Anthropic is normal

While Anthropic is the hero of this particular story for being the most responsible person in the room, I am not here to cheer for it as my favorite team. It’s still a profit-driven company, it’s still contributing to the AI problems, and it even chose to become a defense contractor for the Trump administration. But they’ve been more responsible than their peers.

Nothing makes me angrier than people who don’t have principles and say whatever they have to say to gain power, even when their justifications are contradictory. In contrast to that, Anthropic has been consistently in favor of AI regulation. In 2025 they were the first tech company to endorse the SB 53 AI regulation bill which would mandate extra safety requirements on companies including themselves. They are not just mercanaries trying to grab power. They’re pro-safety and pro-regulation in general as a business strategy, even when that means the government takes power from them.

The fact that surveillance and killbots are the only issues left shows how minimal Anthropic’s terms with the government have actually been. They’ve already massively compromised on their ethical principles to work with the military. And I don’t mean in a guilt-by-association way, I mean very literally, Anthropic has already specially modified their policy with the government to permit the military to do almost anything it wants — far more than any commercial offering allows.

In their public Acceptable Use Policy, under “Universal Usage Standards”, Anthropic has a blanket prohibition on developing and designing weapons. In fact, most of their Universal Usage Standards are just a description of what it means to be the federal government in 2026:

These supposedly universal prohibitions do not extend to the US military; Anthropic submitted a bid to use Claude in coordinating autonomous drone swarms. Their only requirement was for a human to be in the loop on kill decisions — an absolutely minimal gesture towards safety made while still selling weapons to a rogue government.

Anthropic has been extremely focused on the design and tuning of Claude, as evident by their detailed constitution outlining what kind of character they want Claude to have. They’re not just trying to play legal games with terms of service, they’re trying to build something that resists certain categories of use at a structural level. But in terms of exercising legal power via contract or terms, they’re doing the bare minimum.

The obvious failure of Anthropic here is that they involved themselves with the defense industry in the first place. Since the original contract Claude has heavily contributed to the most sensitive and controversial military operations. Claude reportedly played a key role in the extrajudicial capture of Nicolás Maduro, and was used again when Trump attacked Iran.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has expressed ongoing concern over potential misuse of AI, and even noted the extralegal federal military engagements in Minnesota as evidence that the core values and principles in his ethical framework (namely, anti-autocracy) are at risk:

Dario Amodei@DarioAmodei

I've been working on this essay for a while, and it is mainly about AI and about the future. But given the horror we're seeing in Minnesota, its emphasis on the importance of preserving democratic values and rights at home is particularly relevant.

Mon Jan 26 17:03:46 +0000 2026

The threat of military violations seems to concern Anthropic not because they’re woke libs or antiwar hippies but because they’re normal people. And normal people who engage in second-order thinking understand the potential implications of playing a role in what appear to be multiple breaches of US and international law. Trump’s getting away with it, but for how long? And what warmongers will be held responsible along with him? Even for defense contractors, behaving responsibly is a long game it’s important to play.

It’s not just about killer robots and mass surveillance

It’s interesting to think about the imminent threat posed by weaponization of surveillance using AI. Mass surveillance is a very real, very serious issue. Autonomous killing robots are a less imminent threat, but still a serious issue given drone warfare.

So it’s easy to see a story here: there are two guardrails and the people being guarded by the guardrails have suddenly become very angry about them, which means they must want to break those particular rules. When people suddenly become willing to pour enormous resources into repealing a law or regulation it’s usually because there’s friction in that particular spot.

Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesias

Normal guy: “why would AI even be able to kill people?”

Yudkowsky: [Complicated account of deception and instrumental convergence.]

Hegseth: “We will force companies to make unsupervised killer robots, that’s why.”

Wed Feb 25 01:20:18 +0000 2026

I don’t think this is the most salient read of the situation. I think the issue is much deeper and much worse.

The authoritarian ethic

I don’t believe this conflict is primarily over any particular term or condition. It’s not driven by the Trump admin wanting to break those terms now, it’s that they object to working with anyone in a relationship that isn’t strictly authoritarian.

Authoritarianism has an internal value system, even though it’s deeply backwards. It places moral weight on power, loyalty, and hierarchy of authority. Anthropic is only showing the thinnest possible pretense of responsibility, but this tiny gesture towards real virtue is objectionable to Trump and Hegseth because it’s a genuine breach of their values. Anthropic’s token gestures towards humanity offend the misanthropes.

Trump and Hegseth are expressing genuine moral outrage at the idea that there could ever be an authority higher than their moment-to-moment whims. The idea of people with rights working with others is disturbing because it implies a system of rights, a world where people have value that isn’t bestowed on them by their betters. These people are genuinely outraged at the idea of having to work with others in any capacity except being served by subordinates.

The Trump admin is defined by a cult of blind loyalty. It’s not looking to do business with private companies for economic prosperity or technical efficacy, it is looking to force tech companies into an alliance with Trump’s fascist political project. And they see the USA as being engaged in a civil war. Against the Democratic Party, against democratic cities, against immigrants, against Antifa, against libs, against woke. To them a dispute is not a business matter, it is a wartime betrayal of allegiance others are expected to uphold, or else be classified as enemies.

The authoritarians fundamentally do not understand mutually beneficial arrangements and they have no sense of fair play. They see the world as a zero-sum game, and if they’re not winning they’re losing. There can be no force above them, so it’s a deep offense for them to be meaningfully bound by law or contract. They replace law with “policy”, unilaterally dictated by powerful executives without oversight, accountability, or recourse. (And the projection is obvious here, as they interpret “policy” as being equivalent to a whim when their enemies have it.)

In the real world, doing business with the government that involves scope-of-use provisions is completely normal. Being concerned about use of force in Minnesota is the duty of every responsible citizen. But growing authoritarianism is marked by a giddiness in demanding people act outside normalcy and making bigger and bigger claims on people.

What the Trump admin is violently objecting to is not tech policy, it is the idea that there could ever be such a thing as a higher standard at all. Not people, not nations, not contracts, not law, not ethics, not God. It is a “god complex” to ever consider checks and balances on the US government, in the eyes of these people who view themselves as the gods. This is a much worse problem than wanting to put Claude in killbots robots today, or wanting to identify political dissidents and execute them like in the Winter Soldier. It’s not any problem because it’s every problem. Seeing yourself as god means there’s no limit to the atrocities you’ll commit.

It is, to quote Eva, the ethos of the unapologetic rapist:

eva (^_^)/@eva.computer

people who are spiritually rapists react to being told "no" the same way in all contexts

2026-02-27T22:34:37.885Z

They fundamentally don’t want to work with people. They will force themselves onto whatever they want when given the opportunity. They don’t want to negotiate consent. They revel in the power imbalance itself and their ability to exploit it. They want to dominate and for others to submit.

Nuclear retaliation over moderate behavior

As per the authoritarian ethic, Trump met what he perceived as disloyalty with a disproportionate, nuclear response.

Hegseth has now labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, a designation reserved for foreign companies that might be compromised by enemy governments. This is used to prohibit material from nationalized firms like Huawei from entering anywhere in the “supply chain”. Hegseth is invoking this not to prevent a real risk, but to trigger existing clauses to prevent any federal contractor from using Claude at any point, as if it were so unsafe it could taint the entire lineage of any product. Not only does this deny Anthropic federal funding, it also prevents them from doing business with any businesses that work with the government.

At the same time, they threaten to invoke the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era statue to nationalize critical industries to supply wartime emergencies. This could allow the government to compel Anthropic to do business in a specific way, but carries the exact opposite semantic designation of a supply chain risk. To invoke the DPA is to argue the product is so valuable and critical to national security that the government has the right to unilaterally seize it.

Dean W. Ball@deanwball

Nvidia, Amazon, Google will have to divest from Anthropic if Hegseth gets his way. This is simply attempted corporate murder. I could not possibly recommend investing in American AI to any investor; I could not possibly recommend starting an AI company in the United States.

Fri Feb 27 22:46:02 +0000 2026

The disproportionate response is intentional. This is attempting to bankrupt Anthropic as a punitive, retaliatory measure.

The administration is trying to make an example out of Anthropic as explicit intimidation of other companies. The goal is to extralegally punish Anthropic so hard for not unconditionally submitting themselves to the whims of the administration that no other AI company would dare show the same “resistance.” These are both outlandish nuclear options and misusing them like this is already criminal.

This is all more consequence-first-justification-later nonsense. They’ve proved as much by the military using Claude to attack Iran after claiming it was a security risk. It’s obviously pretextual (a legal term for “lying”), but it’s a way the government could abuse existing procedures to inflict damage on a political enemy. Which is their whole deal. The hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug.

It’s the same move Trump always does, the same move he’s pulled with tariffs. It’s deeply corrupt use of the government to coerce people with strong-arm economic pressure invented by the executive to make an example out of punishing enemies.

Lawful conduct is a joke

The argument against safeguards is that you don’t need any external safeguards because you can always trust in the good ol’ liberal process to set military policy safely and responsibly through the constitutional system. This is obviously nonsense. The Trump admin has never respected US law, not since day one. They’re thugs.

Prevention — even unenforced prevention that only establishes remedy, like a terms of service document — is perhaps the only defense against this. Take the risk of domestic surveillance: we see the same story continually. Something is secretly deployed, it’s leaked later, and by the time there’s a chance to object it’s considered “national security” and the damage can never be remediated. The courts failed already, and fail again for each tick of the clock.

With the trumpies especially, there is an obvious contempt for due process and any procedure that threatens leaders’ power to execute their personal decisions. They commit crimes faster than enforcement can catch up and it has, unfortunately, worked.

The Trumpist understanding of politics is immediate power at the expense of long-term stability. “As long as our hand is on the immediate means of enforcement, we have the power.”

Miles Taylor, “One step closer to bombing civilians” (2025) …
On the flight home, Stephen Miller — then a senior advisor to the president — sat down across from me and the head of the U.S. Coast Guard. What followed was a conversation I’ll never forget.

“Admiral,” Miller asked, “the military has aerial drones, correct?”

“Yes,” the Admiral answered.

“And some of those drones are equipped with missiles, correct?”

“Sure,” the Admiral said, beginning to catch on.

Miller pressed further: “And when a boat full of migrants is in international waters, they aren’t protected by the U.S. Constitution, right?”

The Admiral clarified that while technically true, international law still applied.

“Then tell me why,” Miller said, “can’t we use a Predator drone to obliterate that boat?”

The Admiral, a veteran of military command, was dumbfounded. “Because it would be against international law,” he replied. You can’t kill unarmed civilians just because you want to.

Stephen Miller didn’t appear interested in the legal implications. Indeed, he seemed more interested in whether anyone could stop Trump from committing such acts.

“Admiral,” he concluded, “I don’t think you understand the limitations of international law.”

Perhaps Anthropic has an idea of the limitations of “all lawful use” as adjudicated by the federal government. Their negotiations seem to imply so:

Ross Anderson, “Inside Anthropic’s Killer-Robot Dispute With the Pentagon” The Pentagon had kept trying to leave itself little escape hatches in the agreements that it proposed to Anthropic. It would pledge not to use Anthropic’s AI for mass domestic surveillance or for fully autonomous killing machines, but then qualify those pledges with loophole-y phrases like as appropriate—suggesting that the terms were subject to change, based on the administration’s interpretation of a given situation.

In the eyes of the people with the hands on the levers, “lawful use” doesn’t mean power specifically granted in law by congress, it means… literally whatever makes the lever move. Especially in unaccountable military contexts, the federal government will interpret text to mean whatever it wants.

The NSA’s mass surveillance program was ruled illegal, and in response they continued doing the same things under an exciting new set of definitions. Torture being illegal doesn’t mean the US won’t do it, it means “if it was authorized by the President”, it can’t be considered torture. The act itself comes first, and regardless of what was done it gets justified after the fact however necessary.

This is widely unpopular with everyone

The good news is this has been wildly unpopular with everyone.

Anthropic hasn’t prevented the DoD from getting AI they can misuse — no one can — but by standing by their principles they’ve forced the issue into public consciousness, which is a win.

It’s also a win how profoundly hated Hegseth’s behavior has been here. Polling from Blue Rose Research shows that people — including Trump voters — believe companies should be able to set limits with the military, and further that we should ban autonomous weapons outright regardless of vendor:

David Shor@davidshor

The public - including Republicans - are overwhelmingly against what @PeteHegseth and the Trump administration are trying to do here.

The people unsurprisingly do not want killer robots and do not trust Trump/Hegseth/the Republican party to do the right thing without limits.

Tue Feb 24 22:07:21 +0000 2026

This tells you about the rest of the industry

This kind of nuclear reaction over one company trying to maintain the most basic safeguards you’ve ever heard of tells you everything you need to know about the rest of the AI industry. As long as unstable and violent people like Hegseth who want a free pass to direct, unaccountable, safety-off tech are getting everything they want from OpenAI and co, you know every blip about “AI safety” you hear from them is bullshit.

This incident has provided a clear-cut line to test whether a company is serious about AI safety or not. Research and conferences and stunts mean nothing if you won’t reject this government; a government who is not only out of control and eager to use AI for harm, but is also willing to turn on you at a moment’s notice.

Even if Anthropic’s talk of ethics had been a marketing ploy, it’s deeply shameful that other firms are refusing to match those standards. Worse yet, Anthropic’s virtue — relative to its competitors — broke an otherwise united front of tech companies’ complicity in Trump’s fascism.

And they’re all still complicit, of course. Google reversed policy and is now eager for contracts to bring AI to autonomous weapons systems.

Elon Musk is bringing Grok into classified settings too. The ban on “ideological” training doesn’t apply to Grok, of course, because it’s all bullshit.

Elon Musk@elonmusk

Grok 3 is so based 😂

Sun Feb 16 13:09:33 +0000 2025

And then there’s OpenAI, a company who keeps removing references to safety from its mission statement, the company whose safety practice was so unconscionable it sparked the creation of Anthropic in the first place. OpenAI threw themselves at the DoD the day of the Anthropic retaliation.

Sam Altman@sama

Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.

In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.

AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.

We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only.

We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.

We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.

Sat Feb 28 02:56:18 +0000 2026

It’s truly shameless scabbing. It’s a show of fealty, an eagerness to break ranks with safety and cuddle up to a reckless and dangerous military.

Introducing Nintendo

Nintendo, even compared to its corporate contemporaries, has a distinctly hostile philosophy around art: if they can’t control something themselves, they tend to try to eliminate it entirely. What Nintendo uses creative rights to protect is not the copyright of their real creative works, it’s their control over everything they perceive to be their “share” of the gaming industry.

Let me start with a quick history, in case you’re not familiar with the foundation Nintendo is standing on.

Nintendo got its start in Japan making playing cards for the mob to commit crimes with. It only pivoted to “video games” after manufacturing playing cards for the Yakuza to use for illegal gambling dens. (I know it sounds ridiculous, but that’s literally what happened.)

Nintendo got its footing overseas by looking to see what video game was making the most money in America, seeing it was Space Invaders, and copying that verbatim with a clone game they called “Radar Scope”:

Then, when that was a commercial failure, they wrote “conversion kit” code to turn those cabinets into a Popeye game, failed to get the Popeye rights they needed, and released it anyway. They kept the gameplay and even the character archetypes the same, they just reskinned it with King Kong. They didn’t even name the protagonist after they swapped out the Popeye idea, so he was just called Jumpman.

But then Nintendo was almost itself the victim of an abuse of IP law. “Donkey Kong” derived from King Kong, and even though the character was in the public domain, Universal Studios still sued Nintendo over the use. Ultimately the judge agreed with the Nintendo team and threw out the lawsuit, in an example of a giant corporation trying to steamroll what was at the time a small business with over-aggressive and illegitimate IP enforcement.

This was such an impactful moment for Nintendo that they took the name of their lawyer in the Universal Studios case — Kirby — and used it for the mascot of one of their biggest franchises. It was a significant move that demonstrates Nintendo’s extreme gratefulness — or even idolization — of the man who defended them against abuse of IP law.

You would hope the lesson Nintendo learned here would be from the perspective of the underdog, seeing as they were almost the victim of the kinds of tactics they would later become famous for using themselves. But no, it seems they were impressed by the ruthlessness of the abusers instead, and so copied their playbook.

The Loaded Gun

While some counterfeiting happens domestically the major concern is usually counterfeits imported from foreign trade. This brings us to Customs and Border Patrol, which you might know as the other side of the ICE/CBP border control system. You might be surprised to see them involved with this, since Border Patrol agents are fully-militarized police outfitted to combat armed drug cartels.

But among its other duties, Border Patrol takes a proactive role in enforcing intellectual property protection at ports of trade — backed by the full force of the Department of Homeland Security — by seizing goods it identifies as counterfeit and either destroying them outright or else selling them themselves at auction.¹ To get your property back, you have to sue Border Patrol — an infamously untouchable police force — and win.

Copyright is supposed to be good

This is my controversial stance, and the premise of my series: copyright (as properly defined) is a cohesive system, and, when executed properly, is actually good for everyone.

At this point, you might think I’m setting myself up to fail the purpose of a system is what it does test. If there’s some definition of what copyright “should” be, but it doesn’t map to the system of copyright as it actually exists, why bother spending time with a definition we fully expect not to apply to the system?

I’m not trying to imply that our current system is justified by a definition that’s meant to be its “purpose” even while the definition fails to describe how the system really works. In fact, I ultimately want to do the opposite.

The word “copyright” can refer to two very different entities.

One is copyright as a system of political power. This is the overall system, composed copyright legislation, international treaties, and systems of enforcement.

The other is copyright as a philosophical doctrine. This is the basis (at least ostensibly) for copyright law and enforcement power, and what the system is meant to derive from. Copyright as a political system should be an implementation of this philosophy, and its power derives its legitimacy from how well it maps to the philosophy and correctly implements it goals.

The philosophy should be good for artists, but the reality of the power structures is bad for artists. Not only is that bad, it also makes the discourse around the topic insufferable, because people talking about “copyright” usually aren’t referring to the same thing!

I argue that the philosophical doctrine of copyright is actually remarkably sound; the goals work, but the system of power has gone rotten. What’s more, we can identify the ways it’s gone bad by comparing it to the philosophy that it should derive from, and find that instead of being an implementation of the philosophy, it’s been corrupted, and ends up pushing a completely contrary set of goals.

What we’re subjected to today in the name of copyright does not come from the real principles of copyright. Compared to the current state of US intellectual property law, the “real copyright” I’m talking about is like grass so utterly smothered by concrete that not only do no strands poke through, everyone involved has forgotten it was ever there.

The situation is so bad that even though I think copyright should be a good thing, I think our current bastardization of it may be worse than nothing at all, to the point where we’d be better off with the problems real copyright is meant to solve than with all the new, worse problems it’s inflicted on us.

But because what we’re enduring now is a corruption of another thing and not its own original evil, we’re not limited to measuring it by the harm it inflicts: we can also measure it by its deviation from what we know it should be.

So what’s the good version? This true, unadulterated form of creative rights?

Eugenicists need broad centrist support

Now, a lot of people pushing the anti-trans agenda aren’t actually murderers or overt political fascists. The extremists are still the extremists. Moderates sustain these genocidal movements, but they don’t drive them. Unlike the center, the people who rise to the top are always the ones drawn to the movement because of its viciousness. It still matters, though, whether the people towards the middle are willing to help them or not.

It’s still true that legislators and anti-trans activists are not pursuing moderate treatment (psychotherapy, etc); they’re distinctly aiming for obliteration. But that message only works for people who agree with those people openly willing to back genocide outright, or people who can agree with the lampshade.

Even most of the republicans don’t actually know the people they’re voting for are full-on cuckoo-bananas. But the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” types end up pushing this agenda, even if they’re unaware. People see a ballot where one choice describes a more convenient world for them, and they tick it. They’re not supposed to think about the violence it takes to make that happen.

People like framing the idea of pride like they frame the abolition of slavery or civil rights: as a celebration of a positive political change that happened in history, rather than an ongoing conflict. As soon as pride feels like a conflict, it feels like a conflict they’re on a side of, because they are.