But this isn’t a fight about Anthropic, or mass surveillance, or even AI. This is a fight about lawfare, constitutional rights, and corruption.
The lawfare part of it is that to coerce an individual or a company, governments are willing to abuse their power. The Biden administration did it when pressuring social media companies to censor content. The Trump administration is doing it to a much greater extent with things like ordering every government agency to stop using Anthropic and by labeling them a supply chain risk.
The ideological part of it is when Defense Sec Hegseth and Trump and AI Czar / PayPal Mafia member David Sacks repeatedly attack Anthropic as “woke”, and it is clear they’re undermining this company from their government positions based on Anthropic’s speech (first amendment violation). This obviously is part of why they attacked Anthropic in such a public way.
And the corruption part of it is OpenAI’s leaders being big supporters of the MAGA movement and the Trump administration. Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, is the biggest donor ever to the MAGA PAC. Why did Hegseth grant a contract to OpenAI after banning Anthropic, even though OpenAI has the same red lines in their agreement (what Sam Altman claimed)? It’s because of the corruption - give Trump and his family/friends money, and you’ll get something back.
The fight against these types of government abuse have ALWAYS been happening. But the abuse is much more in the open today, and much larger in scale than ever before. Scandals like Watergate would not even make the news today. And that is what the public should be waking up to and focusing on. We need to rethink our political system significantly and add a lot more protections against the kind of things the Trump 2.0 administration has done.