Item — HN Reader

Despite the complete Archie Bunker energy in that post here is something interesting from the post:

"Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow."

with major civil and criminal consequences to follow.

WTF !!!

6 comments

That was in the cards since Hegseth's initial announcement, when he brandished the option for Anthropic to be put on the same level as China and Russia, i.e. the same level as State enemies of the US. Got to give it tho Anthropic's CEO, I had first though that he'd give in faster, looks like he's still clinging on.

Also see what happened to Joseph Nacchio in the early 2000s [1]:

> He was convicted of 19 counts of insider trading in Qwest stock on April 19, 2007[2] – charges his defense team claimed were U.S. government retaliation for his refusal to give customer data to the National Security Agency in February, 2001.

Unfortunately, I think the same thing is in the cards now for Anthropic's CEO, that is if he doesn't choose to play ball.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

The part of Dario's response I found funniest was pointing out the inherent contradiction in the DoW threats. Somehow, they could both be a national security threat as well as a national security necessity. Not by doing something differently - at the same time, to the same people, in the same context.

They won’t be brandished as a supply chain risk because the supply chain members are good at lobbying and they like Claude.

As an example, Amazon is a defense contractor and uses Claude heavily internally for development. They are also major investors in Anthropic. Amazon would not want Claude to be banned from use on developing AWS services that may be cross sold to the government. Multiply this by every defense company that uses Claude (eg anduril and Palantir).

They could totally try and punish Anthropic executives of course. That seems likely.

TACO, right? Six whole months to not actually phase anything out. And the orange brat just retrenched at a revised and more impotent threat.

He's worried he might need Anthropic to steal the midterms.

I’d love to get the reaction if all the VC investors who “reluctantly” had to support Trump because Lina Kahn was just too meddlesome, and they had to support a candidate who would be hands off with big tech.

Leopards, faces

This shouldn't surprise anybody at this point. This is how Trump behaves on a daily basis. He thinks that he can direct the federal government to do literally anything he wants and operates on pure retribution.

So many people wrote think pieces about how Trump couldn't possibly be a fascist because fascism involves state takeover of corporate power. Hm...

I am honestly surprised he is being this nice given he could use the war powers act and eminent domain to just seize the company and conscript their employees. I am sure someone will say that is not legal but when has that stopped anyone.

What I don't get is why they really want it. I can't think of a worse platform in general to do anything with combat that is, anything in a data-center. I would take the Quake 3 Arena engine on a new ultra insane mode combined with a tiny self hosted model to detect humans, uniforms, vehicle make and model plus a simple Friend or Foe over all the big AI platforms any day. Add an optional feed from an encrypted meshtastic like network to sync nodes using pre-defined Ostiary like commands. Ultra-fast, light-weight on all resources, decentralized.

The enemy could neutralize all the big platforms in one day by simply activating a few dozen of the sleeper agents in the US or a couple High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) deployed by a few stratospheric balloons as China flew over every major military installation in the US. Adding to this having a network dependency to the big platforms from autonomous weapons is an extreme vulnerability. Any design that depends on a central command is a single point of success.

> I am sure someone will say that is not legal but when has that stopped anyone.

it has routinely stopped them as the courts have already struck down countless of nonsense by this administration, and they rely exactly on this bluster every time they try something else.

The issue is that even though courts work slower than a president with a smartphone eventually it will all get sorted out and they know this, which is why some people falling for this shock and awe behavior is so silly.

The issue is that even though courts work slower than a president

So ... not stopped the president. Make a move, eventually ruled naughty, shift to another move, ruled a no-no, take an alternate path, rinse repeat. How does one fix the courts or is it working as intended?

He simply ignores the courts.

He just changes the law he uses as justification and does the same as before. The Gish gallop of law