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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26123 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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The US is a sovereign nation and will take all acts necessary to guarantee its national security, with the ample blessing of the constitution and its stewards. That's not going to change, however amazing an actor Jack Nicholson is.

That has included nationalizing companies with strategically useful assets in the past. It's not really a matter of negotiation, if you're producing military widgets, the US can just decide you have to sell to them in priority, that they can just seize your stuff if the need is pressing and that you can't sell to anybody that's an enemy. They can use or copy any of your tech without compensation, and they can wipe themselves with your license agreement or contracts if they so wish.

What Hegseth is doing is establishing the predicate by which he can use or suggest the President use some of those powers, and he's then going to come to Amodei and say "give it to me or I'll take it", and Amodei's going to give it to him. They'll find some way to save face, probably having Anthropic license it all to some other company that lets USG do whatever with the tech, but it's going to happen. Just like it happened for every technology before it.

I mean what will happen is they'll get it from someone else. Otherwise, what exactly are they going to take? This isn't some factory or a warehouse full of inventory. Maybe they can take the current model weights and have something that's obsolete in 6 months. What they want is a Claude 6 that will do whatever they ask it to and for that they need Anthropic and it's employees to cooperate and without North Korea levels of oppression there's only so many levers they have.

An example may be valuable enough.

It's one thing to never want to deal with war, governments like the US generally (but not always) respect your wishes if you don't want your tech to be militarized. They may develop their own or use a competitor, but "my hands will never make a weapon" is a tenable position.

However, signing yourself up to militarize it but trying to put conditions on your sovereign is a fast track to corporate suicide. I think this is a black mark against Amodei that he ever thought shit like that would fly as a CEO.

I've heard people say "but they signed a contract". There are no contracts with a sovereign, not really. They deign pretend they're a private citizen for convenience, but really you are at the mercy of their pleasure, or at best of the law.

Oh I'm sure that's what they are going for. Though the lesson could as easily be don't even start doing business with the US government which may not be the win they imagine.

he's then going to come to Amodei and say "give it to me or I'll take it", and Amodei's going to give it to him.

He already had it. Now he's saying he doesn't want it after all. I don't think he's gonna get it.

Edit: he didn't get it.

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