Rob Wiblin

that OpenAI or XAI, that they're offering them looser contractual terms on business contracts, that would hardly make them safe if the concern were really that a private company could very quickly accumulate military power to rival the entire US government.

That'd be presumably be thinking about rules to prevent something that's explosive being built by incompetent idiots or built in such a way that the designs get leaked to China.

They would likely propose some legislation to Congress that would enable them to handle the many other issues that this is going to create down the road.

And they would presumably try to keep AI researchers roughly on their side, not alienate them on an unprecedented scale over a relatively minor issue.

But none of that is happening.

Indeed, it's generally antithetical to current US government policy.

What is happening is that one company is getting punished for rejecting the government's proposed terms in a contract dispute.

Thompson's high-level abstract arguments about AI's transformative power justifying government intervention, they probably make sense.

I kind of agree with them.

But it's hard to find evidence that that argument is what's motivating the government's particular actions in this dispute with Anthropic.

Let's turn to the third charge, that Anthropic's position is an undemocratic one, that by setting conditions on how the military uses its technology, Anthropic is in effect usurping a role that properly belongs to elected leaders.

The strongest version of that argument came from Palmer Luckey, the founder of military contractor Angero.

Luckey thinks the core two questions are, do we believe in democracy, and should our military be regulated by our elected leaders or corporate executives?

He goes on to argue that even seemingly innocuous terms and conditions, like you cannot target innocent civilians, they evolve difficult judgment calls about what counts as a civilian, what counts as targeting, and so on.

And under Anthropic's proposed framework, Anthropic will get some say on those questions, questions that really feel like government policy decisions.

Blackie sees that set up as fundamentally at odds with democratic self-government.

Lucky is pointing to a legitimate issue here.

From the government's perspective, it's most straightforward for your military operations to be unconstrained by the opinions and moral qualms of your suppliers.

Even to me, that practical worry is a potentially reasonable argument for the government to end their contract with Anthropic and look for other AI providers who are more straightforward to work with.

The story is a little bit more complicated than sometimes portrayed though.