Dean Ball

They would absolutely say no to that.

This is eroding that level of trust.

This allows, because of the independence of American businesses, not total, but significantly greater independence of American businesses from the U.S.

military, it's easier to trust and work with them.

We were already having trust problems with American AI, this whole notion of AI sovereignty and whatnot.

And I think now those trust issues are...

considerably worse because our government is behaving with the same attitude that China's behaves with.

Yeah, I mean, I think in the limit, right, there's nothing in principle that stops the government from saying, you know, you have to agree to our contract terms.

And I see people from, you know, defending this move saying, well, of course, like, you know, you can't set the—businesses can't set the terms of their engagement with the government.

If the military needs it for national security, of course they have to provide it.

And—

You know, one of the terms of a contract is price, right?

So, like, if you're saying that the government businesses can't set the terms, like, you're saying something quite radical.

And it's like, the thing is, is I know people who are saying that don't believe it, and they just haven't thought about this, you know, in a principled way.

And part of the reason for that, I fear, you know, America was founded kind of uniquely.

America is a country that was founded on principled thinking, right?

about like, you know, okay, how should this work in a timeless and universal way, right?

How do we create rules, procedural rules that can withstand the test of time and that will like always be right?

And I fear that a lot of the people that are defending this kind of just either explicitly don't understand this about America or they don't care.

they think that that's long since dead, which was kind of what the Claude essay was about.