More like the government is treating this like the near term weapon it actually is and, unlike the Manhattan project, the government seems to have little to no control.
Anthropic has been pushing for commonsense AI regulation. Our current administration has refused to regulate AI and attempted to prevent state regulation.
"The government doesn't have control of this technology" is an odd way to think about "the government can't force a company to apply this technology dangerously."
The government should be entitled to any lawful use of a product they purchase, not uses dictated solely by the provider. It's up to courts to decide what lawful use is, it's not up to these companies to dictate.
The product is a service, and they agreed to a contract. Now they don't like the contract.
Is your view that contracts with the government should be meaningless? That the government should be able to unilaterally, and without recourse, change any contract they previously agreed to for any reason, and the vendor should be forced at gunpoint to comply?
If you do believe this, then what do you believe the second order effects will be when contracts with the government have no meaning? How will vendors to the government respond? Will this ultimately help or hinder the American government's efficacy?
Hegseth trying to play “I’m altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further” just shows this gang’s total lack of comprehension of second-order effects.
No, it’s up to the government to create policy and legislation that outlines what is lawful or not and install mechanisms to monitor and regulate usage.
The fact that an arm of the government wants to go YOLO mode is merely a symptom of the deeper problem that this government is currently not effectual.
YOLO here refers to unsafe usage of LLMs. Your government is supposed to make legislation that protects all of its citizens, it’s not “what you agree with” game.
Providers are free who they choose to do business with, or not do business with. Are you arguing that the government should be able to compel a provider to allow their use when it’s well documented the government does not respect nor adhere to the rule of law? I think you misunderstand commerce and contract law.
Providers are bound by plenty of laws that alter how they do business or who they do business with.
You can’t say “no disabled people at your business”. Hell, you can’t even say “no fake service animals at my restaurant”. Many in America also think you can’t say no girls in the Boy Scouts, or no men in a women’s locker room.
When Congress makes the law, you will be accurate. At this time, there is no law that enables the US executive branch to achieve their desired outcome of strong arming Anthropic.
> Many in America also think you can’t say no girls in the Boy Scouts, or no men in a women’s locker room.
Your average American is low functioning, low education, vibe driven with a 6th-8th grade reading level, so this ("What Americans think") is not terribly relevant in my opinion. Provide statute and case law.
Which I'm sure will work as well as tariffs. Three years to go, good luck to them, slowing them down as proven exceptionally effective. Their efforts will likely die at midterms.
Flagship LLM companies seem like the absolute worst possible companies to try and nationalize.
1. There would absolutely be mass resignations, especially at a company like Anthropic that has such an image (rightfully or wrongfully) of “the moral choice”.
2. No one talented will then go work for a government-run LLM building org. Both from a “not working in a bureaucracy” angle and a “top talent won’t accept meager government wages” angle (plus plenty of “won’t work for trump” angle)
3. With how fast things move, Anthropic would become irrelevant in like 3 months if they’re not pumping out next gen model updates.
Then one of the big American LLM companies would be gone from the scene, allowing for more opportunity for competition (including Chinese labs)
It would be the most shortsighted nationalization ever.
Makes me wonder how the engineers working for the "moral choice" company felt about it dealing with Palantir, a company perhaps the furthest away from anything moral.
>> No one talented will then go work for a government-run LLM building org.
I think you massively underestimate how many people would have no problem working for their government on this. Just look at the recent research into the Persona system for ID verification, where submitting your ID places you on a permanent government watchlist to check if you're not a terrorist. There's a whole list of engineers and PhDs and researchers present who have built this system.
>> “top talent won’t accept meager government wages” angle
Again, that's wishful thinking - plenty of people want to work in cybersecurity in AI research for the government agencies, even if the pay isn't anywhere close to the private sector. This isn't exclusive to the US either - in the UK MI5 pays peanuts compared to the private companies for IT specialists, yet they have plenty of people who want to work for them, either because of patriotism for their country and willingness to "help".
If you have more money than god, you no longer get to play the "I didn't know" game. You have the resources. If you don't know, you made a choice to not know.
Chinese models are developed by Chinese corporate. they are free and open weight because they are the underdog atm. they are not here for fun, they are here to compete.
The competition is good though, it will push down the prices for all of us. At some point being behind 5% won’t have much practical difference. Most people won’t even notice it.
I will gladly switch to that one if their CEO is less of sociopath than Altman and god forbid Amodei. In fact I use some of the new Chinese models at home and compared to Opus 4.6 AGI, the difference is getting less. Codex 5.3 xhigh is already better than opus anyway.
Would anyone pull a Pied Piper and choose to destroy the thing rather than let it be subverted? I know that's not exactly what PP did, but would a decision like that only ever happen in fiction?
It wouldn't need to. As sibling commenter pointed out... they'd have a massive exodus of talent, and they'd cease to make progress on new models and would be overtaken (arguably GPT 5.3 has already overtaken them).
funnily enough, buses in philadelphia are IMO pretty nice. Especially the current fleet. No more hiking up narrow stairs. They sit low to the curb, easy on and off, go to a lot of locations, and they're clean inside and out.
Compare that to the subway which several stories below city hall, nasty, dirty, filthy, stinking air, human excrement, rats, etc... I love the bus
The US auto market is like the UK in the 80's. As the UK is flooded with Chinese appliance cars - I seriously doubt that VAG or anyone else can stop them. It's over for domestic automotive industries unless we are willing to accept higher prices via anti-competitive measures to keep some manufacturing domestic.
That doesn't seem to be the case across Europe based on current sales.
Looking at marketshare in the EU+EFTA+UK 2025 to 2026:
VW Group went from 26.8% to 26.7%. Stellantis went from 15.5% to 17.1%. Renault Group went from 9.8% to 8.7%. Hyundai Group 8.4% to 7.6%. BMW Group 7.0% to 6.9%. Toyota Group 8.0% to 7.2%. SAIC Motor was flat at 2.0%. BYD 0.7% to 1.9%. Tesla 1.0% to 0.8%.
So it doesn't really seem like BYD is eating into the sales of European manufacturers yet. VW + Stellantis + Renault + BMW + Mercedes + Volvo + Jaguar Land Rover was 66.9% in 2025 and it's 67.1% in 2026, an increase of 0.2 percentage points (looking at just VW + Stellantis + Renault, it was an increase of 0.4pp).
We'll see what happens going forward, but Chinese cars aren't killing it yet. SAIC Motor is flat. BYD is doing very well, but it's a lot easier to grow when you're small. I think that Chinese cars will present challenges, but I'm less sure that it's over for European automakers. Right now, European automakers are marginally increasing their marketshare (probably more noise than anything, but not evidence of decline).
I think BYD is a strong company and I think they'll continue to gain marketshare, but will others? SAIC has seen modest European growth since 2024, but nothing really threatening and they're sitting at 2% marketshare and their modest growth seems to becoming no growth. Chery is really small. Geely is ultra small without Volvo.
So it feels like it's really the BYD story. BYD is the company actually making inroads and growing at a significant rate. And I don't think that a single company can destroy the European auto industry. It's possible BYD could become 10-20% of the European market and that would be a major win for them and make a significant dent in competitors. But do you see them becoming more? Are there other companies that seem promising?
The US government has already chosen the higher prices via anti-competitive measures route, specifically to keep affordable Chinese and even Japanese cars out of the market.
> The US auto market is like the UK in the 80's ... It's over for domestic automotive industries unless we are willing to accept higher prices via anti-competitive measures to keep some manufacturing domestic
That is what is happening. The reality is that the demographic that manufactures cars is different from the demographic that purchases EVs [0].
That said, American battery manufacturing has silently been booming despite public political consternation [1] thanks to defense against overproduction.
Also, it's hypocritical to demand American autoworkers lose their jobs while demanding tech bros be defended against the H1B program [2] and offshoring [3].
A lot of people’s problems with H1B visas has nothing to do with protecting American jobs. The truth is H1B visa are a method of exploiting foreign workers. Make H1B run for a fixed time period and not be tied to a specific job and you’ll simultaneously boost the supply of highly-skilled workers and ensure they get a fair market price.
Is it hypocrisy? Or is it "I support whatever I think is good for the American consumer and America generally"? Most real people couldn't give less of a fuck about market fundamentals and purity.
There are only ~440,000 Americans employed in computer-related work [0] compared to ~4,000,000 Americans employed in the automotive industry [1], ~1,700,000 Americans in the transportation manufacturing industry [2], and ~500,000 in electronic components manufacturing [3].
More American consumers would be negatively impacted by layoffs in well paid manufacturing industries that are fairly geographically distributed like the automotive industry than an industry that is consolidated in a handful of single party states like the software industry.
More bluntly, SWEs primarily live in single-party states like California, Washington, NY, and Texas; represent a fraction of employees Americans; and work in a politically irrelevant industry (if the tech industry was actually politically powerful the H1B rule would have never been proposed). In essence American SWEs are politically irrelevant and do not matter as they cannot swing elections.
I read that post as him talking about their company, in the sense of the company they were working for. If that was the case, then an exploit of an unfixed security issue could very much affect them either just as part of the company if the fallout is enough to massively harm business, or specifically if they had not properly documented their concerns so “we didn't know” could be the excuse from above and they could be blamed for not adequately communicating the problem.
For an external company “not your company, not your problem” for security issues is not a good moral position IMO. “I can't risk the fallout in my direction that I'm pretty sure will result from this” is more understandable because of how often you see whistle-blowers getting black-listed, but I'd still have a major battle with the pernickety prick that is my conscience¹ and it would likely win out in the end.
[1] oh, the things I could do if it wasn't for conscience and empathy :)
No i mean, 'a company you own'. At the end of the day you're just a worker getting paid to produce output. cross your I's and dot your T's and whatever else and then clock out.
Even keeping to the 9-to-5 you can make your displeasure at being insecure know. And if the security issues come to a head and it damages the company, you could be out on your arse if the company dies or needs to cut costs. In the current environment is a lot worse than it would have been five or ten years ago, and that same environment likely limits the “I don't like it so I'll just leave” options that are available.
I'm lucky, I have options¹ and it is looking like I don't need them²³, but many are not so lucky.
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[1] I made serious enquiries about a couple of them when the recent take-over was announced, just in case…
[2] the new corporate masters seem to be doing more than talking the talk, and on quality matters we were already doing things right and the new overlords don't appear to have any desire to change that
[3] well, at least not on these matters, there are a few cultural changes that I need to get used to or get away from, largely due to being a bigger organisation now, but they aren't wrong just a little further from my preference than things were before.
Their websites says they're a freelance cloud architect.
The article doesn't say exactly, but if they used their company e-mail account to send the e-mail it's difficult to argue it wasn't related to their business.
They also put "I am offering" language in their e-mail which I'm sure triggered the lawyers into interpreting this a different way. Not a choice of words I would recommend using in a case like this.
This is a good point. I think we get a couple of emails a week for exactly this kind of bottom feeder 'consulting firm' 'offering' to tell us all about some massive security issue they found, as long as we sign up for a 'consulting engagement'[1]. On the other hand, we generally ignore them, not threaten to sue them.
[1] We get about as many 'pay us a bounty or we'll tell the world about this horrid vulnerability we found'. I have suggested to legal we treat those like extortion attempts to make them go away and stop wasting our time but legal doesn't want to spend time on it.
Twitter was for, almost ever, infected with basically spam and 'fake user counts'. These fake user counts were of course included in the numbers told to investors and it drove sales price of stock. Did you think facebook would ever be immune to that?
no but if the old '10x developer' is really 1 in 10 or 1 in 100, they might just do fine while the rest of us, average PHP enjoyers, may go to the wayside
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