US corporations and the ultra-wealthy. You probably just haven't been paying attention until now.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
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Your language suggests you’re an ideological supporter of trump but I’m curious:
What exactly is being imposed by anthropic?
This is from the anthropic letter:
> We held to our exceptions for two reasons. First, we do not believe that today’s frontier AI models are reliable enough to be used in fully autonomous weapons. Allowing current models to be used in this way would endanger America’s warfighters and civilians. Second, we believe that mass domestic surveillance of Americans constitutes a violation of fundamental rights.
Do you see these views as “left wing”? Or what do you disagree with here?
It isn't a left wing stance though. It's standing for the constitution. At the cost of going against the illegal state demands.
Compliance with the DoD doesn't remove big tech's complicity.
I would argue we're miles away from an important turning point, it's been turning so much since then, its basically a full circle now
Im sorry to say the turning point has well passed. The US is a facist country with leaders who will flaunt the rule of law.
Please memorize the 14 points of fascism, you will see examples of this multiple times a day. Its ecerywhere.
Domestic mass surveillance might feel tolerable when you live in the country conducting it. But how would you feel about other countries adopting similar policies, and thereby mass-surveilling the American people? Because that's exactly what these policies authorize when applied to the rest of the world.
Americans always think they're exceptional so they have the divine right to do things that the rest cannot.
I would feel much better about other countries mass surveillance than the US. China for instance can’t do nearly as much to me as the US justice system can.
Ok so now connect the mass surveillance system to an automated killing system that can blow you up in the grocery store because you're standing in line next to its target.
Yes but you would be dead before it can affect your quality of life so its unimpactful. The former can very much impact your life
The fear itself of that happening is impactful, and they know that and will use it
Given a choice between someone blowing me up because I’m next to a high value asset and worrying about jack booted masked thugs with qualified immunity killing me and being cheered by 40% of the population - I’ll take my chance with China having my info before ICE or the local police.
The bad news for American people is that "others" are pretty good at these technologies. When I read an important AI paper chances are all the names on it are non-American, even for papers from American labs. In a real war, this becomes problematic.
Every nation has some bias but I think Americans have power poisoning for being the dominant power for so long. They think they are entitled to do anything and believe they are the good guys in the history. Well...
What’s an American name?
I thought the US was a country of immigrants (or was before it started hunting them)?
When you look at the world as a action movie with good/bad guys, then you're going to have a pretty bad time.
There are only good/bad people for moments in time. Some are good for longer than others.
But I get it, anti-American sentiment is very popular right now.
How else do you suggest common folks are supposed to view world, or well anything?
Americans do the same, hence whole world got ttump. 95% of the world aint US, so such logic is even easier for almost whole mankind - is US force of good or evil? Different places would give you different answers, and most americans would not like the actual spread these days.
The way the anthropic statement was written really stood out to me. How they posture themselves in favour of surveillance for foreign countries or the existence of fully autonomous weapons if they don't threaten US citizen lifes.
I wonder if this is how some non minority of American thinks or was just worded like that to try to appeal to the "most radical patriots"
I'm pretty neutral in this fiasco, but if a company is willing to consider *in principle* providing services to the *Department of War*, they'd better be OK with their services being used to conduct surveillance or kill people of other countries...
I think war is bad and generally a stupid thing to do, but my point is that if they were negotiating terms with the department at all, it's really a given they'd be OK with the stuff you took issue with.
It’s especially ironic considering the title and the fact that many employees are not US citizens.
Among other consequences, if Anthropic ends up being killed it’s going to be just another nail in the coffin of trust in America.
Companies who subscribed will find themselves without an important tool because the president went on a rant, and might wonder if it’s safe to depend on other American companies.
It is absolutely unsafe to depend upon American companies, and I can guarantee you that all over the world, people are actively looking for alternatives already. You never know what happens next, things that used to take years happen in a single Truth Social post now, and no matter how twisted your worst nightmare scenarios look, this ridiculous band of crooks in charge of the USA manages to one-up them.
When you put it like that, it makes me almost want to wish for Anthropic to die from this. But the blow to the field in general would be huge, and I benefit from their service as well.
Unfortunately, every country has a law somewhere saying it can take private property at will if it is in the national interest.
It's not only the US being special in this case.
The problem is pretty simple: there is money to be made and someone will do what the Pentagon wants. Will it be worse in capabilities than Anthropic? Probably, but as long as it can be used to wage autonomous war wherever the US military decides, it will be good enough.
Anthropic can stick to their beliefs as much as they want, but it will not change the outcome, maybe just postpone it a bit.
On an unrelated note, I think the Pentagon erred when it labeled them a supply chain vulnerability, they should have used the DPA to make them do what they need. Less drama and much cheaper compared to replacing them with a whole different company.
Anthropic will just move out of the US. A lot of scientists fled Nazi Germany in the early stages. A lot of them fled to USA and end up being part of the Manhattan project that gave the Abomb that helped US win and end the war. We are going to bleed a lot of AI researches and engineers.
USA can’t just deny the ability to leave if you are deemed to be important for national security?
But they could open up a branch in EU with some people (and their money), and then step by step employ the people from the US in EU, bleeding out the US entity on a long run: At least yet, no one can stop their top scientist to move to another country with the knowledge and just pick up their work in the new conutry.
>At least yet, no one can stop their top scientist to move to another country
Let's hope so, because I am not so certain.
Oh come on. Saying “no” is not eroding trust, it’s taking a stand.
When the US banded human embryo research did that erode trust? I didn’t hear anything about that at the time.
Don't you know enforcing whats best for your citizens clearly erodes trust? Just keep selling off your future for short term gains! Anything else is heckin problematic :(
> We hope our leaders will put aside their differences and stand together to continue to refuse the Department of War's current demands for permission to use our models for domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight.
This is a trap. Two, I guess, but let's take the first one:
Domestic mass surveillance. Domestic.
Remember the eyes agreements: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/are-the-eyes-agreements-abo...
Expanding:
> These pacts enable member countries to share signals intelligence (SIGINT), including surveillance data gathered globally. Disclosures, notably from Edward Snowden in 2013, revealed that allies intentionally collect data on each other's citizens - bypassing domestic restrictions like the US ban on NSA spying on Americans - then exchange it.
Banning domestic mass surveillance is irrelevant.
The eyes-agreements allow them (respective participating countries) to share data with each other. Every country spies on every other country, with every country telling every other country what they have gathered.
This renders laws, which are preventing The State from spying on its own citizens, as irrelevant. They serve the purpose of being evidence of mass manipulation.
You all want to feel safe just because you are a US citizen but this is a mass surveillance technology on global level. It’s nothing like some secret agent spying on a KGB asset in Berlin like in the old days. We are writing on HN, are we on American soil? Not really. No one asked me for passport. This is not a “domestic” space. Everything here can be automatically and legally spied on. And this applies to everything digital. Spy bots don’t have the concept of “domestic” or any way to identify citizenship. And if Google or TikTok can spy on you, your government and ChatGPT/Grok’s agentic secret agents can definitely spy on you. I’m sure they have better loopholes than the Eyes thing, if they really need one.
It is relevant. Anthropic would have argued the US military could not use its tools to process data gathered by foreign agencies when it applied to US citizens or soil.
So there you have it
> We hope
No. Hope is not a strategy. Too much of the techno optimist future narratives we use to coat over the increasingly screaming cognitive dissonance as we see what keeps us civil, from each other's throats, decline, smothered by the rise of the broligarchy.
What's happening here is not about AI. It's a loyalty test, administered to every major actor in the economy, the more influential, the more ruthless and earlier.
Your core values, in exchange for taxpayer money access and loyalty to the Don, an offer few can refuse.
And the choice will come for everyone. It's a distillation attack to filter the
- DEI for Grants - Your officer's oath to not kill civilians by word of your leader for continued career - AI Safety for non blacklisting - Your immigirant employee's location for us not harassing your offices in person - Your trans neighbour shipped to a reeducation camp and gender reassignment for the safety of your family.
Becoming complicit is the ultimate loyalty
So stop hope. Stop asking. Demand, Force, Resist.
``` Do not go gentle into that long night, The righteous should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light ```
The point that I've not seen someone making: do you even need LLMs for domestic surveillance? I can grab a copy of EmbeddingGemma or Qwen3-embedding or a similar model and do semantic clustering of existing data, since the "retrieval" is the most important part for such applications, not its integration into a LLM.
if it doesn't matter, why is the DoD pushing for it?
Power play? My understanding is that they want to see companies bend the knee publicly
The citation for your quote appears to be an unsourced Reddit post.
The agreement at the heart of 5 Eyes is to not surveil the other nations - this must be up there for most persistently misunderstood fact among techies (probably why AI spits it out)
Unless there’s new information, this is exactly what the Snowden leaks exposed.
Snowden wasn’t showing the world the NSA surveillance systems against them; he was trying to show that the US was illegally spying on its own citizens by leveraging the five-eyes countries to collect and aggregate the data on their behalf.
I was always baffled by this "revelation". Everyone has always known about the five-eyes arrangement. It was common knowledge when I was growing up in the 70s. It wasn't new info.
There were a lot of things Snowden revealed, but most assuredly it was also about spying on US citizens. The NSA directly wiretapping people, even in cases when all communication was domestic. The NSA working to bypass security via routers diverted during shipping to Google, Facebook, and others, backdoors installed, thus compromising their infrastructure.
Back to the 5eyes, there is a difference in terms of scope and scale, when it comes to a foreign country spying on your citizens, and you doing it. The scope is entirely different, the scale, the capability.
It does matter whether it is 5eyes doing it, or whether it is domestic.
Now, does this stance matter overall? I don't know. It's a nice moral stance, I think. Is it functionally realistic?
I just don't know.
Who are you going to cite?
Snowden, as a very rare exception, did show clearly that the government agencies are quite capable of not providing anything to cite.
The agreement, conveniently, isn't legally binding. It's a gentleman's agreement between utter scoundrels, formed to give a semblance of trustworthiness.
As an Australian, I wouldn't trust it at all. The US government has already asked the Australian government for highly expanded information on Australian citizens, and that's above the table.
Stop believing what these people are telling you. They have an awful track record, and the people making the statements now are even worse than the previous people.
There's obviously gaps in domestic mass surveillance they've gotten from allies or else they wouldn't care so much about using Anthropic for it.
That's always been the loophole. But it involved an extra step so they are just trying to get rid of that one annoyance.
Here is an interesting thing to think about which country spies on Americans the most and how? Are there New Zealand commandos sneaking around the shores tapping cables? Moles working in the AT&T for the Canadian government? What happens if one of those individuals get caught, are they quietly allowed to leave, and if they commit any crimes do the charges get erased magically? Otherwise, if that doesn't happen there is danger they'll grab our spies in their countries in turn. Or they just blatantly pass lists around of who works for whom so they don't interfere with each other as that would preclude getting the data back through the loop to the NSA.
There is of course another loophole and that is private entities collecting data. The Constitution doesn't say anything about that, so the government figures it's fare game if they just pay a company to collect the data and then they query later. They didn't collect it so it's not "spying".
I imagine they're officially sent in some "diplomatic" capacity.
Anne Sacoolas (the woman who mowed down a British teenager with her car, but escaped because she had diplomatic immunity) turned out to be a senior CIA spy.
Actually she probably did not have diplomatic immunity. That is why she was removed from the country in such a hurry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Sacoolas#Diplomatic_issue...
Not just that, but with how unfriendly we have been to the world, there's no guarantee that they will keep sharing as they have in the past.
This is one thing I cannot fault Trump on. He's really succeeded in reducing European reliance on, subservience to, and respect for the USA. Now if we can stand on our own and not just swing further towards China instead, he'll have produced an absolute miracle
> He's really succeeded in reducing European reliance on, subservience to, and respect for the USA.
is that so?
It's amusing to imagine spies from puny former British colonies snooping around the AT&T offices in trench coats and fedoras, but if this is the case, more likely they just share access to data from remote systems
You should definitely ask your local homeless veteran of their opinions of other forces. I highly doubt many will have anything but praise to express.
When these things done right you won't hear about it.
Pardon?
It's a response to the "puny" part of your statement. Anzac special forces are renown for their brutal effectiveness (and frequent disregard for the rules of war[1])
Despite this comment focusing on "domestic", because it highlights workarounds I read it as reinforcing the tone-deaf implication in the letter that using the models to spy on non-Americans is ok.
The problem with forcing public policy on companies is that companies are ultimately made from individuals, and surely you can’t force public policy down people’s throats.
I’m sure nothing good can come out of strong-arming some of the brightest scientists and engineers the U.S. has. Such a waste of talent trying to make them bend over to the government’s wishes… instead of actually fostering innovation in the very competitive AI industry.
I don't see how public policy is being "forced" on anyone here? It seems like the system is working as intended: government wants to do X; company A says "I won't allow my product to be used for X"; government refuses to do business with company A. One side thinks the government should be allowed to dictate terms to a private supplier, the other side thinks the private supplier should be allowed to dictate terms to the government. Both are half right.
You can argue that the government refusing to do any business with company A is overreach, I suppose, but I imagine that the next logical escalation in this rhetorical slapfight is going to be the government saying "we cannot guarantee that any particular use will not include some version of X, and therefore we have to prevent working with this supplier"...which I sort of see?
Just to take the metaphor to absurdity, imagine that a maker of canned tomatoes decided to declare that their product cannot be used to "support a war on terror". Regardless of your feelings on wars on terror and/or canned tomatoes, the government would be entirely rational to avoid using that supplier.
I think the bigger insanity here is the labeling of a supply chain risk. It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic. It's another when it actively attempts to isolate Anthropic for political reasons.
It means that all companies contracting with the government have to certify that they don't use Anthropic products at all. Not just in the products being offered to the government.
This is a massive body slam. This means that Nvidia, every server vendor, IBM, AWS, Azure, Microsoft and everybody else has to certify that they don't do business directly or indirectly using Anthropic products.
Microsoft, Azure, AWS, Nvidia and IBM all have deals with other providers for AI. That itself doesn't turn the needle.
I think the point is that would be catastrophic for Anthropic.
Who cares about Anthropic? That's the guys who are pushing for regulations to prevent people from using local models. The earlier they are gone the better
"First they came for Anthropic, and I said nothing because fuck those guys I guess."
First they came for Anthropic in spite of the fact that Anthropic tried so hard to make them come for local models first.
Nvidia can also say no, they won't have choice but yield or not have AI at all
Going by what Hegseth said, it bans them from relationships or partnering with Anthropic at all. No renting or selling GPUs to them; no allowing software engineers to use Claude Code; no serving Anthropic models from their clouds. Probably have to give up investments; Amazon alone has invested like $10B in Anthropic.
It bans them from using all open source software unless they have signed an agreement with the developer to prohibit use of Claude Code.
> It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic.
This is literally the mechanism by which the DoD does what you're suggesting.
Generally speaking, the DoD has to do procurement via competitive bidding. They can't just arbitrarily exclude vendors from a bid, and playing a game of "mother may I use Anthropic?" for every potential government contract is hugely inefficient (and possibly illegal). So they have a pre-defined mechanism to exclude vendors for pre-defined reasons.
Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate.
That doesn’t sound right. Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website.
Let me put it this way: DoD needs a new drone and they want some gimmicky AI bullshit. They contract the drone from Lockheed. Lockheed is not allowed to source the gimmicky AI bullshit from Anthropic because they have been declared a supply-chain risk on the basis that they have publicly stated their intention to produce products which will refuse certain orders from the military.
Let’s put it this way, The DoD is buying pencils from a company. Should that company be prohibited from using Claude?
You are confusing the need to avoid Anthropic as a component of something the DoD is buying, with prohibitions against any use.
The DoD can already sensibly require providers of systems to not incorporate certain companies components. Or restrict them to only using components from a list of vetted suppliers.
Without prohibiting entire companies from uses unrelated to what the DoD purchases. Or not a component in something they buy.
There seems to be a massive misunderstanding here - I'm not sure on whose side. In my understanding, if the DoD orders an autonomous drone, it would probably write in the ITT that the drone needs to be capable of doing autonomous surveillance. If Lockheed uses Anthropic under the hood, it does not meet those criteria, and cannot reasonably join the bid?
What the declaration of supply chain risk does though is, that nobody at Lockheed can use Anthropic in any way without risking being excluded from any bids by the DoD. This effectively loses Anthropic half or more of the businesses in the US.
And maybe to take a step back: Who in their right minds wants to have the military have the capabilities to do mass surveillance of their own citizens?
> Who in their right minds wants to have the military have the capabilities to do mass surveillance of their own citizens?
Who in their right minds wants to have the US military have the capability to carry out an unprovoked first strike on Moscow, thereby triggering WW3, bringing about nuclear armageddon?
And yet, do contracts for nuclear-armed missiles (Boeing for the current LGM-30 Minuteman ICBMs, Northrop Grumman for its replacement the LGM-35 Sentinel expected to enter service sometime next decade, and Lockheed Martin for the Trident SLBMs) contain clauses saying the Pentagon can't do that? I'm pretty sure they don't.
The standard for most military contracts is "the vendor trusts the Pentagon to use the technology in accordance with the law and in a way which is accountable to the people through elected officials, and doesn't seek to enforce that trust through contractual terms". There are some exceptions – e.g. contracts to provide personnel will generally contain explicit restrictions on their scope of work – but historically classified computer systems/services contracts haven't contained field of use restrictions on classified computer systems.
If that's the wrong standard for AI, why isn't it also the wrong standard for nuclear weapons delivery systems? A single ICBM can realistically kill millions directly, and billions indirectly (by being the trigger for a full nuclear exchange). Does Claude possess equivalent lethal potential?
Anthropic doesn't object to fully autonomous AI use by the military in principle. What they're saying is that their current models are not fit for that purpose.
That's not the same thing as delivering a weapon that has a certain capability but then put policy restrictions on its use, which is what your comparison suggests.
The key question here is who gets to decide whether or not a particular version of a model is safe enough for use in fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic wants a veto on this and the government doesn't want to grant them that veto.