This conflict has zero to do with AI in the grand scheme of things. We had a whole supreme court case about refusing service to customers. Remember that? Private companies can choose which customers to service. And let's be clear about what's being sold. It's not a product that changes hands, it's a service provided continually. And as anyone except the enlisted military troops can, said vendor can choose which efforts to help with. If what the government wants is so onerous as to find no vendors to offer it then that says something doesn't it?

This reads a whole lot like the government gets to make you do whatever it wants because the president was elected?

Freedom!

That's great that responsibility for offensive decisions ultimately lie with the civilian leaders of the military, but that does not give them the right to compel behavior from private citizens under threat of the government obliterating them.

"Seemingly innocuous terms from the latter like "You cannot target innocent civilians" are actually moral minefields that lever differences of cultural tradition into massive control."

GEEEEE, I wonder who the bad guys are here.

This opinion coming from one of the most compromised people possible on this issue, lol.

Good grief - we happen to have a free market with multiple suppliers. But a defense contractor in deep with the current administration’s ideology might have a hard time remembering that.

A lot of words and somehow still missing the point. This is a pretty straightforward question: should the US government be able to force a company to do business with it based the government's unilateral terms? I think the answer to that ought to be no, they should not be forced. And there's no other discussion to have.

You can discuss whether a corporation is violating some law, and punish them if they are, but I don't think jumping from "corporation doesn't want to do business with the gov" to "corporation is a national security risk" makes any sense.

What a fuckin' joke.

I agree with Palmer that Corporations shouldn't control governments.

But that's not what this is about. The US government is free to not use Anthropic's services.

The problem is that the government is using bullying tactics against a company excercising it's rights to not sell. Especially if they actually designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk - not only is that threat absolutely ridiculous, but actually doing so should be 9/10 on the danger scale.

WTF is even happening anymore? How did we get here that this is even up for debate???

Palmer Luckey is excusing the inexcusable for treats from the regime. If the regime gets away with this, when constitutional government is restored, I will be petitioning my congresspeople to destroy Anduril in retaliation.

None of this is relevant. They’re saying “our stuff can’t be used effectively for X but you can use it for Y”. It’s like if someone was saying “dude the o ring is going to fail on the shuttle launch” and you respond “if we have random people permitted to stop the shuttle launch every time we will never get off the ground”.

The rhetorical technique of generalizing a specific constraint is very effective in the peanut gallery but hopefully we don’t want our shuttles to blow up.

From Palmer Luckey who worshipped Trump as a teenager? Who has billions in contracts due to his sycophancy? Just like Joe Lonsdale and Peter Thiel? Yea his opinion is irrelevant.

> Should our military be regulated by our elected leaders

Utterly fallacious. Trump is not a leader, rather he is a divider. Nor was he elected to act as a dictator unbeholden to the Constitution or the courts. Corporate control is indeed terrible, but autocratic authoritarianism is worse. This gradient is shown by how it is only the rare company trying to impart some kind of restraint which is being taken to task.

It's also pretty amazing how no matter which societal institution we try to invoke to put the brakes on the fascists, we're invariably told that the "proper approach" is actually something else, usually settling on simply waiting for an election, some time down the road, maybe. Are we supposed to believe that elections are the only institution our society has? The fascists won a single election, and so we're told that supposedly serves as a mandate for doing whatever they'd like to our country for the next four years? Yeah, no, fuck off.