[Telemakhos]

Governments are sovereign: they tell people what to do (by making laws, by exercising a monopoly of violence, etc), and nobody tells them what to do. Governments also fight wars, which means lives depend on the government's ability to command.

Private companies make products. When those products were plowshares or swords or missiles, the company didn't really have a say over how they were used, and could be compelled by the government to supply them. Now that new cloud and AI products that increase government command abilities live on servers controlled by private companies, private companies think they can tell government what to do and not do. No government will accept that, because the essence of government is autocratic sovereignty: the sovereign commands and is not commanded.

[Filligree]

In American law, companies have the choice of whether or not to do business with the government, outside of a few corner cases. There’s a process for forcing them, but it can’t just be because the leader says so.

In this particular case Anthropic had a contract stating what the military could and could not use their models for. The military broke that contract. Anthropic declined to sign a revised one.

This is within their rights, and more to the point, the government should absolutely not be allowed to unilaterally alter contracts they’ve already signed!

Predictability is the whole point. Undermining it is how you destroy your own economy.

[orochimaaru]

That is allegedly not what happened. Anthropic’s CEO was happy to grant waivers on a case by case basis.

The problem is the branches of the government that Anthropic was doing business with found it infeasible to do this.

They had another problem. If one of their contractors used Claude to engineer solutions contrary to Anthropic’s “manifesto” would Claude poison pill the code?

Basically Anthropic wanted the angels halo and the devils horns and the govt said pick one.

[SpicyLemonZest]

> That is allegedly not what happened. Anthropic’s CEO was happy to grant waivers on a case by case basis. The problem is the branches of the government that Anthropic was doing business with found it infeasible to do this.

That's not what the presidential announcement blacklisting Anthropic said. It said they're being punished for trying to require that the military follow their terms of service.

[orochimaaru]

That’s the other pov (from the govt angle) - https://www.businessinsider.com/pentagon-official-details-ho...

The media is usually flush with defending Anthropic. And yes - the supply chain risk label is too broad. But there is another side to the story and Anthropic isn’t an “innocent” as made out to be.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I've heard this POV before, I just re-read it again, and I genuinely do not understand which part of it you think shows Anthropic is anything but innocent. To me it seems pretty clear: Emil Michael heard that Anthropic was asking questions about how their system was used, and he thinks that attitude is an unacceptable security risk. He won't accept the use of systems that were developed based on "their constitution, their culture, their people" or "their own policy preferences". Anyone who would ask such questions might sabotage military operations if they don't like the answers, he argues, and I believe that he genuinely believes this.

So he'll only accept systems developed by people who understand, as Sam Altman promised to, that the US military is not to be questioned.

[orochimaaru]

My impression was that Dario was happy to grant case by case exceptions. But Emil did not want that. I mean why setup claude at DoW where the goal is surveillance and targeting (possibly autonomous).

[Geezus_42]

Sure, they have a "choice", except that no one turns done the kind of money the government has to offer, and if the company is public they are legally obligated to increase shareholder value.

[mcmcmc]

> the essence of government is autocratic sovereignty

*was

Democracy was and is radical for putting the common people in charge of the government. The right to petition for redress of grievances is literally in the first amendment. Government is a social contract, enforced with state violence on one end and mob violence on the other.

If you want to return to autocratic rule, I hear North Korea is lovely this time of year.

[JackFr]

More importantly in the United States we have certain rights which cannot be abridged, even by a majority of the electorate though the government.

[Geezus_42]

Except the politicians just ask their rich friends to do the things they aren't allowed to do and then act like there's nothing they can do.

[mcmcmc]

And that makes autocracy better somehow? Democracies are designed to evolve. If government corruption is a problem, we as citizens have the power to change that. Laws can be passed to add controls, fund enforcement, require transparency.

Write to your reps and demand it. Call their offices and rattle their gates. If they don’t make it happen, vote in someone who will.

[Geezus_42]

I never said autocracy is better. I hope you are right. I do vote for people who at least appear to lean towards my ideal. The problem is being surrounded by people who are indoctrinated to vote the opposite, and being let down by the few who do win. There do appear to be pockets where good things are happening on the local level, but at the national level it's a shit show.

[Geezus_42]

I never said autocracy is better. We already have laws against a great number of things that are currently happening, but they are either enforced selectively or not at all. For many of what I would consider the most aggregious violations, even when punishments are handed down they are so weak that they do nothing to deter the crime. Companies literally figure the fines for laws they know they are breaking into their budget and people keep pretending like the system works.