5 ms·

All of these problems are downstream of the Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive. The military should be reigned in at the legislat

All of these problems are downstream of the Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive. The military should be reigned in at the legislative level, by constraining what it can and cannot do under law. Popular action is the only way to make that happen. Energy directed anywhere else is a waste. Private corporations should never be allowed to dictate how the military acts. Such a thought would be unbearable if it weren't laughably impossible. The technology can just be requisitioned, there is nothing a corporation or a private individual can do about that. Or the models could be developed internally, after having requisitioned the data centers. To watch CEOs of private corporations being mythologized for something that a) they should never be able to do and b) are incapable of doing is a testament to how distorted our picture of reality has become.

ricardobeat 7mo ago
> The technology can just be requisitioned During a war with national mobilization, that would make sense. Or in a country like China. This kind of coercion is not an expected part of democratic rule.
- helaoban 7mo ago
  The question of whether or not the government should be able to use AI for targeting without the involvement of humans is a wartime question, since that is the only time the military should be killing people. Under such a scenario, requisition applies, and so all of this talk is moot. The fact that the military is killing people without a declaration of war is the problem, and that's where energy and effort should be directed. Edit: There's a yet larger question on whether any legal constraints on the military's use of technology even makes sense at all, since any safeguards will be quickly yielded if a real enemy presents itself. As a course of natural law, no society will willingly handicap its means of defense against an external threat. It follows then that the only time these ethical concerns apply is when we are the aggressor, which we almost always are. It's the aggression that we should be limiting, not the technology.
  - anon84873628 7mo ago
    You could view various non-proliferation agreements as a legislative constraint on military technology. Same for chemical and biologicals. Those do prove your point that the law will be ignored if expedient. But it doesn't invalidate the notion of a society putting constraints on itself.
- wrqvrwvq 7mo ago
  It has always been a part of democratic rule, in peacetime and war. All telco's share virtually all of their technology with the government. Governments in europe and elsewhere routinely requisition services from many of their large corporations. I think it's absurd to think llm's can meaningfully participate in realworld cmd+ctrl systems and the government already has access to ml-enhanced targeting capabilities. I really have no idea what dod normies think of ai, other than that it's infinitely smarter than them, but that's not saying much.
  - not_that_d 7mo ago
    I would like to see a proof of this happening in Europa.
    - soderfoo 7mo ago
      If you're referring to telcos sharing their tech with government there are a few examples of Ericsson working with the Swedish military: > Brigadier-General Mattias Hanson, CIO, Swedish Armed Forces, says: “Strengthening Sweden’s militarily and acting as part of a collective defense requires us to increase our defensive capabilities. We need to utilize the latest technology and all the innovative power of the Swedish private sector. Sweden has unique skills and capabilities in both telecoms and defense technology..." [0] This is just one quick example I could find. [0] https://www.ericsson.com/en/news/2025/6/ericsson-5g-connectivity-to-support-swedish-defense-tests https://www.ericsson.com/en/news/2025/6/ericsson-5g-connecti...
  - ricardobeat 7mo ago
    Not the same thing. The parent comment was talking about government “requisiting” services as in forceful compliance, takeovers, not collaboration or regulatory compliance.
- tw1984 7mo ago
  > an expected part of democratic rule. give yourself a break. what your fancy democratic rule still holds under Trump?
  - anon84873628 7mo ago
    Yeah, we all know that. They were making a point in response to the parent.
  - ricardobeat 7mo ago
    Some of us don’t live in the USA.
  - kristjansson 7mo ago
    This cynicism is the surest way to doom it
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- beepbooptheory 7mo ago
  Makes me think of Operation Paperclip [1]. It happened after the war though, and its not China, but I think it helps your point! 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
tootie 7mo ago
It's also downstream of voters who voted in a president who promised to be dictatorial after failing at an attempted insurrection. We need to deprogram like 70M very confused people.
- helaoban 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - kalkin 7mo ago
    I'm curious for your understanding of why Trump won in 2024. If I'm understanding right, you think it was because American voters were rejecting Maoism ("it was called re-education"), to which you think the previous commenter likely subscribes, and which voters associated with Harris/Walz? But I suspect I'm not getting it quite right, and it would be helpful if you would spell out what you mean, rather than just relying on allusion. (I myself don't have a clear answer to why Trump won, but I don't think it speaks well to the decision-making of the median voter on their own terms, whatever those were, that Trump's now so unpopular despite governing in pretty much the way he said he would.)
    - helaoban 7mo ago
      [flagged]
      - kalkin 7mo ago
        > Biden, and then Harris/Waltz, are the kind of the ultimate expression of this left-wing, elitist decadence. Biden appointed a man who wears stilettos and dresses to work in charge of nuclear waste as the Department of Energy... Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably a more directly fatal error... This is just totally disconnected from policy reality. Biden did not tolerate mass border crossings. (I _wish_ he'd dismantled ICE, but he very clearly did not.) A relatively minor DoE appointment going to a member of an unpopular minority both has nothing to do with policy and is the kind of thing that must necessarily be acceptable if minorities are actually going to be "treated equally under the law". This is a ludicrous basis to infer "the subservience of the political class" to transgender people. On the other hand, Trump is a billionaire with Epstein connections and entirely unabashed about making money for his businesses and family using his government position. If this isn't "decadence", or "elitism", what meaning could the words possibly have? "Deprogramming" might be an unfriendly word but it's hard for me to imagine how you have a functional democracy when a plurality of voters are making decisions on the basis of straightforward falsehoods, or even inversions of reality, just because "at least that is the perception". This isn't a sustainable situation, and it will end with either re-connecting these people to reality or disenfranchising them (really, them disenfranchising themselves along with the rest of us, e.g. by re-empowering someone who tried to steal an election). The former seems vastly preferable. Speaking of unfriendly words - I also broadly have very little sympathy for a demand that people on the left speak respectfully of Trump voters given the total lack of any reciprocation. Even if it is the right way to do politics, the asymmetry between the way Democratic politicians talk about rural areas and the way Republican politicians talk about cities is another thing that's totally unsustainable.
jobs_throwaway 7mo ago
> The technology can just be requisitioned, there is nothing a corporation or a private individual can do about that. I strongly doubt this is true. I think if you gave the US government total control over Anthropic's assets right now, they would utterly fail to reach AGI or develop improved models. I doubt they would be capable even of operating the current gen models at the scale Anthropic does. > Or the models could be developed internally, after having requisitioned the data centers. I would bet my life savings the US government never produces a frontier model. Remember when they couldn't even build a proper website for Obamacare?
- qup 7mo ago
  > Remember when they couldn't even build a proper website for Obamacare? With a massive budget, too. Hundreds of millions iirc. It felt like a website that the small web-dev shop I worked for could build without much problem in a couple months. We didn't have 200 layers of beauracracy, though. That said I don't doubt the military could take their current tech and keep it running. It's far different from the typical grift of government contractors.
  - jobs_throwaway 7mo ago
    Maybe they could keep it running. With the way models are improving though, I don't think that'd be useful for long. In 6 months or a year when the frontier is again pushed out, I don't think the military is going to want to be running Opus 4.6 And contrary to what the model-makers would like you to believe, I don't think we're anywhere close to the system being self-improving enough that you could just let it run without intervention and it spits out a new frontier model
techblueberry 7mo ago
The private corporation is not dictating to the military, it’s setting the terms of the contract. The military is free to go sign a contract with a different company with different terms, but they didn’t, and now they want to change the terms after the contact was already signed. No mytholgization needed, just contract law.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- nemo44x 7mo ago
  The country is sovereign. It can just make a law democratically that changes things. The sovereign must act on whatever is in its best interest. The method of action is democratic in this case.
dartharva 7mo ago
> The military should be reigned in at the legislative level, by constraining what it can and cannot do under law. Is there an example of such a system existing successfully in any other country of the world that has a standing army?
- helaoban 7mo ago
  I think any such examination of a military that doesn't actually fight wars is meaningless. The question can only be really asked of a handful of countries.
blitzar 7mo ago
> Private corporations should never be allowed to dictate how the military acts. The military should never be allowed to dictate how Private corporations act
einpoklum 7mo ago
> Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive. Good thing the US is led by such figures as Donald Trump or Joseph Biden, stalwart trustworthy men with their hands firmly on the wheel.</sarcasm>
vonneumannstan 7mo ago
This is just a weird Trump talking point. This situation is unprecedented on many levels. The pentagon already had a signed contract with these stipulations and wanted to unilaterally renegotiate with Anthropic under threat of deeming them a foreign adversary and destroying their business if they didn't accept the DoD demands. It's totally absurd to turn this around on Anthropic and paint them as trying to determine US Military policy.
snowwrestler 7mo ago
Congress needs public pressure to act, and the public needs a spur to apply pressure. That’s really what Amodei is doing with this statement.
JackYoustra 7mo ago
I'm sorry I read this a lot and this is kind of an insane thing to say? Classified OLC memos giving legal cover to any military action has been a fixture for the last over twenty years! Congress never abdicated power, it just, by the nature of the constitution, practically has SO much less power than the president! The president is a single person that people elect, they expect the person to be a leader, and congress will always, always play a following role so long as the president has unilateral power over the military, is directly elected, and just in general has expansive interpreting authority over laws. You know who doesn't have as much power? The swiss head of state, so weak you can't even reliably name them! THATS what it looks like to defeat personalization, not some hand wringing hoping a system does something that it wasn't designed to do.
xnx 7mo ago
> Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive. This is a common but far too passive description. Republicans in Congress support everything Trump and friends are doing.

ricardobeat 7mo ago

> The technology can just be requisitioned During a war with national mobilization, that would make sense. Or in a country like China. This kind of coercion is not an expected part of democratic rule.

helaoban 7mo ago
The question of whether or not the government should be able to use AI for targeting without the involvement of humans is a wartime question, since that is the only time the military should be killing people. Under such a scenario, requisition applies, and so all of this talk is moot. The fact that the military is killing people without a declaration of war is the problem, and that's where energy and effort should be directed. Edit: There's a yet larger question on whether any legal constraints on the military's use of technology even makes sense at all, since any safeguards will be quickly yielded if a real enemy presents itself. As a course of natural law, no society will willingly handicap its means of defense against an external threat. It follows then that the only time these ethical concerns apply is when we are the aggressor, which we almost always are. It's the aggression that we should be limiting, not the technology.
- anon84873628 7mo ago
  You could view various non-proliferation agreements as a legislative constraint on military technology. Same for chemical and biologicals. Those do prove your point that the law will be ignored if expedient. But it doesn't invalidate the notion of a society putting constraints on itself.
wrqvrwvq 7mo ago
It has always been a part of democratic rule, in peacetime and war. All telco's share virtually all of their technology with the government. Governments in europe and elsewhere routinely requisition services from many of their large corporations. I think it's absurd to think llm's can meaningfully participate in realworld cmd+ctrl systems and the government already has access to ml-enhanced targeting capabilities. I really have no idea what dod normies think of ai, other than that it's infinitely smarter than them, but that's not saying much.
- not_that_d 7mo ago
  I would like to see a proof of this happening in Europa.
  - soderfoo 7mo ago
    If you're referring to telcos sharing their tech with government there are a few examples of Ericsson working with the Swedish military: > Brigadier-General Mattias Hanson, CIO, Swedish Armed Forces, says: “Strengthening Sweden’s militarily and acting as part of a collective defense requires us to increase our defensive capabilities. We need to utilize the latest technology and all the innovative power of the Swedish private sector. Sweden has unique skills and capabilities in both telecoms and defense technology..." [0] This is just one quick example I could find. [0] https://www.ericsson.com/en/news/2025/6/ericsson-5g-connectivity-to-support-swedish-defense-tests https://www.ericsson.com/en/news/2025/6/ericsson-5g-connecti...
- ricardobeat 7mo ago
  Not the same thing. The parent comment was talking about government “requisiting” services as in forceful compliance, takeovers, not collaboration or regulatory compliance.
tw1984 7mo ago
> an expected part of democratic rule. give yourself a break. what your fancy democratic rule still holds under Trump?
- anon84873628 7mo ago
  Yeah, we all know that. They were making a point in response to the parent.
- ricardobeat 7mo ago
  Some of us don’t live in the USA.
- kristjansson 7mo ago
  This cynicism is the surest way to doom it
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
beepbooptheory 7mo ago
Makes me think of Operation Paperclip [1]. It happened after the war though, and its not China, but I think it helps your point! 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

tootie 7mo ago

It's also downstream of voters who voted in a president who promised to be dictatorial after failing at an attempted insurrection. We need to deprogram like 70M very confused people.

helaoban 7mo ago
[flagged]
- kalkin 7mo ago
  I'm curious for your understanding of why Trump won in 2024. If I'm understanding right, you think it was because American voters were rejecting Maoism ("it was called re-education"), to which you think the previous commenter likely subscribes, and which voters associated with Harris/Walz? But I suspect I'm not getting it quite right, and it would be helpful if you would spell out what you mean, rather than just relying on allusion. (I myself don't have a clear answer to why Trump won, but I don't think it speaks well to the decision-making of the median voter on their own terms, whatever those were, that Trump's now so unpopular despite governing in pretty much the way he said he would.)
  - helaoban 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - kalkin 7mo ago
      > Biden, and then Harris/Waltz, are the kind of the ultimate expression of this left-wing, elitist decadence. Biden appointed a man who wears stilettos and dresses to work in charge of nuclear waste as the Department of Energy... Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably a more directly fatal error... This is just totally disconnected from policy reality. Biden did not tolerate mass border crossings. (I _wish_ he'd dismantled ICE, but he very clearly did not.) A relatively minor DoE appointment going to a member of an unpopular minority both has nothing to do with policy and is the kind of thing that must necessarily be acceptable if minorities are actually going to be "treated equally under the law". This is a ludicrous basis to infer "the subservience of the political class" to transgender people. On the other hand, Trump is a billionaire with Epstein connections and entirely unabashed about making money for his businesses and family using his government position. If this isn't "decadence", or "elitism", what meaning could the words possibly have? "Deprogramming" might be an unfriendly word but it's hard for me to imagine how you have a functional democracy when a plurality of voters are making decisions on the basis of straightforward falsehoods, or even inversions of reality, just because "at least that is the perception". This isn't a sustainable situation, and it will end with either re-connecting these people to reality or disenfranchising them (really, them disenfranchising themselves along with the rest of us, e.g. by re-empowering someone who tried to steal an election). The former seems vastly preferable. Speaking of unfriendly words - I also broadly have very little sympathy for a demand that people on the left speak respectfully of Trump voters given the total lack of any reciprocation. Even if it is the right way to do politics, the asymmetry between the way Democratic politicians talk about rural areas and the way Republican politicians talk about cities is another thing that's totally unsustainable.

jobs_throwaway 7mo ago

> The technology can just be requisitioned, there is nothing a corporation or a private individual can do about that. I strongly doubt this is true. I think if you gave the US government total control over Anthropic's assets right now, they would utterly fail to reach AGI or develop improved models. I doubt they would be capable even of operating the current gen models at the scale Anthropic does. > Or the models could be developed internally, after having requisitioned the data centers. I would bet my life savings the US government never produces a frontier model. Remember when they couldn't even build a proper website for Obamacare?

qup 7mo ago
> Remember when they couldn't even build a proper website for Obamacare? With a massive budget, too. Hundreds of millions iirc. It felt like a website that the small web-dev shop I worked for could build without much problem in a couple months. We didn't have 200 layers of beauracracy, though. That said I don't doubt the military could take their current tech and keep it running. It's far different from the typical grift of government contractors.
- jobs_throwaway 7mo ago
  Maybe they could keep it running. With the way models are improving though, I don't think that'd be useful for long. In 6 months or a year when the frontier is again pushed out, I don't think the military is going to want to be running Opus 4.6 And contrary to what the model-makers would like you to believe, I don't think we're anywhere close to the system being self-improving enough that you could just let it run without intervention and it spits out a new frontier model

techblueberry 7mo ago

The private corporation is not dictating to the military, it’s setting the terms of the contract. The military is free to go sign a contract with a different company with different terms, but they didn’t, and now they want to change the terms after the contact was already signed. No mytholgization needed, just contract law.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
nemo44x 7mo ago
The country is sovereign. It can just make a law democratically that changes things. The sovereign must act on whatever is in its best interest. The method of action is democratic in this case.

dartharva 7mo ago

> The military should be reigned in at the legislative level, by constraining what it can and cannot do under law. Is there an example of such a system existing successfully in any other country of the world that has a standing army?

helaoban 7mo ago
I think any such examination of a military that doesn't actually fight wars is meaningless. The question can only be really asked of a handful of countries.

blitzar 7mo ago

> Private corporations should never be allowed to dictate how the military acts. The military should never be allowed to dictate how Private corporations act

einpoklum 7mo ago

> Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive. Good thing the US is led by such figures as Donald Trump or Joseph Biden, stalwart trustworthy men with their hands firmly on the wheel.</sarcasm>

vonneumannstan 7mo ago

This is just a weird Trump talking point. This situation is unprecedented on many levels. The pentagon already had a signed contract with these stipulations and wanted to unilaterally renegotiate with Anthropic under threat of deeming them a foreign adversary and destroying their business if they didn't accept the DoD demands. It's totally absurd to turn this around on Anthropic and paint them as trying to determine US Military policy.

snowwrestler 7mo ago

Congress needs public pressure to act, and the public needs a spur to apply pressure. That’s really what Amodei is doing with this statement.

JackYoustra 7mo ago

I'm sorry I read this a lot and this is kind of an insane thing to say? Classified OLC memos giving legal cover to any military action has been a fixture for the last over twenty years! Congress never abdicated power, it just, by the nature of the constitution, practically has SO much less power than the president! The president is a single person that people elect, they expect the person to be a leader, and congress will always, always play a following role so long as the president has unilateral power over the military, is directly elected, and just in general has expansive interpreting authority over laws. You know who doesn't have as much power? The swiss head of state, so weak you can't even reliably name them! THATS what it looks like to defeat personalization, not some hand wringing hoping a system does something that it wasn't designed to do.

xnx 7mo ago

> Congress having thoroughly abdicated its powers to the executive. This is a common but far too passive description. Republicans in Congress support everything Trump and friends are doing.