It’s like citizens get one vote, and then the shareholders of that company get a much bigger vote on a per person basis.
(Please withhold boring responses about how there are lots of problems with corporations, or this current government is bad, etc etc. I know all that, I’m just playing devil’s advocate because it seems like there is a reasonable case on that side, again, in the abstract.)
So we should make lobbying by corporations illegal? Because is not lobbying "influencing or attempting to influence" policy?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying
Further Anthropic was not trying to 'influence or attempt to influence policy': they simply had restrictions on what their service(s) could be used for, which was written into a contract that the (current) administration agreed to. The government was free to have whatever policy it wanted.
If the government didn't like the conditions of the contract then the government could try to get Anthropic to agree to change the terms, or cancel the contract all together.
As one comment put it: Can the government force a company that runs a nuclear power plant force that company to make a nuclear weapon?
If Anthropic wants non-weapon/military use of their service, and publicly states that and puts that into the terms of service, can they be forced to? Can the government force a Quaker to pick up a gun?
* https://www.renofriends.org/the-peace-testimony-and-military...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quakers
Or can the government force a Quaker to manufacture a gun? Force a sale of steel that the Quaker manufactures to a weapons maker? (There's a whole spectrum of 'complicity' here.)
Which is what anthropic did? Nation states aswell as companies want to control their business involvements. The difference is, companies manipulating representatives will never be as fundamental (hopefully) as an arbitrary legal basis for governments to force companies. The orwellian angle comes from the total authoritarian one.
How is mass surveillance not orwellian.
I remember Winston having a private conversation about political beliefs, and then being literally tortured into submission. And I remember Anthropic refusing a government order (albeit a stupid government order), and then being labeled a "supply chain risk." You can twist reality however you'd like though.
If you can’t see the allegory in that story to an administration that actively goes after those it labels as enemies because they dare to voice their own opinion or oppose their political goals in any way, either you’re not cut out for literary analysis and trying to apply metaphors in literature to the real world or you aren’t seeing the real world for what it is.
> Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable.
Yup, definitely not an enemy.
> Instead, @AnthropicAI and its CEO @DarioAmodei, have chosen duplicity
Don’t you call your friends duplicitous?
> Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles.
Oh boy. Doubleplus ungood.
> I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic
Oh yeah, totally not an enemy. Just no one can do business with them. Doubleplusungood behavior.
They’re both a danger to US troops with their behavior and also critical to the supply chain of said troops. Very important to understand and accept that doublethink.
I remember Winston being forced to accept that 2+2=5 and believing it.
> In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
* https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/321469-in-the-end-the-party...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_%2B_2_%3D_5#George_Orwell
> And I remember Anthropic refusing a government order (albeit a stupid government order), and then being labeled a "supply chain risk." You can twist reality however you'd like though.
I remember when American companies could do domestic business, or not, with whomever they wished without having to worry about being punished by the government for their choices.
If a government orders a pacifist to pick up a gun, is that allowed? If a government orders a pacifist to manufacture a gun, is that allowed? (There's a spectrum of 'complicity'.)
No you don't, because that time as never existed.
> If a government orders a pacifist to pick up a gun, is that allowed? If a government orders a pacifist to manufacture a gun, is that allowed? (There's a spectrum of 'complicity'.)
Yes. It's called the draft. It's called wartime manufacturing decrees. These all existed at the time of Orwell, and he never alluded to them being thoughtcrimes. Compelling people to act against their beliefs is common and distinct from throughtcrime. And if you cannot see that, then I don't even know how to talk to you. Government has always controlled your outer life. Orwell introduced thoughtcrime as the next step in totalitarianism, as the erasure of inner life.
edit: I asked Opus to analyze this thread, and I agree with it.
> That said, Orwell would probably also note that the people arguing against you aren't entirely wrong to be alarmed — they're just reaching for the wrong literary reference and overstating the analogy. Government retaliation against companies for political speech is concerning on its own terms without needing to be dressed up as dystopian fiction. The 1984 framing actually weakens the critique by making it easy to dismiss as hyperbolic.
> He'd probably tell everyone in the thread to say what they mean in plain language and stop hiding behind his book.
So I agree with the judge, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard.
Unfortunately for you and all of the other people here endlessly talking about her use of "Orwellian" as references to thoughtcrimes, reality control, and doublethink, she was likely instead using the word in reference to the fact that the DoW wanted to use the tech for surveillance.
So, no, you don't agree with the judge, as convenient as that appeal to authority may have seemed. She made a slightly hyperbolic statement about the surveillance state. You all went into... I don't even know what.
> Moreover, Defendants’ designation of Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” is likely both contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious. The Department of War provides no legitimate basis to infer from Anthropic’s forthright insistence on usage restrictions that it might become a saboteur. At oral argument, government counsel suggested that Anthropic showed its subversive tendencies by “questioning” the use of its technology, “raising concerns” about it, and criticizing the government’s position in the press. Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government
And something like 150 retired judges signed on, those are the amicus briefs supporting Anthropic:
> Numerous amici have also described wide- ranging harm to the public interest, including the chilling of open discussion about important topics in AI safety. The motion for a preliminary injunction is granted.
She could have said that those amicus briefs raise surveillance concerns. She didn't use the word surveillance; she didn't say AI safety is important; she said open discussion about AI safety is important. That's the issue over which this injunction is granted.
We know that the judge asked a long, organized list of questions to the government; there are multiple ways for the government to get out of a contract, and she gave them room for nuance. We're talking about an astute top graduate of the Ivy League, who understands what it means to reference 1984; not some new jerk appointee.
So, I have to wonder if your perspective is an experiment. It's possible for someone today to pretend to be as brainwashed as the proles in 1984, to gauge 2026 reactions in a near-anonymous forum. Do like-minded others jump in? How many people actually read the judicial order? Do bots come out of the woodwork to bring up colonization and antisemitism points against Blair himself? If you bring up the same points on Reddit, do certain phrases appear at a frequency too high for coincidence? Orwell appears so regularly that repeated trials of this might demonstrate that the window is opening to a kind of 1984 doubt. I think we agree that'd be fascinating research.
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command"
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
That must have been a bit of a goofy check to write.
Or it may be the convention of using the name that the plaintiff or defendant has given themselves.