Your court system wasn't designed for the Executive branch acting with actual bad intent.

You're a country of laws, but if enforcing them takes months if not years... Then during that time, you're the wild wild west

There's nothing sneaky about terms & conditions. If the gov wants a service they legally need to abide by its terms, same as us, if they don't like it they should choose another product.

Anthropic doesn't want their AI used for misaligned mass surveillance scanners and killbots, there are obvious reasons they might not want that.

> they shouldn't have some sneaky way to exert control over decision making using their products.

why not, many companies have all sorts of rules you agree to when using their products, including many legal ("lawful") things. Are you saying that the government as a client should be unbound by contractual obligations that apply to other clients?

This administration has made it very clear that they will do what they can to change laws whenever convenient, without congressional oversight, whether or not they are "allowed" to.

Trump implemented tariffs he wasn't allowed to immediately, he started a war he probably wasn't allowed to in order to (allegedly) distract from associating with a pedophile, he wrote an executive order trying to undo the fourteenth amendment, he has actively been abducting and imprisoning lawful residents (and even citizens!) and actively pushed for racial profiling to do so.

If a company feels like the government will simply rewrite the laws in order to advance any kind of political whim (including to be weaponized against that very company!), it's not wrong or even weird for them to want to add safeguards to their product.

To be clear, this isn't weird or uncommon. Lots the stuff you sign in the EULA isn't preventing you from doing things that are "illegal".

It's incredible if you honestly believe that.

The only reason this blew up at all was because of the insane overreach by the DoW after anthropic voiced their concern.

It was well within anthropic right to do so, as it was part of their contract.

And it would've been very understandable that the DoW balked at that, though the real issue would be the incompetence how the contract was able to get through with that in it. But with that contact in place, the only sensible action would've been to terminate the contract and move on. Frankly, nobody would've cared.

But the DoW felt it just had to go further... And their chosen action was just an insane overreach - hence the controversy.

Anthropic wanted the ability to verify compliance whereas OAI and Google went "OK no verification but then we won't give you the weights".

>So no one except them tells them what they can or cannot do.

you're missing "laundering the responsibility" approach - find a lawyer who writes that the thing is legal in his opinion, and voila.

I guess we have to appoint Amodei and Altman as our benevolent dictators to keep Congress in check!

I mean it's basically an extremely high-stakes version of the (possibly apocryphal) Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Most people (at least the people I've talked to, which admittedly is somewhat of a lefty bubble but I think even more generally) agree that companies getting to or close to "monopoly" status is a pretty bad thing, and that they should be broken up. Political candidates get a lot of social credit for claiming that they're going to do exactly that. The moment that they actually get into a position where they actually could do something about it, they suddenly remember who their campaign contributors are, and can then create reasons to avoid actually solving any of these problems.

Very occasionally we have successes in this field, like the breakup of Standard Oil and AT&T), but of course both of these sort of became toothless since we basically allowed both of these companies to re-acquire each other and form the same problems again.

There are similar reasons as to why politicians will occasionally push for regulations to not allow themselves to invest in companies that their policies affect, but somehow manages to never get through.

Politicians are very rarely punished for breaking political promises, but often rewarded for making the promises. They are also rewarded by their corporate overlords for breaking these promises.

Google has a monopoly because of the internet's insistence on ad blocking, and outright indignant refusal to dare pay a greedy company for thinking they could ask for money for a "free" web service.

It's basically impossible to get off the ground competing against google when 30-40% of people are just freeloading your service, and 80-90% think the internet is an ethereal realm that everyone could have ad and subscription access to if we could only agree to starve these greedy middle men.

Good comment, and I agree lol

I read it twice (admittedly quickly) but couldn't grasp the point even though I felt like it was there.