A private corporation can choose not to sell to the government. A lot of them do exactly this. A lot of hoops to jump through.
However, if they do sell to the government, they shouldn't have some sneaky way to exert control over decision making using their products. We're a country of laws, and for better or for worse, these laws are made by elected officials and those appointed by elected officials.
Why an American company wouldn't want American defense to have the most capable tools at their disposal is a different matter all together, but here we are.
> they shouldn't have some sneaky way to exert control over decision making using their products.
why not, many companies have all sorts of rules you agree to when using their products, including many legal ("lawful") things. Are you saying that the government as a client should be unbound by contractual obligations that apply to other clients?
That's fine as long as the company can choose they don't like those terms and refuse to do business. But in this case the government threatened, and carried out the threat, of classifying Anthropic as a "supply chain threat" if they didn't agree to the government's terms.
I want to be clear, I agree. I have no objection to unique government contracts. I'm specifically curious about GPs position that a government contractor should be (ethically?) bound from putting contractual obligations on government use of their service.
Like the various ai providers limit lawful use like creating AI pornography. I think it would be reasonable to keep a contractual restriction against that even when working with the government.
The system also wasn't designed for presidential immunity. Combining that with unlimited federal pardons, we're the wild west permanently, or at least until that decision is overturned.
I suspect cynically that as soon as someone not a republican takes power the presidential immunity will magically evaporate in a burst of bad faith jurisprudence.
We have not seen a non-compliant executive in this country since FDR. People need to actually read the output from the Court and the associated response from the Executive branch, and not the news. I realize we a swimming in a soup of chaos about this current administration, but there has been no Andrew Jackson moment. This White House does something, and there is an injunction, and they back off. They have a pretty good batting average at the appeals level and at SCOTUS, but there is no instance I can reference where they deliberately ignore an order from the courts.
There's nothing sneaky about terms & conditions. If the gov wants a service they legally need to abide by its terms, same as us, if they don't like it they should choose another product.
Anthropic doesn't want their AI used for misaligned mass surveillance scanners and killbots, there are obvious reasons they might not want that.
This administration has made it very clear that they will do what they can to change laws whenever convenient, without congressional oversight, whether or not they are "allowed" to.
Trump implemented tariffs he wasn't allowed to immediately, he started a war he probably wasn't allowed to in order to (allegedly) distract from associating with a pedophile, he wrote an executive order trying to undo the fourteenth amendment, he has actively been abducting and imprisoning lawful residents (and even citizens!) and actively pushed for racial profiling to do so.
If a company feels like the government will simply rewrite the laws in order to advance any kind of political whim (including to be weaponized against that very company!), it's not wrong or even weird for them to want to add safeguards to their product.
To be clear, this isn't weird or uncommon. Lots the stuff you sign in the EULA isn't preventing you from doing things that are "illegal".
However, if they do sell to the government, they shouldn't have some sneaky way to exert control over decision making using their products. We're a country of laws, and for better or for worse, these laws are made by elected officials and those appointed by elected officials.
Why an American company wouldn't want American defense to have the most capable tools at their disposal is a different matter all together, but here we are.