In the US, the FDA has a Compassionate Use exemption to clinical trials for exactly this circumstance!
There must be informed consent, no reasonable alternatives (which, in cases we deem terminal, is often the case), and some evidence pointing to the treatment possibly being helpful. It's an excellent ethical program that gives patients a choice and advances science.
In my experience most legitimate biotech companies working on promising drugs and therapies don’t want to touch the exemption with a 30 foot pole. Since they raise most of their money from the public to fund clinical trials, a single bad reaction could generate enough bad PR to derail fundraising and kill the drug. Sticking to clinical trials allows them to control that blast radius so even though the FDA approves >95% of applications, in practice very few drugs are available that way.
The biggest exception is oncology. Since everyone knows that chemotherapy is hell, cancer drugs tend to get a pass and pre-approval companies are (slightly) more willing to work with compassionate use exemptions.
1st comment: 2 day old account, "is the real story here", summary -> comment -> question, general punchiness of style without saying that much. These llms feel like someone said "be an informal hacker news commenter" so they often end with "Curious how" instead of "I'm curious how" or "Worth building" instead of "It's worth building". Not that humans don't do any of this but all of it together in their comment history, you just get a general vibe.
author reply: not as obvious, but for one thing yes literally em dash, their post has 10 em dashes in 748 words, this comment has 2 em dashes in 115 words. Not that em dash = ai, but in the context of a post about AI it seems more likely. And finally, https://github.com/mksglu/claude-context-mode/blob/main/cont... the file the author linked in their own repo does not exist!
Thanks for making me aware of another federal agency :)
Seems to me prosecuting or regulating this sort of activity is futile, and pretty much serve only the interests of the mob. These markets make additional data open source, which otherwise might exclusively belong only to mob, so that's pretty cool. We democratized buying airstrikes.
It You may know how bad things really are, but if you don't, the lawboys are pretty much just playing pretend at this point, and have been for a while.
Mob wants me to add: if you try to buy an airstrike with our very based and functional cryptocurrency systems, you will probably just find mob. We have mob priced in, anybody with a significant amount of cryptocurrency knows this too.
It's not as simple as "buy an airstrike" comrade (we are referencing the person writing this post)
If you see prediction markets as how they were originally pitched (price ~approximating likelihood), then insider trading is good. It provides discovery.
If you look at what prediction markets are today (gambling, especially on sports, especially in states that have banned it), then insider trading is bad. Particularly when the people trading can influence the outcome (e.g. a pitcher purposefully throwing into the dirt.)
> Isn't insider trading on a prediction market only wrong to the extent the insider is violating some duty of secrecy to the company?
Yes.
Prediction markets, for corruption reasons, are regulated by the CFTC. In commodities markets, actors are assumed to be making trades based on propriety information. Hedging is the whole purpose!
> …like it's a stock market where there is some society-level interest in giving participants protection from having less information than insiders.
Ah, no!
Insider trading in the stock market is (usually) only illegal in your first case: when the person trading is violating confidentiality.
It is not about fairness.
Fairness is a poor proxy for whether specific trading is illegal.
For example:
If a company accidentally leaves a press release for a merger publicly available, I happen to guess the URL, and then I trade on it: Unfair (I have access to insider information that other market participants do not) but legal!
If I work at the company, am sent the press release to copy edit, and then trade on it: Illegal. I have a duty to the company not to trade on it.
Okay, then imagine you overhear at a bar. Yes “anyone could have” theoretically, but not actually. In either case, you have material non-public information that your counterparty in the market does not.
you got that piece of non public information was not because you are an insider. As long as the bar is not exclusive to insider, i don't see any difference
Isn't it exclusive to people who live in the area of the bar?
What if the bar has a cover charge, so only those who pay get in?
What if the cover charge is $10,000 and the bar is advertised as "the place where public company execs love to come talk to each other about private deals"?
Your comment seems to imply that trading based on material non-public information in prediction markets is always okay, which is not the case. The CFTC just made a press release detailing some instances of invalid use of nonpublic information on prediction markets: https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/9185-26
Interestingly, the CFTC objects to a political candidate trading on their own candidacy on the grounds that it is fraudulent. So it looks like they could attempt to regulate self-trading quite strictly, at least if that theory holds up after a court challenge.
>> If a company accidentally leaves a press release for a merger publicly available, I happen to guess the URL, and then I trade on it: Unfair (I have access to insider information that other market participants do not) but legal!
Not necessarily. Just because you accidentally left your S3 bucket open and I brute force my way to the link by guessing doesn’t make it legal. It can still be insider information. Insider information is not limited to people who have a duty to the company. If I break into the companies office and steal information and trade on it then it can be insider trading.
Supply chain risk is not meant for this. The government isn't banning Anthropic because using it harms national security. They are banning it in retribution for Anthropic taking a stand.
It's the same as Trump claiming emergency powers to apply tariffs, when the "emergency" he claimed was basically "global trade exists."
Yes, the government can choose to purchase or not. No, supply chain risk is absolutely not correct here.
> The government isn't banning Anthropic because using it harms national security. They are banning it in retribution for Anthropic taking a stand.
You might be completely right about their real motivations, but try to steelman the other side.
What they might argue in court: Suppose DoD wants to buy an autonomous missile system from some contractor. That contractor writes a generic visual object tracking library, which they use in both military applications for the DoD and in their commercial offerings. Let’s say it’s Boeing in this case.
Anthropic engaged in a process where they take a model that is perfectly capable of writing that object tracking code, and they try to install a sense of restraint on it through RLHF. Suppose Opus 6.7 comes out and it has internalized some of these principles, to the point where it adds a backdoor to the library that prevents it from operating correctly in military applications.
Is this a bit far fetched? Sure. But the point is that Anthropic is intentionally changing their product to make it less effective for military use. And per the statute, it’s entirely reasonable for the DoD to mark them as a supply chain risk if they’re introducing defects intentionally that make it unfit for military use. It’s entirely consistent for them to say, Boeing, you categorically can’t use Claude. That’s exactly the kind of "subversion of design integrity" the statute contemplates. The fact that the subversion was introduced by the vendor intentionally rather than by a foreign adversary covertly doesn’t change the operational impact.
But there will always be deficiencies in testing, and regardless, the point is that Anthropic is intentionally introducing behavior into their models which increases the chance of a deficiency being introduced specifically as it pertains to defense.
The DoD has a right to avoid such models, and to demand that their subcontractors do as well.
It’s like saying “well I’d hope Boeing would test the airplane before flying it” in response to learning that Boeing’s engineering team intentionally weakened the wing spar because they think planes shouldn’t fly too fast. Yeah, testing might catch the specific failure mode. But the fact that your vendor is deliberately working against your requirements is a supply chain problem regardless of how good your test coverage is.
The rule in question is exactly meant for “this”, where “this” equals ”a complete ban on use of the product in any part of the government supply chain”. That’s why it has the name that it has. The rule itself has not been misconstrued.
You’re really trying to complain that the use of the rule is inappropriate here, which may be true, but is far more a matter of opinion than anything else.
You keep trying to say this all over these comments but this isn’t how the law works, at all.
I fully understand that they are using it to ban things from the supply chain. The law, however, is not “first find the effect you want, then find a law that results in that, then accuse them of that.”
You can’t say someone murdered someone just because you want to put them in jail. You can’t use a law for banning supply chain risks just because you want to ban them from the supply chain.
Not sure what you think “the law” is, but no, this kind of thing happens all the time. Both political teams do it, regularly. Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton…all have routinely found an existing law or rule that allowed them to do what they want to do without legislation.
> The law, however, is not “first find the effect you want, then find a law that results in that, then accuse them of that.”
In this case, no, there’s no such restriction. The administration has pretty broad discretion. And again, this happens all the time.
Sorry, it sucks, but if you don’t like it, encourage politicians to stop delegating such broad authority to the executive branch.
It doesn't harm national security, but only so long as it's not in the supply-chain. They can't have Lockheed putting Anthropic's products into a fighter jet when Anthropic has already said their products will be able to refuse to carry out certain orders by their own autonomous judgement.
The government can refuse to buy a fighter jet that runs software they don't want.
Is it really reasonable to refuse to buy a fighter jet because somebody at Lockheed who works on a completely unrelated project uses claude to write emails?
I’m not sure if you deliberately choose to not understand the problem. It’s not just that Lockheed can’t put Anthropic AI in a fighter jet cockpit, it’s that a random software engineer working at Lockheed on their internal accounting system is no longer allowed to use Claude Code, for no reason at all.
A supply chain risk is using Huawei network equipment for military communications. This is just spiteful retaliation because a company refuses to throw its values overboard when the government says so.
This isn’t the case, sadly. Some people, like Ben Horowitz sadly, have gone completely off the deep end.
Some are culture warriors who feel they have been wronged, some are opportunists. But the thing with opportunism is that this is who they are and what they believe in. Having a president who is corrupt is exactly what they want because they know exactly how to work with him: quid pro quo.
There is no distance between them being pro-Trump and opportunistic. He’s the perfect embodiment of those values.
This is patently silly. The US does not have a democratically elected dictatorship.
People and companies are free to do whatever the fuck they want that’s not illegal. They can resist any government priorities for any reason, including finding them destructive or anti-democratic or corrupt.
The government is able to change the laws within the current system to back its will—regardless of whether it’s in the interest of the people who voted for them, let alone the entire population.
There must be informed consent, no reasonable alternatives (which, in cases we deem terminal, is often the case), and some evidence pointing to the treatment possibly being helpful. It's an excellent ethical program that gives patients a choice and advances science.
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