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Ideally, governments should not have companies they like or dislike. (They still can have an independent anti-trust commission which can split up monopolies, though.)
In the US, the relationship between big corporations and the government envisioned by both sides of the aisle is the same as in fascism -- companies enjoy some autonomy and can make money for their shareholders, but if the Fuehrer tells them to build tanks, they know that they are not at liberty to respectfully decline and build cars instead. Seen with the Democrats leaning on the social media companies to suppress COVID misinformation (later extended to general 'misinformation'), the TikTok law, to the pathetic display of the heads of SV kissing the ring of the Don when he took office last year and his blatant favoritism.
So Hegseth retaliating against a company who dares to have (quite modest, to be honest) ethical red lines is in a long tradition of corporations being told what to do lest they receive a broadside from regulatory authorities.
For Anthropic, this is a costly signal. While I am reasonably confident that the courts will stop this government overreach eventually, the court system recently had this thing were they would let government decisions play out for a year before saying "haha, obviously not".
It also makes me slightly more confident in Anthropic doing the right thing in general. Obviously they took some hits over revisioning their Responsible Scaling Policy earlier that week. My personal take is that at least Anthropic cares somewhat about alignment. Contrast with OpenAI after Altman's coup, or Meta (whose director of alignment only makes the news when she gets OpenClaw to delete her inbox) or xAI (whose goal seems to be to build the AI which undressed most minors before becoming a paperclip maximizer).
Of course, Anthropic is also signaling that they are not Trump-aligned, which may be helpful in three years. OTOH, Democrats also want a military contractor to jump when told to jump, and their red lines did not even mention vulnerable minorities, so I am unsure how much goodwill this will buy them.
I am also unsure how this will matter for their day-to-day operations, my understanding is that AI companies are burning through vast amounts of investor cash in order to train the next money which will win the AI race and pay for itself a thousandfold, which seems almost as viable if you do not have government contractors as customers.
For US contractors, I am not yet clear what the supply risk designation entails. Is it just "you may not use Claude code while working on Pentagon software" or "your whole company may not both work on defense contracts and use Claude" or "Anthropic is radioactive, and any company working with a radioactive company is radioactive itself, and a defense contractor must be non-radioactive". The last one seems practically unenforceable in a global economy, "the Malaysian shipping company we use has their offices cleaned by a company which uses a Huawei router" would qualify, after all. The middle one hinges on what a whole company is, which is typically very flexible, you could have Oracle Defense as a separate entity from Oracle or whatever.
Of course, in the hole I am living in, the latest hearsay news is that Claude is the best LLM for writing code. Not sure how the gap to their competitors compares to the juicy gravy train of fat DoD contracts, though.
So one way to spin this (depending on how you lean wrt AI coding) would be "Hegseth weakens US military by denying them the best tool for the job", which from an European perspective does not really sound like a bad thing.
Realistically, I think the relationship between companies and the government changes considerably when the technology at hand represents a critical and frontier level capability. SpaceX, for example, constitutes a load bearing part of our national security.
Whether or not Anthropic's demands were modest, I think they crossed a line. And the DOW crossed an even larger one with the designation (which is a massive overescalation).
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If I had to name the company I'd like to see pull-off ASI, I'd absolutely go for Anthropic. I agree that they take alignment very seriously, and while I do not agree with all the moral takes they've tried to instill into Claude via its Constitution, it's remarkably sane nonetheless. I'm not an EA, I don't give a hoot about shrimp welfare, I'm ambivalent about model welfare, but I'll be damned if I see a better alternative. I mirror your take on OAI, XAI and Meta. Google? I'm unsure. Perhaps better than those three.
Amanda Askell clearly strikes me as being one of the few philosophers who genuinely deserves being the godmother of an AGI. Maybe Scott could do better, if I absolutely had to name alternatives.
I'm no expert, but my impression is that the DOD wants to go with the maximalist interpretation, while Anthropic wants to both dismiss charges, or in the event it sticks, get away with a narrow interpretation.
Maybe I'm delusional, but I feel like if Elon figured out AGI or ASI, he would throw the rest of us some scraps. If not an actual model then just the knowledge to make one. But if OAI or Anthropic figured it out, they would definitely guard it jealously and probably unleash it to actively hinder competing labs from making the same breakthrough.
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