Rob Wiblin

But the post then slips from attempting to describe reality into a prescription of what we should accept and how we ought to react to it, literally arguing that possessing overwhelming might can make your actions right.

It's actually pretty easy to accidentally equivocate between something being predictable on the one hand and it being acceptable on the other.

And I think Thompson here was being very sincere and saw himself as pointing out some hard truths.

And he did have useful things to say in that post.

But it really is very dangerous to start seeing harmful or unlawful actions as unobjectionable just because they're not surprising or because they're being done by very powerful actors.

As to whether it's naive and pointless to object in this case, that remains to be seen.

Anthropix Resistance has galvanized something like 90% of the tech industry to oppose the use of the supply chain risk designation for this purpose.

Companies that have previously stayed quiet have been alarmed enough by the potential precedent that they're joining the effort to push back.

Past guest of the show, Dean Bull, who wrote AI policy for the Trump administration.

He called the attempted corporate murder of Anthropic perhaps the most dangerous policy move he'd ever seen the US government try to take.

A high bar, surely.

And using AI for surveillance or fully autonomous kill chains is even more controversial in Silicon Valley now than it was before.

And it was already pretty controversial.

The US is still a nation of laws for the most part, and legal analysts give Anthropic a good chance of prevailing in court, likely even securing a preliminary injunction to block the order before this video goes out.

If that happens, the naive company will have established a legal precedent that helps protect the entire AI industry from economic coercion.

A risky path to choose perhaps, but not necessarily a stupid one.

Second, in the rest of the post, Thompson gives interesting arguments for what views might sensibly motivate the kind of extreme action the Pentagon has taken here.

But when you look at the specifics of this actual case, those motivations, they just don't seem to be what's driving things.

If the US government had genuinely just become convinced that AI companies were building something as dangerous as private nuclear weapons, what might we expect them to do?

Well, they'd presumably focus on the whole AI industry, not single out the one company that was most proactive about working with them and alerting them to exactly this risk.