Well sure they do, thank Citizens United and others for that. But that doesn't mean we can't appropriately categorize them as also hostile actors alongside russia, china, whoever.
It's undo influence over politics against the best interest of the American people that's the issue. Company, foreign nation, it doesn't matter.
Citizens United did a lot to effectively legalize foreign influence as well, since the mechanism is opaque transfer of money
But regardless, most people's threat models should discount based on geographic and political distance. All else being equal, chinese surveillance is a bigger threat to you if you're in china than if you're in the us, and vice versa
So the Honolulu Star-Observer (a corporation, or “artificial person”) only has those rights & privileges that it has been granted by the State of Hawaii?
This is going to end up being a nice little windfall for the attorneys and otherwise just clog the Federal court system.
"the day the law goes into effect, it strips each Hawaii entity of the powers it held the day before. The new law asserts that “[t]he creation and continued existence of a corporation is not a right but a conditional grant of legal status by the State and remains subject to complete withdrawal at any time. All powers previously granted to corporations under the laws of this State are revoked in their entirety."(TFA)
The meaning is pretty clear, don't try to influence politics in favor of the corporation or you will go away. Simple as.
Citizens United was about spending money on electioneering communications, and whether there was a First Amendment right to do so even if you’re associating in a corporation like the New York Times Company or Apple or Citizens United or the Sierra Club.
I think the odds of that are low. It's not like decision maker(s) are watching social media and going with the vibes, but it's almost certain that there's a rich conversation going on behind the scenes in opaque channels, especially with regards to the AI-only companies. And those conversations are likely what drove their decision.
Lol, fair point! But I'd argue two things. The first is that few to none of them are changing their opinions due to the proles. The second is that public vs private opinions often differ, sometimes extremely, especially with influential people. For an example there I think it's fairly certain that some chunk of the people pushing AI believe it's a bubble, and are motivated solely by trying to squeeze the boom window for all they can personally extract. And so their public positions on things, and their private ones may different radically - especially in domains where they stand to win/lose as a result of those issues.