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.

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.

> 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.