This is probably as a concise summary as you could get from there:
> Defendants have now submitted the administrative record justifying those actions. The record is slim. A four-page memorandum, which post dates two of the three challenged actions, provides the entirety of the government’s rationale. Defendants have now backed away from the thrust of their risk assessment, which relied on Anthropic having backdoor access to its technology once deployed in a national security system. It is now clear that Anthropic undisputedly lacks any such access and that, as Defendants concede, Anthropic’s technology is itself no riskier to the national security than any other “black box” artificial intelligence model
I think this both overstates and understates the case. The evidence being weak does not invalidate the decision; as the court notes, the government gets substantial deference on matters of national security.
The invalidation comes from the fact that this is clearly retaliatory behavior for speech; and the evidence for this is fairly strong since the administration has made public statements to that effect.
The evidence being weak means that it is clear that there is no reasonable belief that the cause of action is anything but an attempt to apply a penalty for the use of protected speech.
Presumably this is going to lead to anthropic getting a big payday from the US gov for all the time their flagship product was banned and all the users they lost due to it
I thought that the blacklisting was what led to them losing the business? Didn't the blacklisting effectively mean that contractors couldn't use Anthropic because it was supposedly a supply chain risk?
This is good, generally, for government overstepping especially in the case of targeted domestic restrictions (and what amounts to anti-competitive blackmail in my opinion)
BUT! The judge’s opinion that “The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," is actually false. In the current administration it’s absolutely a blank check to punish and retaliate and I’m not sure under which authority a federal judge would stop them at this point.
Current Supreme Court had made it clear they don’t have many controls here…
Furthermore, Anthropic isn’t likely to recover any funds after this. So what if it happens to your small hardware startup? It’s a terrible precedent for Hegseth to set, and will lead to future harm. But he’s not the brightest bulb. Keep on talking up “Lethality” buddy… :/
If this article is accurate, it sounds like Mythos via Anthropic had proven itself to be a security risk. This explains the dual speak around it being both essential and a supply chain risk, since if it were hacked by another country it would compromise security.
Not being any riskier than any other "blackbox" AI is still sufficiently dangerous and I suppose the difference, without knowing more about what the government tested, was that they knew Mythos could do these things as they had evaluated it themselves.
When this administration is done we need to amend the constitution to hold politicians legally and financially responsible for intentionally lying and intentionally breaking the law. This was obviously illegal on its face and yet there is no consequence to pushing the norms.
This is impossible until a critical mass of voters across every state starts putting competence and integrity ahead of their pet issue and populism. If you actually want to start making headway in this direction you have to stop voting for candidates in either of the main parties. The parties are probably not salvageable. Find a third party candidate with these qualities and vote for them and convince as many people as you can to vote for them.
If we can't do that then we are just stuck as a body politic.
Realistically, the option that will actually work for you is to fight within Democrat primaries. The absolute best case is you get a Mamdani. (Note this means accepting a bit of populism, because ultimately it's a popularity contest). Third parties are going nowhere due to the coordination problem.
(NB: this is meaningfully different in the UK which has really multi-party elections despite Westminster elections being FPTP)
Start with the Supreme Court, who determined “official acts” are to be presumed legal. With no standards test for what qualifies as an official act or not.
This still makes my blood boil. Even then people didn't seem to care (maybe they didn't understand) and we're all collectively just going along with it.
Literally the purpose of the House of Representatives, if I understand correctly.
So it requires a critical mass of very local reps to care about executive accountability. Which is exactly why Project 2025 / Trumpism plays the endorsement game so heavily. Fealty.
We already have the tools. The problem is that the corrupt oligarchs have the money that is considered equivalent to speech. Start with fixing that problem and other problems become solvable.
It did what it was supposed to - punish an entity that dared not do what the government told them to. It doesn't matter if anthropic gets a payday out of it, the administration doesn't get hurt by that and won't learn any lessons. We need to hold individual politicians and functionaries accountable
Congress is supposed to hold the Executive branch accountable. They deliberately refuse to do so because keeping their cult in power is all that matters to them.
Of course it does. For those trying to hold the administration to account, there's all sorts of laws.
Can't indict the President for unlawful acts during his term. Can't post pictures online about the President. Can't lawfully protest against ICE agents abducting people off the street.
It's the Gish gallop applied to a legal/legislative system - it just can't keep up with the sheer volume of cases that would need to be brought to curtail even the worst of it and that's assuming that if/when it eventually gets in front of the supreme court that that "august" body actually does curtail it.
Yes - because the system is trying to prevent the flood by piling up sticks instead of removing the source of water.
It's in failure mode (intentionally, is my read) because while it might eventually declare "x is not legal" at no point is it discouraging the people who did X (and have now also done y, z, 1, 2, and 3 - all also likely illegal) because there is zero actual accountability at the personal level.
If your house is flooding from a broken pipe... you don't bail. You turn the water off.
Debt forgiveness was dumb too. It normalized capricious government handouts for volitional actions. After the Corinthian shutdown there was little excuse for taking on massive debt for BS degrees.
You have a generation of Americans who were told repeatedly and often in their teenage years that if they wanted to be able to compete in the global job marketplace, they'd need, at the very least, a bachelor's degree.
As it turns out, employers were going to offshore those jobs and cut those wages regardless of your education. The value of degrees was wildly over-inflated compared to the economic reality, particularly after the Great Recession and COVID. The result has been an entire generation of people who aren't able to attain the same life milestones as their parents' generation, which is inherently destabilizing to a society. Corinthian Colleges wasn't the main perpetrator of this; the entire system was. By their shutdown in 2015, most people born between 1980 and 1995 were out of college and were paying massive loans to legitimate schools.
When you have a party (in this case, the federal government) obtaining something of value (student loan interest payments) via statements that are materially not true, there's a word for that: fraud.
Student loan forgiveness was a targeted effort on the behalf of a lending institution's head officer - in this case, the President of the United States - to try and renegotiate the terms of the loan serviced by that institution as to give some remedy to the problem.
This would have required a write-down of the foregone payments that would be approximately equal to what the US government spends on providing OASDI checks to retirees for one year, and most retirees do not rely on OASDI checks to avoid homelessness, starvation, or other destitution. It's basically a bonus that you get for living over the age of 65, at this point being paid in part by loans taken out by the US government that will have to be paid off long after the recipients of that money are dead.
We should allow students to discharge their loans if they cannot repay them. This means risk will be assigned to borrowers and that would squeeze the ability for kids to take out loans on stupid majors that have absolutely no hope of ROI, as currently priced.
I dont know what you mean there. There is literally no symmetry between the two. Not in the case of how Biden administration reacted to cases they lost. And also not in the supreme court treatment - it ideological and political goals are pretty clear at this point, although not always pro-Trump.
Clinton, being a lawyer, asked for a definition of "sex". The definition given to him did not include oral sex. When a lawyer asks you for a definition of a word, then you are getting screwed.
The modern Trump version is: "If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment." - Trump's legal defense during his first impeachment.
I know most will see this as a good thing, and perhaps in this case it is, but I think it's generally concerning that people can vote for leaders who effectively can't do anything significant.
I understand this community largely disagrees with Trump, but the only people who win overall from these scenarios are people who support the status-quo and don't like the idea of a leader having significant power to change things. Any leader who is elected on a mandate to govern differently will face similar legal challenges.
I'm also not saying there's no place for legal challenges either, but there is a balance to be found there. The idea the Pentagon can't blacklist a US company for whatever reason it wants just seems absurd to me regardless of whether this specific ruling is good or bad.
> I think it's generally concerning that people can vote for leaders who effectively can't do anything significant
There's been a ton of this sort of discussion over the past three hundred years, and the consensus which was particularly strong in the Federalist Papers was explicitly that there should be no _one_ person with significant, arbitrary powers.
> but I think it's generally concerning that people can vote for leaders who effectively can't do anything significant.
The people vote for a lot more than just the president. This isn't the president's job. That's what the judge says, not that nobody can do it, just the president/executive can't.
The people also vote for the people who's job it is to have done the same thing but legally.
The opinion is quite straightforward, and the evidence on the government's side was entirely nonsense, essentially.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
This is probably as a concise summary as you could get from there:
> Defendants have now submitted the administrative record justifying those actions. The record is slim. A four-page memorandum, which post dates two of the three challenged actions, provides the entirety of the government’s rationale. Defendants have now backed away from the thrust of their risk assessment, which relied on Anthropic having backdoor access to its technology once deployed in a national security system. It is now clear that Anthropic undisputedly lacks any such access and that, as Defendants concede, Anthropic’s technology is itself no riskier to the national security than any other “black box” artificial intelligence model
Military suppliers are innocent until proven guilty! Can't see how that could go wrong...
Everyone is, yes, that's how rule of law works.
Ok, let’s say I buy that. Why was Anthropic singled out?
I think this both overstates and understates the case. The evidence being weak does not invalidate the decision; as the court notes, the government gets substantial deference on matters of national security.
The invalidation comes from the fact that this is clearly retaliatory behavior for speech; and the evidence for this is fairly strong since the administration has made public statements to that effect.
The evidence being weak means that it is clear that there is no reasonable belief that the cause of action is anything but an attempt to apply a penalty for the use of protected speech.
Like so many of this administration's actions, unfortunately...
As they said during Louis the 14th's reign: "Si veut le roi, si veut la loi.", which translates to the law wants what the king wants.
Presumably this is going to lead to anthropic getting a big payday from the US gov for all the time their flagship product was banned and all the users they lost due to it
The government would just not pay, similar to what trump tried with his rape verdict
This is about the DoD supply chain risk designation—*not* the export controls.
The case is not about that though
I thought that the blacklisting was what led to them losing the business? Didn't the blacklisting effectively mean that contractors couldn't use Anthropic because it was supposedly a supply chain risk?
That was a different issue from the US government preventing Anthropic from selling general access to their Fable 5 model for a few weeks.
124 comments on this submission from 10 hours prior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49473522
This is good, generally, for government overstepping especially in the case of targeted domestic restrictions (and what amounts to anti-competitive blackmail in my opinion)
BUT! The judge’s opinion that “The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," is actually false. In the current administration it’s absolutely a blank check to punish and retaliate and I’m not sure under which authority a federal judge would stop them at this point.
Current Supreme Court had made it clear they don’t have many controls here…
Furthermore, Anthropic isn’t likely to recover any funds after this. So what if it happens to your small hardware startup? It’s a terrible precedent for Hegseth to set, and will lead to future harm. But he’s not the brightest bulb. Keep on talking up “Lethality” buddy… :/
https://san.com/cc/no-the-nsa-wasnt-hacked-by-ai-heres-what-...
If this article is accurate, it sounds like Mythos via Anthropic had proven itself to be a security risk. This explains the dual speak around it being both essential and a supply chain risk, since if it were hacked by another country it would compromise security.
Not being any riskier than any other "blackbox" AI is still sufficiently dangerous and I suppose the difference, without knowing more about what the government tested, was that they knew Mythos could do these things as they had evaluated it themselves.
When this administration is done we need to amend the constitution to hold politicians legally and financially responsible for intentionally lying and intentionally breaking the law. This was obviously illegal on its face and yet there is no consequence to pushing the norms.
This is impossible until a critical mass of voters across every state starts putting competence and integrity ahead of their pet issue and populism. If you actually want to start making headway in this direction you have to stop voting for candidates in either of the main parties. The parties are probably not salvageable. Find a third party candidate with these qualities and vote for them and convince as many people as you can to vote for them.
If we can't do that then we are just stuck as a body politic.
Realistically, the option that will actually work for you is to fight within Democrat primaries. The absolute best case is you get a Mamdani. (Note this means accepting a bit of populism, because ultimately it's a popularity contest). Third parties are going nowhere due to the coordination problem.
(NB: this is meaningfully different in the UK which has really multi-party elections despite Westminster elections being FPTP)
Start with the Supreme Court, who determined “official acts” are to be presumed legal. With no standards test for what qualifies as an official act or not.
This still makes my blood boil. Even then people didn't seem to care (maybe they didn't understand) and we're all collectively just going along with it.
I don't think that'd require a Constitutional amendment, would it?
Literally the purpose of the House of Representatives, if I understand correctly.
So it requires a critical mass of very local reps to care about executive accountability. Which is exactly why Project 2025 / Trumpism plays the endorsement game so heavily. Fealty.
Presumably taxpayers will pay for it one way or the other.
I think they get a personal financial penalty with no insurance coverage. This has to stop.
We already have the tools. The problem is that the corrupt oligarchs have the money that is considered equivalent to speech. Start with fixing that problem and other problems become solvable.
It's convenient to blame the "oligarchs" since it justifies you doing nothing since there's nothing you can do.
Could you tell us why the politicians - who are the only ones who have the power to amend the Constitution - would be interested in doing that?
They actually had laws supposed to act as stop guard against corruption and executive lawlessness. Supreme court systematically dismantled them.
And by supreme court, I mean right wing justices specifically. Who got there thanks to their heritage foundation connections. Which made project 2025.
You just need the rule of law for that. It helps to not elect blatantly corrupt people as president.
Problem is that apparently the US will occasionally elect a corrupt president, so we need stronger measures in place for when that happens.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49473522
It did what it was supposed to - punish an entity that dared not do what the government told them to. It doesn't matter if anthropic gets a payday out of it, the administration doesn't get hurt by that and won't learn any lessons. We need to hold individual politicians and functionaries accountable
But I guess Anthropic will not be compensated?
Lots of that going around in this administration
Add it to the "but no one's going to do anything about it" pile
I think Anthropic will tone down the hype in their PR. So there is hope.
"The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics."
Unlawful means absolutely nothing these days.
I don’t know, the $166B in refunds returned to importers after the IEEPA tariffs were ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court seem pretty meaningful
Meaningful as a mega transfer of tax revenue from citizens to corporations, which for all we know was the whole point.
Ya, but that's only going to the corporations. I doubt they are going to send the rest of us a check.
Meaningful for who though, the common person in the country?
Not for stopping damage to the end-payers of those fees.
Great for fleecing those end-payers, however.
Congress is supposed to hold the Executive branch accountable. They deliberately refuse to do so because keeping their cult in power is all that matters to them.
Of course it does. For those trying to hold the administration to account, there's all sorts of laws.
Can't indict the President for unlawful acts during his term. Can't post pictures online about the President. Can't lawfully protest against ICE agents abducting people off the street.
It's the Gish gallop applied to a legal/legislative system - it just can't keep up with the sheer volume of cases that would need to be brought to curtail even the worst of it and that's assuming that if/when it eventually gets in front of the supreme court that that "august" body actually does curtail it.
Yes - because the system is trying to prevent the flood by piling up sticks instead of removing the source of water.
It's in failure mode (intentionally, is my read) because while it might eventually declare "x is not legal" at no point is it discouraging the people who did X (and have now also done y, z, 1, 2, and 3 - all also likely illegal) because there is zero actual accountability at the personal level.
If your house is flooding from a broken pipe... you don't bail. You turn the water off.
The problem is that courts are getting flooded but it's up to Congress (de facto the Republican party) to remove the source of water.
But they're a mixture of exclusively cultists or cowards so they won't do it.
They need to be charged with any and every crime they can credibly be accused of so this calculus changes in the future.
Steve Bannon, who advised the 45 administration, called that tactic "flood the zone with shit".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone
https://archive.ph/BfuVs
Right, like the student debt forgiveness. We hate the ones we disagree with and we love the ones we agree with.
Debt forgiveness was dumb too. It normalized capricious government handouts for volitional actions. After the Corinthian shutdown there was little excuse for taking on massive debt for BS degrees.
How was it dumb?
You have a generation of Americans who were told repeatedly and often in their teenage years that if they wanted to be able to compete in the global job marketplace, they'd need, at the very least, a bachelor's degree.
As it turns out, employers were going to offshore those jobs and cut those wages regardless of your education. The value of degrees was wildly over-inflated compared to the economic reality, particularly after the Great Recession and COVID. The result has been an entire generation of people who aren't able to attain the same life milestones as their parents' generation, which is inherently destabilizing to a society. Corinthian Colleges wasn't the main perpetrator of this; the entire system was. By their shutdown in 2015, most people born between 1980 and 1995 were out of college and were paying massive loans to legitimate schools.
When you have a party (in this case, the federal government) obtaining something of value (student loan interest payments) via statements that are materially not true, there's a word for that: fraud.
Student loan forgiveness was a targeted effort on the behalf of a lending institution's head officer - in this case, the President of the United States - to try and renegotiate the terms of the loan serviced by that institution as to give some remedy to the problem.
This would have required a write-down of the foregone payments that would be approximately equal to what the US government spends on providing OASDI checks to retirees for one year, and most retirees do not rely on OASDI checks to avoid homelessness, starvation, or other destitution. It's basically a bonus that you get for living over the age of 65, at this point being paid in part by loans taken out by the US government that will have to be paid off long after the recipients of that money are dead.
We should allow students to discharge their loans if they cannot repay them. This means risk will be assigned to borrowers and that would squeeze the ability for kids to take out loans on stupid majors that have absolutely no hope of ROI, as currently priced.
I dont know what you mean there. There is literally no symmetry between the two. Not in the case of how Biden administration reacted to cases they lost. And also not in the supreme court treatment - it ideological and political goals are pretty clear at this point, although not always pro-Trump.
criminals in charge did unlawful shit. what a surprise.
"When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."
"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is"
Clinton, being a lawyer, asked for a definition of "sex". The definition given to him did not include oral sex. When a lawyer asks you for a definition of a word, then you are getting screwed.
> then you are getting screwed
depends what the definition ...
The modern Trump version is: "If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment." - Trump's legal defense during his first impeachment.
I know most will see this as a good thing, and perhaps in this case it is, but I think it's generally concerning that people can vote for leaders who effectively can't do anything significant.
I understand this community largely disagrees with Trump, but the only people who win overall from these scenarios are people who support the status-quo and don't like the idea of a leader having significant power to change things. Any leader who is elected on a mandate to govern differently will face similar legal challenges.
I'm also not saying there's no place for legal challenges either, but there is a balance to be found there. The idea the Pentagon can't blacklist a US company for whatever reason it wants just seems absurd to me regardless of whether this specific ruling is good or bad.
> I think it's generally concerning that people can vote for leaders who effectively can't do anything significant
There's been a ton of this sort of discussion over the past three hundred years, and the consensus which was particularly strong in the Federalist Papers was explicitly that there should be no _one_ person with significant, arbitrary powers.
> but I think it's generally concerning that people can vote for leaders who effectively can't do anything significant.
The people vote for a lot more than just the president. This isn't the president's job. That's what the judge says, not that nobody can do it, just the president/executive can't.
The people also vote for the people who's job it is to have done the same thing but legally.
And NOT a damned thing will be done to punish the administration for these obvious illegal actions.
And they'll continue to do so, because it takes months to unwind this shit, and the damage was done immediately.
Another activist judge. They all need to go, it’s sad that one judge can derail goodness and what’s proper. Kind of like a dictatorship, or a king.