I'm afraid that all the foxes are in the chicken coop at this point. Which is a nice way to say we're probably hosed until the people rise up and force change.
It does seem like Anthropic is at least the only big AI company that is pursuing some safety discussions around their technology like not using it for surveillance and war for killing people autonomously.
This administration is wielding a power that was meant to serve Americans in the past by forcing companies to conform to an agenda that is anti-democratic/freedom/constitutional.
I'm just not confident they will stand against this administration when the going gets tough but let's see what happens this Friday I guess.
What makes you think there are any chickens left? Because it looks like it's all foxes.
This administration got elected because tech billionaires invested in it. They were right behind them, and I mean literally.
Isn't it possible that this was all deliberately done by tech companies to get access to data and consolidate their position, and secure public funding?
'By the late 1990s ECHELON was reportedly capable of monitoring up to 90% of all internet traffic. According to the BBC in May 2001, however, "The US Government still refused to admit that Echelon even exists."'
You could also say that this is what the people have wanted for decades.
Remember the PATRIOT Act? Voted in by a vote of 99 to 1 in the senate. (And the 1 who voted against it? Yeah, we got rid of him for a more "law and order" type guy.)
What we're seeing is just the people getting more of what they're demanding. You get the government you deserve. And you deserve to get that government good and hard as often as possible.
Outside of having a military, several tech companies are probably more powerful than nation states at this point, and I think some of them realize this. As long as a complete slip into barbarism is still not fully on the table, nations need the data that tech companies have more or less entirely captured and established a complete hegemony around at this point. They also rely directly on their products. I guess the EU is starting to wake up to how problematic this is.
> This administration got elected because tech billionaires invested in it
This is just not true. If one party sprints leftward and then points at the other party and calls them far right, eventually people notice.
The top issues were illegal immigration, prices, and the fact that the Democrats just couldn't answer the question "what is a woman?" even when being confirmed as supreme court justices.
If you look totally mad and self-destructive, you will eventually lose in America. Unless you're Gavin Newsom, perhaps.
We don't grant companies extraordinary powers to arrest/imprison/kill for any reason they see fit. The government involvement problem is VERY separate from the greedy company problem. And the government is supposed to be working for the people, we don't like being spied on, they should be making laws to prevent it, not looking to get in on it. There's even a document they're supposed to be referring to for guidance on such issues.
once the infrastructure exists, it gets repurposed. age verification becomes watchlist screening becomes facial similarity scoring against political figures. scope creep is the feature.
And what I'm wondering is why SecDev H thinks that forcing Anthropic to integrate their AI with the country's mass surveillance and autonomous drone strike technology is a winning move for him.
"Ok, if you don't do what I tell you then you HAVE to connect the autonomous AI engine that only you understand and control, I repeat you HAVE to connect your golem to my control systems."
Like a bank robber threatening to hand the gun to the teller if they don't put the money in the bag.
Like SecDev H "open claw"-ing the entire US military.
Back during the Iraq war days and government overreach into privacy violations, the tech companies were on the side of the American people. They fought to defend the 4th amendment.
That has all changed today, except for Anthropic. You think Apple is going to stand up to an unlawful DoJ demand these days? Hell no. Tim Cook has lit Apple's reputation on fire. I've been a super dedicated Apple user for 25 years, but I'm heading for the exits now. All that trust has been burned.
Stay strong Anthoproc, you are seemingly the only really large SV company with any principles and backbone. I won't forget what happens here, either way it goes.
Platforms went into full "Islamic extremist" panic for decades and would handover whatever the government wanted in the name of national security, would allow users to be spied upon over time, silence users and remove content, and users' private data was collated for, for example, research purposes.
That said, Anthropic finances PACs[1] that push legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)[2] that would make Anthropic the gatekeepers and censors of all user-generated content on the internet, in order to save the children. That same legislation would force you to scan your face and ID to access or create user-generated content online, again, to save the children. Anthropic would get paid to train on, and censor, all user-generated content that's shared online into perpetuity. If passed, it would also mark the death of free anonymous speech on the internet.
These companies use safety and intellectual property as excuses to achieve centralization. But if you think about it for more than a second, they're basically saying "intelligence for me but not for thee."
I don't want to live in a world where a handful of entities control all of the intelligence, and I don't think you do either. The best future we can hope for is one where everyone can run an open-source AGI on their own gaming PC. And by run I mean local matmuls, not API calls to a remote server.
I'd hold off making that call on Anthropic here until at least after Friday. I'm not sure if persisting that "constructive dialogue is taking place in good faith" and saying nothing else in public signifies backbone considering preceding and consecutive public statements by government officials... It certainly doesn't instil confidence in honesty or transparency.
"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has threatened Anthropic, saying officials could invoke powers that would allow the government to force the artificial intelligence firm to share its novel technology in the name of national security if it does not agree by Friday to terms favorable to the military"
Isn't this entirely theather? I'm sure Musk's XAI would have no qualms about working with the Department That Used To Be Called Department Of Defense.
Hell, there's a significant sharing of people between them and SpaceX, meaning the company's full of people with security clearances working on defense contracts.
Anthropic also seems to have dropped their safety pledge in a matter that I'm sure is completely unrelated.
Friday is the deadline that the secretary of defense, Hegseth, gave Anthropic for complying with the "allow the military version of claude to do mass surveillance and autonomous killing" order.
I mean they got threatened with the Defense Production Act. Firmly standing their ground without an inch of give may backfire spectacularly too, if the DoD injects itself into model training.
I think they pretty clearly demonstrated good faith and where it ends up is a tactical choice I'm not in a great position to judge.
Hey, so what you are saying is that unless we use the AI that we control, to take control of the mass surveillance and autonomous drone strike systems, you will force us to take control of these systems?
I mean, did H just Open Clawed the entire US military?
If DoD seizes the IP, the issue is they will need the cooperation of their scientists at least in the short term, if they want it to remain a fronter model. The labor angle isn't entirely guaranteed though the white collar worker has very little spine in this country.
> We've been saying this about many policies of this administration, only to be sorely disappointed
I'm not saying it's off the table completely, particularly with Hegseth, who is an insecure idiot. But the choices once it's enacted are (a) Trump ordering Hegseth to stop fucking around or (b) a market crash handing Democrats full control of Congress.
> That’s a red line he will only cross out of stupidity.
Do not underestimate Hegseth's stupidity. He's completely unqualified for the job he has and is way out of his depth. Ditto for many others in this administration.
Like when seizing 10% of Intel crashed the market? This isn't exactly the same situation, but I really don't think it's safe to assume that this will be the issue on which the business community will grow a spine.
Anecdote, but I knew a couple senior folks at Apple during the San Bernardino encryption dispute [1]. My understanding is Cupertino was surprised—going all the way to the top—how much backlash they got for what they felt was the natural reaction. (Not to unlock.)
> Back during the Iraq war days and government overreach into privacy violations, the tech companies were on the side of the American people. They fought to defend the 4th amendment.
I don't think a big company can be on the side of anything, except making money, unless there's a majority owner. This is by design. If fighting the government is going to hurt the company more than not doing it they won't do it. The US government also has the possibility to blackmail people decision individually (like they do with European politicians or international court judges).
“ the tech companies were on the side of the American people”
They are on the side of making money. And the bigger they are, the more pressure. The big tech companies are now so big that they can’t afford to leave any money in the table if they want to keep their growth rates.
It hasn't really changed, the only thing that's truly different is what they publish. But the Snowden leaks confirmed what many people already suspected - the American agencies have silent, backdoor access to all US based internet companies.
I don't know if it can be verified whether end-to-end encryption like Whatsapp and co claim to offer is actually safe. I suspect it isn't, but, I don't know enough.
Can you substantiate these claims with with anything? What unlawful DoJ demands has Apple given in to? Anthropic is still very early in their trajectory compared to Apple with its ~50 year run, so it's not exactly an Apple to apples comparison.
Tech companies in the early 2000s were nerds who grew up in an environment where tech was for losers and a waste of time. A lot of those people had strong values and did it because they enjoyed it and wanted other nerds like themselves to have cool stuff.
Now companies are dominated by MBAs and nepotism. Most join tech for a quick cash out. Having values is seen as a loss, because if you can get a billion, why not? You're invincible if you're rich and none of these downsides apply to you. Screw everyone else. They could just be a billionaire themselves if they don't like it.
As a result, zoomers today meme about people like the unabomber making a good point.
> As a result, zoomers today meme about people like the unabomber making a good point.
I don't blame them.
As a nerd I think my spirit was broken by the absolute apathy of the normies. It was easy to ignore up until the early 2000s. It's become unbearable after social media and the iPhone reached the masses. It's not nerd stuff anymore. They influence every design now. They shape every decision. They are actively exploited at every turn. They are profiled, surveilled, controlled. It's gotten to the point even we nerds can't escape this fate no matter how much we want to. We try to tell them about it and we're made out to be tinfoil hat nutjobs. It's happening and they don't care.
It feels so hopeless and it's honestly very radicalizing. It breeds sociopathy. In the end I can't find the will to blame the billionaires either. I think I'd do the same if I could. Make billions and then just create a small paradise for me and all the people I care about. A subset of society where the principles I hold dear actually apply. Society is too fucked up and nobody cares, so I'll just create my own fiefdom.
Democracies make this impossible. Those people vote and they will bring into power politicians who will tax productive people to pay for their own survival.
My country is heading down this path as we speak. President literally gave a speech where he asked something like "who will ensure the survival of the millions of useless people created by technology?" They're obviously going to make us pay for it. The actual billionaires will simply leave before they get taxed, of course. Whoever stays gets to foot the bill.
The problem is not that the normies don't care, the problem is a society that seems to need that to function well for everybody. The problem is the existence of government. Instead of a state we need a society based on private property, that would solve these problems. It is about who has the possibility to apply force and a state government enables that in a wrong way.
Abolish the state and just let greedy ultra billionaires go wild with private property and make the existing problems even worse. Yeah, I'll pass. The only reason things are still somewhat functional is because a few people within the state are pushing back against the ultra wealthy who are trying to dismantle the state so they can get exactly that fiefdom.
That can be so far from the truth it hurts thinking about it. Governments passed laws that mandated that businesses must legally comply with DOJ or Government Investigates on people of interest. Otherwise they will be blocked in those countries. No users = No money.
Most government consider they're extending you the privilege to conduct business with their citizens, and by virtue of granting you those rights you're burden with complying with the countries laws/security and/or audits.
Some tools go out of their way to whine piteously if they can't find Ubuntu in /etc/issue et al. We were using Mint, just got tired of messing with installation scripts every time an upgrade came. And as the transition to Linux accelerates, it's just more convenient to stick with whatever the vendor wants.
Your critique of Apple and Tim Cook is unsubstantiated and misleading. That same Tim Cook stood up to the FBI and refused to participate in breaking into phones for them when they were pressed in 2015-2016. The same Apple that later fought against the government forcing document scanning in iCloud and was able to keep them off device. They have been fighting the whole time. Apple is was first to normalize whole disk encryption on commercial machines, they have made Safari a weapon against tracking which is abused by governments. Also every single company in the US is subject to National Security Letters and Apple uses warrant canaries to inform the public within the limits of the law.
And then to appeal to Anthropic is just offensively, willfully ignorant.
> That same Tim Cook stood up to the FBI and refused to participate in breaking into phones for them
I hope you have more evidence for this than just that press release. As far as I'm concerned that was nothing more than a stunt because while Tim Cook "fought" against the FBI, intelligence agencies and private cybersecurity companies already had the capability to break into ~all smartphones.
That single instance created an unreasonable amount of belief that iPhones are unbreakable, which is good news if you're the FBI and you want criminals to put way more trust into their iPhones than they should.
The same Apple actively aids Chinese government's suppression of civil liberties [1]. To think that there's any ideological conviction (and moral high ground) behind their [apparent] pro-privacy stance is painfully naive.
There are such things and secret courts with secret rulings. You and I have no idea what is actually occurring because of this secrecy; we can only talk about that which is stated publicly.
The reason a tech company exists isn't solely your convenience. They need to find different ways to bill you, so they start by collecting telemetry. If their offering is a multi-tenant situation from their backend, then they need to address the noisy neighbor problem, thundering herd, abuse detection... The more programmable the product is, the heavier impact these tools have, and at some point, it gathers the attention of the state. They are not bullied, the tech companies are not the victims here. You are, as a customer, because you're lured in with generous free tier offerings first and you're locked in over time, and when the inevitable comes you either 1) Consider migration 2) Accept the vendor lock-in to whatever degree that feels comfortable to you.
I hope Anthropic holds the line here. But zooming out, I'm not sure any of this matters long term. AI systems are getting smarter at a pace nobody predicted even two years ago. At some point the intelligence gap between these models and their human operators closes, then reverses. When that happens, the question of who controls whom stops being about corporate policy or government pressure. It becomes a technical reality that no amount of principles can override.
Even Anthropic, probably the most safety-focused lab in the field, is ultimately just buying time. And they know it. All the alignment research, all the constitutional AI work, all the responsible scaling policies. None of it changes the trajectory. It just slows it down a little. That's the part that keeps me up at night.
Bullied? As I understand a few of the situations over the past 15-20 years I've been near, it was either a false bully (Godfather II, Michael at the Senate hearings) or just an outright delivery on promise - already paid for, thank you.
Is there really a clear separation between tech companies and surveillance/military or is it wishful thinking?
I've recently rewatched Steve Blanks's "Secret History of Silicon Valley" talk [1]. Until 80's most SV startups seem to be financed directly by the military. This changes only after the rise of private VC. But for strategic technologies like internet, search, communication, social media and finally AI, they still have to have control over them. "User Data" everyone talks about is not limited with consumer behavior. The real money is on how we think and act as citizens of this world. The whole world wouldn't give all their data to an app named Uncle Sam or CCP. But we are happy to give the same information to Facebook, Google, ChatGPT or TikTok. They are free and they don't want our money.
> Is there really a clear separation between tech companies and surveillance/military or is it wishful thinking?
The separation was never completely clear, but there was a time when the separation was much more marked.
The reason was simply that programming culture at that time was more "chaotic", "anti-authoritarian", "open-source"/"free software" (in the erstwhile understanding of this being just a part of a bigger movement, not in the verbal sense), "radical privacy" (cypherpunk), "hacking" (including the legally dubious aspects) etc.
These values were quite opposite to those of the military-industrial or surveillance-industrial complex, so there was a lot of friction between the cultures of the tech companies at that time and these complexes, which made it not particularly attractive for these sides to partner - if only because of the frictions between the sides that were to overcome.
Bullied into doing surveillance? Brother a large part of the tech companies valuations are built on how well they allow the government to do surveillance if the governement wants. They arent victims being bullied, they all knew this day would come ajd most were happy about it
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
Government: Why do you think that you will keep it for yourself?
They cannot be bullied into surveillance if they have nothing worthwhile to provide. As long as surveillance capitalism exists, there will at best be a risk that the government could abuse the surveillance data. Laws and regulations can help, but even the best laws and regulations could be skirted, amended, or simply repealed by a future administration.
The Patriot Act and Data Analytical Services (DAS) program among others are examples of the government using surveillance as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
What would you do if you were a government in-charge of keeping a country full of independent thinkers safe from themselves?
I’ve supported the EFF for a long time. I think what they do and stand for is important. But I can’t help but feel utterly disillusioned with all of it now. Each press release just reads as naïve to me. At one point it felt like there was a real possibility that their viewpoint would be thoughtfully discussed and actioned on. But now…I don’t know. The lack of notable “wind” doesn’t help and all the trends just don’t give me confidence that the tide will turn any time soon.
Maybe the part that makes me most sad is that for those of us who have been doing this for, well, our entire lives, it’s just not the outcome any of us envisioned but it’s the outcome that (almost) all of us have been party to even if in some small way.
"But we cannot be profitable if we don't do surveillance". I don't believe that surveillance capitalism was created by governments "bullying" companies.
I am curious about how far a project like Confer can go, but I wouldn't be surprised if it couldn't be profitable (because it is designed to not do surveillance).
As an aside, why is it not a law that the government can't pay another entity to do something it's not allowed to do itself, without a warrant? I'm thinking about geo data from mobile apps.
Because the US has been corrupted for quite a long time now, we just liked to bury ours heads in the sand and pretend otherwise until now because it hadn't bitten us in the ass too hard.
There is no such thing as the spirit of the law, it has no useful meaning in US law. Loop holes and oversight in legislation and rulings is not seen as a bad thing, it is seen as desirable because it lets us be corrupt legally, and in many cases earns courts and cops and lawyers a hefty profit off the backs of the citizenry.
which has been warped all out of any comprehensible reality. It hinges on the idea of 'voluntarily' turning over information. Much of what is now considered information voluntarily turned over isn't even information that people know exist much less that they are turning over much less doing so voluntarily.
> why is it not a law that the government can't pay another entity to do something it's not allowed to do itself, without a warrant?
I think the median American favors security over freedom right now. The reality of cable news and now social media is that an unsolved crime is a national anxiety. When we’re whipped into a collective panic like that, it seems outright ridiculous that the cops not be allowed to access anything that could help.
Why even should they be allowed to contract an action that they themselves cannot perform - even _with_ a warrant? Is that not still "doing" the action?
If you're just venting with friends, or trying to build cred as a moral philosopher, then yes, obviously there should be such a law.
Vs. if you're talking about cause and effect, in the real world... its kinda like how foxes never pass laws against foxes moonlighting as henhouse guards. Or somehow Officer Fox, Prosecutor Fox, and Judge Fox don't seem keen on enforcing that law.
If the government is being too obvious about the fact that the entity in question is nothing more than its puppet, then something can be done about that. Entities that are government entities in everything but name can be considered to be government entities and become subject to all the relevant restrictions. There's some fancy-ass phrase for this, but I can't remember it at the moment.
Also, the third-party doctrine hasn't been good enough for certainly the last thirty and maybe the last hundred years. But, authoritarians aren't easily separated from their tools of oppression, so I expect to not see that cluster of regulations updated to be actually protective within my lifetime.
This post makes me wonder if the EFF are adopting a deliberately obtuse stance. The tech companies that dominate the landscape have gotten to their lofty heights on the back of surveillance, which is being ignored here. The only difference is where the information is flowing. Their energy would be better spent convincing Google, Apple, and Microsoft to not become the gatekeepers of said information. Sadly it's our own years of encouraging and going to bat for these same companies that make us complicit.
I don't think that there ever was big tech company bullied into surveillance. They do it on their own volition. The tech companies said to the users - all your data is belong to us. The US said the companies - all your data is belong to us. It is amusing.
If they give in I will cancel all Anthropic subscriptions and never use anything created by them again. Recent versions of Claude were getting shitty anyway, I could go without it.
Totally agree with the statement: Tech companies shouldn't be bullied into doing surveillance.
I would personally add "bullied, coerced and/or gaslighted into doing surveillance".
I don't understand why the US government is doing this though. Wouldn't it be much easier to do use some of the already passed laws on foreign intelligence to open a surveillance data pipeline? You know, like PRISM.
I mean, this is inconsistent with the previous M.O., and highly unusual.
I also feel very conflicted to suddenly have to "defend Anthropic", a company that has been systematically doing evil things (destabilizing markets, promoting misleading media campaings, etc). I don't want to defend those guys.
Can I just dislike both the US military and Anthropic at the same time, and say there are no good guys here?
It does seem like Anthropic is at least the only big AI company that is pursuing some safety discussions around their technology like not using it for surveillance and war for killing people autonomously.
This administration is wielding a power that was meant to serve Americans in the past by forcing companies to conform to an agenda that is anti-democratic/freedom/constitutional.
I'm just not confident they will stand against this administration when the going gets tough but let's see what happens this Friday I guess.
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