In most modern democratic countries (I don't know about the US, since I'm European) executive and legislative branches are one and the same, so that still holds up!
> In most modern democratic countries (I don't know about the US, since I'm European) executive and legislative branches are one and the same, so that still holds up!
In the US we have had legitimate separation of powers between executive, legislative and judicial branches through much of our history and some of my lifetime (I'm almost 53).
We don't anymore.
The Republican-majority Congress has completely abdicated all of its power to the Republican executive and the Republican-majority Supreme Court barely tries to act like it is non-partisan anymore.
The non-Supreme Court judicial system is still (as can been seen by this ruling) functioning as intended, but there's a limit to how helpful that is when the top court is clearly in the bag, and if the other systems of checks and balances aren't repaired quickly it is only a matter of time until enough hyper partisan judges are installed at the lower levels to end that too.
The beginnings of the crumbling of our checks and balances pre-date the Trump era, though they've accelerated greatly during the Trump era. Even before Trump Congress had abdicated much of its power in matters of declaring war, for example.
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.
I really hate that republicans have capitalized on the good faith inherent in "national security matters" and are just sprinkling that onto literally everything they want to do to bypass all matters of scrutiny.
Need to demolish the white house? Oh national security!
Trans people in the military? NAtioanl security!
Need to make anthropic do exactly what you want them to? Well that sounds like national security to me!
The reflecting pool? Urgent national security measure for the 250th.
Republicans are doing this because they are currently in power. Democrats will do it (again) when they're in power. It's a super convenient way to shut down debate since 9/11.
Politics is frequently a game of semantic drift. The application of labels with unclear meaning to further dilute meaning or extend it for the purpose of engagement, legal reclassification... it's not engineering and you can't expect well defined terms from people who want power without accountability.
Politics doesn't work if a significant part of the leadership is constantly acting in bad faith, and behaving essentially sociopathically.
Voters' and citizens' (and some judges') willingness to support sociopathic behavior by leaders is a profound failing at their basic social duties, and is deeply shameful.
People always feel like that to a certain extent, but both quantitatively and qualitatively there have been very dramatic shifts in the past few decades in the USA.
No, this isn't just an overused rhetorical device like all politicians do, those examples are the flimsy legal argument the Trump Admin uses in court, frequently as justification to break the actual letter of the law.
You should be celebrating that Trump does things that get reviewed by court which is a marked departure from the Obama and Biden policy of executing citizens without trial.
Downvote if your TDS has made you support executions without trial.
Congress ceding it's authority to the executive branch is an issue of national concern, has been going on for decades, and is definitely not limited to one specific party [1], though I do agree that the current administration has been testing the limits of executive power more than any other that I can recall in my lifetime.
The current administration is the final nail in the coffin of presidential-style governments versus the parliamentary system.
Separating the legislature and the executive has no useful purpose: if the president is going to defacto enact law should be handled by the legislature, then there's no reason they shouldn't just be the head of the legislature and forced to actually whip the votes to do so.
The US president was always designed to be like this. It's like people are deliberately forgetting anti-federalists were not only a thing, they warned about these exact same problems over 200 years ago.
Impeachment that has to be done in a house of congress that was designed to have minimal accountability and is deeply anti-democratic? Maybe it "broke" down because there were no real checks and balances to begin with.
I'd recommend reading the Federalist Papers. A large number of them are more or less explicit warnings that Trump-style actions and attitudes should not be tolerated, and explanations about how they should be prevented and countered.
The Federalists were extremely familiar with the way monarchies functioned, spent a lot of time thinking about government strucutre, and the US presidency was quite explicitly set up to be something else.
If the leaders of all of our institutions decide to shrug when the president treats national powers as a tool for organized crime, and voters don't do anything about it, that's a people problem, not a problem of institutional structure. Any institution is only as powerful as our collective willingness to support and protect it.
I actually lean a little differently, though maybe it's the same thing in a different shape.
Since modern government seems to require a large bureaucratic apparatus to function, I think it should be its own branch with no single head - or put another way, all bodies established by the legislature should be independent from each other, the executive, and the legislature. This way, all power the legislature grants to a body doesn't acrue to the presidency, and the collective powers of these bodies don't acrue to a single person or group. The president would still have a suite of powers, but they wouldn't automatically expand - the president would only have whatever control over these bodies the legislature chooses to grant. Of course, if the legislature wants to exercise any power over these bodies once they've established them, they would have to do so through the usual legislative process, and it would still be subject to presidential veto.
I dislike it when people claim speech is violence. Like if you're trying to have a conversation on what should be or not - then people claim that it's a violent act to talk about.
I remember a time when stupid speech was suppressed by a punch to the mouth. Internet took that away from us, the social pressure to not be annoying dumbass. Now look where we (USA) are. Sometimes violence needs to be used to stop the speech of the oppressor. Tolerance Paradox and all that.
"Speech is violence" is very popular with the campus groups that want to ban speakers they disagree with.
I'm not sure if it's still going on, but a few years ago the same crowd kept insisting that "silence is violence" which is even more ludicrous - if you're not parroting their critical race theory talking points at every opportunity, YOU are committing an act of violence.
I wish the people down voting you would take a moment to explain why. Not because I agree with you, but because I don't know about this and I am curious and would appreciate a calm rational person to explain why they disagree with you.
I have noticed fads in rhetoric as I've gotten older and lived through many of these moments. The rhetorical fads are mostly about structuring an argument where to disagree makes you appear beyond the pale.
What fascinating about these is that they eventually turn on themselves, because rhetoric has no logical foundation and can be twisted to mean anything.
At this point, it seems pretty obvious to me that every group in this conflict is willing to do basically whatever it takes to push through what it wants. Both sides do it so clumsily and stupidly that they only end up pissing off both observers and their opponents even more. Consensus can never really be reached, because the whole point of these theatrics is the fight itself.
I’m not American, so I’m not used to this kind of thing at all, which makes it even stranger for me to watch one group roleplaying as deeply religious while at the same time embodying arrogance, greed, and a lust for power, while on the other side you have people fighting for equality so hard that it eventually turns into plain old racism, sexism, and mental gymnastics, with definitions of words and concepts being constantly changed just to make them fit into an already flimsy theory meant to explain why the patriarchy or some similar nonsense is supposedly to blame for everything.
I’m genuinely curious to see how the conflict between these two groups develops from here. It just keeps getting more and more absurd.
In the 40s the government took control of the whole economy in the name of national security, in the 1860s the government suspended the constitution in the name of national security. None of this is new.
"In the 40s" and "in the 1860s" here are obfuscations of "during WWII" and "during the civil war". Extraordinary actions in the name of national security during a literal civil war or during a time of total war are to be expected. The comparison to other times is not meaningful.
The context of what the nation was facing in the 1860's (the civil war) and 1940's (world war 2) were very materially different than what it faces now.
It's crazy how powerful trans people are. Given the response, they're as powerful as the Civil War and WW2.
There's 2.8M trans people in the US. Compared to the Axis powers who mobilized 25-30M personnel, each trans person has the equivalent strength of 9-10 Axis soldiers. Impressive.
A prime example is that the Trump regime overthrew all California environmental regulations regarding oil drilling by Sable in the name of national security:
GP already explicitly called it bipartisan, and it was bipartisan well before Obama (though if we're pointing fingers at a modern president for accelerating the abuse of "national security", it really should be Dubya).
Remember covid? We all fell into lockstep with great eagerness. Suddenly everybody agreed on what's good and bad, who's good and bad. And why. So don't go pointing fingers. Attend to the 2x4 in your own eye because it's happening to you right now.
Restriction on the movement of people, animals, and goods which is intended to prevent the spread of disease or pests is much older then COVID.
"
The word quarantine comes from quarantena or quarantaine, meaning "forty days", used in the Venetian language in the 14th and 15th centuries and also in France. The word is designated in the period during which all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague."
The legal short-hand saying that "corporations are people" is terrible PR. Non-legal-experts look at that and logically and correctly conclude "no, they're not", and think it's a ridiculous statement.
The underlying legal principle is that groups of individuals banding together don't lose their fundamental rights. That applies to unions, non-profits, clubs, churches, political parties, small businesses, and yes, corporations.
Courts do allow more government control over "commercial speech" than, say, political speech. But that discriminates based on the type of speech, not the type of speaker.
The main benefit to the fiction is limited liability. Without delegating to the corporation the responsibility for corporate actions would need to be defined as belonging to the owners, or all employees or some other structure where it all points to humans. If meta owes $18bn - I don't owe it - in the strong sense as a legal debt, as a shareholder in my 401k. The value of my ownership stake might go down (or up) but I don't have a shared legal obligation.
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?
I think the reverse is true. Anthropic gave a generous donation to the 'Trump fund' to make it go away, and so the government intentionally fumbled the case. Now Anthropic can continue to do business without this stench following them around.
I don't think there's a law or precedent for that.
The Tucker Act allows for a company to claim damages related to the seizure of property. That is not the same as having a product being stopped from 'shipping'[0].
Also, despite the US Concept of 'Corporate Personhood', Even the Citizens United decision did not set the bar for civil damages to be awarded for a civil rights violation to a 'corporate personhood'. i.e. While they were ruled to have had their First Amendment Rights Violated, there was no financial compensation to be had. The bar for waiving sovereign immunity for an individual/bureau/branch is very high and AFAICT requires specific action from congress.
[0] - The Tucker Act was written in the late 1800s, long before even the concept of Nuclear tech 'Born Secret' doctrine became a thing.
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.
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.
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 think there were some reforms to the process not too long ago that may have done something like you describe.
The problem comes from the fact that a lot of Millennials were told by their parents that having a degree was what mattered, not what the degree was for. That was probably true in their day; it wasn't true in the 00s. Kids were told to follow their dreams. Now those same parents scoff at the idea of meeting their now-adult children halfway in order to let them gainfully participate in the economy. It's insane.
Why do you assume there’s debt involved? Whether BS or not, people with degrees have higher earnings (~2x on average according to the FED) and pay higher taxes (more than 2x on average); it’s very much in the government’s financial interest for more people to have degrees.
That suffers from the stereotype fallacy. Some majors have huge ROI while others leave graduates very frustrated with their prospects. Not everyone will benefit from a degree. Not all degrees are financially sound.
Oh no! You’ve misunderstood. I wasn’t talking about the benefits of degrees to individuals, I was talking about the benefits to the federal budget. And there, the average income of graduates is actually the only thing that matters, because that average turns into a sum total in income tax revenue for the federal government, a total that factors in the benefits of all degrees and all incomes, good or bad. There is a healthy positive ROI today for the government on education, even after student debt forgiveness. We’re making a tidy profit on degrees, not taking on debt. We’re making such a good profit, in fact, that we’d still be in the black making money if we covered all 4 year degrees for everyone who’s already choosing to go to college now. It looks like just the additional income tax revenue the country makes off degree earners compared to high school grads is on the order of 2-3x the sum total money paid in tuition and fees to all post-secondary schools in the US. If everyone in the country decided to get free degrees, all else being equal, it might get closer to break even or dipping into the budget… maybe. But there are multiple other countries that cover college for everyone who wants it, and they’re doing fine financially and not taking on education debt, some even rank better than the US on several economic measures.
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.
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.
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
I think you do not even have the faintest understanding of how good these models are getting and how quickly. It's not slowing down. You should make some friends at the labs to better inform yourself.
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.
Even a fairly corrupt politician might believe that they are less corrupt than the other guy, and would be able to use the law as a weapon to get an even bigger slice of the cake. Or, still more likely, they would believe that "I get my fair share, you're a petty self-dealer, he is blatantly corrupt" and that the law would not be used against their perfectly open and above-board win-win deals, only against that other guy's filthy looting.
But that aside, as noted upthread, it doesn't actually require an amendment, it just requires the existing Congresscritters to do their dang jobs. Not holding my breath.
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)
Choose the worst Democratic politician currently in office and please explain what they’ve done or said that is in any way comparable to what the Republican Party is doing.
This is completely missing the point. Structurally I don't believe either party is set up to allow truly quality candidates to succeed. They optimize for all the wrong things in their candidates. Candidates who are quality that get through tend to be exceptions. Picking the worst of either side is just furthering the "We can't vote for good candidates because they might lose to whoever we believe is the worst candidate on the other side" narrative. The only way out is to stop buying into that narrative in a large enough number.
I think that’s some pretty thin gruel. The Democratic Party is hardly perfect. But that’s true of every political party on the planet. There are some grifters, some incompetent, and some corrupt Democrats. But by and large, Democratic politicians do seem to genuinely try to do their jobs. They seem to be at least somewhat receptive, as well. I see no reason to pretend they’re unworkable. And to suggest “eh, both sides suck” has always felt incredibly lazy and nihilistic to me.
You're missing the point. The harris administration wouldn't have had even 1% of the damage we are seeing. No 50% tariffs on Canada. No Iran war. No family members get bank charters and $600 million DoD contracts. I could go on and on. Biden was never remotely close to what his worst critics predicted nor was Obama. This admin has been far worse than even the most hyperbolic criticism predicted. American leadership and place in the world is permanently weaker now. It won't ever be the same and we will be poorer over the next few generations more isolated and sink into a position of parity if we are lucky.
The Biden administration left an economy that was the envy of the world. Leadership that was trusted and a series of impressive bipartisan legislation from the CHIPs act to the infrastructure bill that set us on a good trajectory for the coming changes. Obama did the same, if we had continued the emphasis on building a solar industry our AI build out would be better positioned now we are behind China by a massive degree.
But hunter Biden sold a few painting? And democrats take corporate contributions so it's all equally bad? That doesn't match the data, results or predictions people make before administrations take over.
Three Republicans started three wars in the middle east and caused three spikes in oil prices.
Three democrats started 0 wars and over saw reduced deficits, landmark legislation like Obamacare, build back better, CHIPs, etc. And would have had even more accomplished if the Trans pacific partnership trade area had been continued the Iran nuclear agreement remained in effect, the solar investments been expanded the EVV subsidies expanded.
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.
We don’t have the tools. No senator is afraid of a $1m fine because they lied in a campaign. Yes it would need to be a high bar but to say we have tools when the basic incentives to behave this badly are t punishable makes it hard to support that conclusion.
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.
Nothing means anything without consequences. You can write all the amendments you want, but if they intentionally disable and dismantle all means of holding them accountable, the Constitution doesn't mean anything. They can't even follow the plain text of blatantly clear amendments like the 14th.
My proposal is that there is a punishment for blatantly ignoring the 14th amendment. That’s the point, become an executive of the government comes with an affirmative obligation to actually enforce the law and a judicial review and cause of action that citizens can bring for
Failure to comply with that commitment.
I don't think "more rules" is the answer. There needs to be people in our government who have integrity, who can apply pressure and take risk. It's the people, not the constitution. The last 1.5 years is evidence that legality doesn't mean anything without people willing to take action.
I actually feel the opposite. The only thing that has slowed this chaos at all have been courts and separation of powers between the states and federal government.
I also think the supreme court immunity decision that gives the executive essentially no criminal liability has awoken then worst impulses.
So laws that specifically target those charged with enforcing law with liability for willful violation of law will stop this bs
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.
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.
> 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.
Recall the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act". The legislature _did_ pass a law banning software then and the executive just ignored it.
> 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.
Trump wasn't elected on a mandate to govern differently, he was elected because the DNC is a shambling corpse of a party that is paid to lose.
Due to some decisions made to protect """free speech""" - specifically, the free speech of moneybag men - capital interests are free to puppet our two parties around with abandon. The DNC in particular saw the new fundraising environment as an opportunity to completely sell out and ignore voters, and they're now hilariously unpopular with their own base despite being nominally in opposition to one of the least popular presidents of all time.
The environment this creates is one in which electoral politics is less than useless: it is actively harmful to the exercise of power on behalf of the people. We are actually seeing unusually high levels of activism in this country, and we actually do have a lot of issues with bipartisan support from voters. People don't want data centers built in their backyard, they don't want Flock building a private Stasi, they want the child rapists running our country to be brought to justice, they want right-to-repair, etc. But all of those issues are also antipartisan: they have bipartisan opposition from politicians, because they all imperil the funding sources you need in order to get into office. Compare the things MAGA people are saying to the things Trump is saying and you'll see the split.
I think you might have also mischaracterized the ruling. The Pentagon is still allowed to sanction supply chain risks, it just has to provide an actual reason for doing so. The Trump administration (really, just Pete Hegseth) tried to sanction Anthropic with no evidence. The actual reason was simple and straightforward: Anthropic had principles other than "doing what Pete Hegseth wanted" and everyone in this administration demands absolute and unfettered loyalty. I can see the value in "governing differently" but this government isn't just "different", it's demonstrably worse even on its own terms.
Will it matter? Trump and his gang of criminal owns the Supreme Court and are happy to flout the law in a move fast a break things approach all the time. (See also the stupid gaudy ballroom) This win a pyrrhic one at best.
As much as I dislike this administration's actions, why? Doesn't the Department of Defense get discretion to contract for whatever reasons it likes, as long as they think it serves public interests?
If Pete Hegseth, who is albeit highly incompetent, decides that Anthropic's values don't match with those of the DoD, isn't that entirely his call to make? Unless there's very specific circumstances at play, Hegseth is at least a public official, and gets to decide to do what he thinks is best for the public. Although he is wrong and Anthropic is right, no judge should force the government to use Anthropic products.
Does anybody have the legal analysis? I'm (clearly) not a lawyer, but I'm more interested for now in the question of whether this is allowed rather than whether it's morally right (it's obviously not).
Judges at this level often do things like this, and given it was brought in California likely the next level would also block the administration. That said, the Supreme Court has been pretty clear that the executive branch has broad and the only authority to designate supply chain risk. That said, they do need to justify it, not sure they did it well enough here, but this is far from an impartial judge.
Also, judges are political appointees -- This one has ruled against the Trump administration repeatedly and it's why this case was brought here. She was appointed by Joe Biden, was born/lives/works in the Bay Area and has a track record.
The trump administration has a long track record of doing illegal things that were struck down in countless courts across the country, so the more likely scenario is that this is yet another mark on that record. This isn't even the first one this week.
As for your legal arguments, it doesn't seem like they are currently correct, but I guess things can always change.
I’m not a lawyer either but I think the introduction section of the ruling seems to address your questions in a somewhat accessible manner. Specifically the last two paragraphs of the intro section.
This would likely be overturned if the federal government needs to push it. At the time Anthropic was saying publicly that they oppose certain actions and their model is restricted in certain ways. The executive branch viewed that as a risk and has the ultimate say over it's vendors, regardless of the judges ruling. The supreme court has been pretty clear on this.
This is also a reminder that, contrary to popular understanding, judges are indeed political appointees. This one was appointed by Joe Biden, works in the Bay Area and definitely has a political bias in both the track record and in activism.
I get irrational angry by logical and nonsensical statements. When I read this: “ Pentagon says private companies should not be able to constrain military action.” I am screaming: But they can fucking how what THEY want to sell to anybody! Setting terms for THEIR side is NOT constraining military action, unless military suddenly has totalitarian power over everybody !
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 26.3 ms ] threadIn the US we have had legitimate separation of powers between executive, legislative and judicial branches through much of our history and some of my lifetime (I'm almost 53).
We don't anymore.
The Republican-majority Congress has completely abdicated all of its power to the Republican executive and the Republican-majority Supreme Court barely tries to act like it is non-partisan anymore.
The non-Supreme Court judicial system is still (as can been seen by this ruling) functioning as intended, but there's a limit to how helpful that is when the top court is clearly in the bag, and if the other systems of checks and balances aren't repaired quickly it is only a matter of time until enough hyper partisan judges are installed at the lower levels to end that too.
The beginnings of the crumbling of our checks and balances pre-date the Trump era, though they've accelerated greatly during the Trump era. Even before Trump Congress had abdicated much of its power in matters of declaring war, for example.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
> 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
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.
Need to demolish the white house? Oh national security! Trans people in the military? NAtioanl security! Need to make anthropic do exactly what you want them to? Well that sounds like national security to me!
The reflecting pool? Urgent national security measure for the 250th.
Voters' and citizens' (and some judges') willingness to support sociopathic behavior by leaders is a profound failing at their basic social duties, and is deeply shameful.
Not to be too contrarian, but I'm certain there are many people who would claim that's the only way it has ever worked (poorly)
Downvote if your TDS has made you support executions without trial.
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/its-...
Separating the legislature and the executive has no useful purpose: if the president is going to defacto enact law should be handled by the legislature, then there's no reason they shouldn't just be the head of the legislature and forced to actually whip the votes to do so.
The Federalists were extremely familiar with the way monarchies functioned, spent a lot of time thinking about government strucutre, and the US presidency was quite explicitly set up to be something else.
If the leaders of all of our institutions decide to shrug when the president treats national powers as a tool for organized crime, and voters don't do anything about it, that's a people problem, not a problem of institutional structure. Any institution is only as powerful as our collective willingness to support and protect it.
Since modern government seems to require a large bureaucratic apparatus to function, I think it should be its own branch with no single head - or put another way, all bodies established by the legislature should be independent from each other, the executive, and the legislature. This way, all power the legislature grants to a body doesn't acrue to the presidency, and the collective powers of these bodies don't acrue to a single person or group. The president would still have a suite of powers, but they wouldn't automatically expand - the president would only have whatever control over these bodies the legislature chooses to grant. Of course, if the legislature wants to exercise any power over these bodies once they've established them, they would have to do so through the usual legislative process, and it would still be subject to presidential veto.
As a concept, it's used as an escape hatch whenever it wants to avoid public scrutiny.
I'm not sure if it's still going on, but a few years ago the same crowd kept insisting that "silence is violence" which is even more ludicrous - if you're not parroting their critical race theory talking points at every opportunity, YOU are committing an act of violence.
What fascinating about these is that they eventually turn on themselves, because rhetoric has no logical foundation and can be twisted to mean anything.
I’m not American, so I’m not used to this kind of thing at all, which makes it even stranger for me to watch one group roleplaying as deeply religious while at the same time embodying arrogance, greed, and a lust for power, while on the other side you have people fighting for equality so hard that it eventually turns into plain old racism, sexism, and mental gymnastics, with definitions of words and concepts being constantly changed just to make them fit into an already flimsy theory meant to explain why the patriarchy or some similar nonsense is supposedly to blame for everything.
I’m genuinely curious to see how the conflict between these two groups develops from here. It just keeps getting more and more absurd.
No, obviously not. That would have been pointless; the US was at war anyway. The US is always at war.
There's 2.8M trans people in the US. Compared to the Axis powers who mobilized 25-30M personnel, each trans person has the equivalent strength of 9-10 Axis soldiers. Impressive.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/08/trump-intervene...
Want to execute a citizen without trial? National security.
Want to execute his child without trial? National security.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla...
" The word quarantine comes from quarantena or quarantaine, meaning "forty days", used in the Venetian language in the 14th and 15th centuries and also in France. The word is designated in the period during which all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine
The underlying legal principle is that groups of individuals banding together don't lose their fundamental rights. That applies to unions, non-profits, clubs, churches, political parties, small businesses, and yes, corporations.
Courts do allow more government control over "commercial speech" than, say, political speech. But that discriminates based on the type of speech, not the type of speaker.
.. but do limit their liabilities. It's not unreasonable to claim that limited liability should come with limited rights.
The Tucker Act allows for a company to claim damages related to the seizure of property. That is not the same as having a product being stopped from 'shipping'[0].
Also, despite the US Concept of 'Corporate Personhood', Even the Citizens United decision did not set the bar for civil damages to be awarded for a civil rights violation to a 'corporate personhood'. i.e. While they were ruled to have had their First Amendment Rights Violated, there was no financial compensation to be had. The bar for waiving sovereign immunity for an individual/bureau/branch is very high and AFAICT requires specific action from congress.
[0] - The Tucker Act was written in the late 1800s, long before even the concept of Nuclear tech 'Born Secret' doctrine became a thing.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone
https://archive.ph/BfuVs
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.
The problem comes from the fact that a lot of Millennials were told by their parents that having a degree was what mattered, not what the degree was for. That was probably true in their day; it wasn't true in the 00s. Kids were told to follow their dreams. Now those same parents scoff at the idea of meeting their now-adult children halfway in order to let them gainfully participate in the economy. It's insane.
Great for fleecing those end-payers, however.
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.
And by supreme court, I mean right wing justices specifically. Who got there thanks to their heritage foundation connections. Which made project 2025.
But that aside, as noted upthread, it doesn't actually require an amendment, it just requires the existing Congresscritters to do their dang jobs. Not holding my breath.
If we can't do that then we are just stuck as a body politic.
(NB: this is meaningfully different in the UK which has really multi-party elections despite Westminster elections being FPTP)
Choose the worst Democratic politician currently in office and please explain what they’ve done or said that is in any way comparable to what the Republican Party is doing.
The Biden administration left an economy that was the envy of the world. Leadership that was trusted and a series of impressive bipartisan legislation from the CHIPs act to the infrastructure bill that set us on a good trajectory for the coming changes. Obama did the same, if we had continued the emphasis on building a solar industry our AI build out would be better positioned now we are behind China by a massive degree.
But hunter Biden sold a few painting? And democrats take corporate contributions so it's all equally bad? That doesn't match the data, results or predictions people make before administrations take over.
Three Republicans started three wars in the middle east and caused three spikes in oil prices.
Three democrats started 0 wars and over saw reduced deficits, landmark legislation like Obamacare, build back better, CHIPs, etc. And would have had even more accomplished if the Trans pacific partnership trade area had been continued the Iran nuclear agreement remained in effect, the solar investments been expanded the EVV subsidies expanded.
How can you equivicate these records?
I also think the supreme court immunity decision that gives the executive essentially no criminal liability has awoken then worst impulses.
So laws that specifically target those charged with enforcing law with liability for willful violation of law will stop this bs
Giant waste of marketing with “Dario” and everything else. Nobody believes it.
Because nobody uses their shit. They have no customers.
And they'll continue to do so, because it takes months to unwind this shit, and the damage was done immediately.
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.
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.
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.
Recall the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act". The legislature _did_ pass a law banning software then and the executive just ignored it.
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.
Due to some decisions made to protect """free speech""" - specifically, the free speech of moneybag men - capital interests are free to puppet our two parties around with abandon. The DNC in particular saw the new fundraising environment as an opportunity to completely sell out and ignore voters, and they're now hilariously unpopular with their own base despite being nominally in opposition to one of the least popular presidents of all time.
The environment this creates is one in which electoral politics is less than useless: it is actively harmful to the exercise of power on behalf of the people. We are actually seeing unusually high levels of activism in this country, and we actually do have a lot of issues with bipartisan support from voters. People don't want data centers built in their backyard, they don't want Flock building a private Stasi, they want the child rapists running our country to be brought to justice, they want right-to-repair, etc. But all of those issues are also antipartisan: they have bipartisan opposition from politicians, because they all imperil the funding sources you need in order to get into office. Compare the things MAGA people are saying to the things Trump is saying and you'll see the split.
I think you might have also mischaracterized the ruling. The Pentagon is still allowed to sanction supply chain risks, it just has to provide an actual reason for doing so. The Trump administration (really, just Pete Hegseth) tried to sanction Anthropic with no evidence. The actual reason was simple and straightforward: Anthropic had principles other than "doing what Pete Hegseth wanted" and everyone in this administration demands absolute and unfettered loyalty. I can see the value in "governing differently" but this government isn't just "different", it's demonstrably worse even on its own terms.
If Pete Hegseth, who is albeit highly incompetent, decides that Anthropic's values don't match with those of the DoD, isn't that entirely his call to make? Unless there's very specific circumstances at play, Hegseth is at least a public official, and gets to decide to do what he thinks is best for the public. Although he is wrong and Anthropic is right, no judge should force the government to use Anthropic products.
Does anybody have the legal analysis? I'm (clearly) not a lawyer, but I'm more interested for now in the question of whether this is allowed rather than whether it's morally right (it's obviously not).
Also, judges are political appointees -- This one has ruled against the Trump administration repeatedly and it's why this case was brought here. She was appointed by Joe Biden, was born/lives/works in the Bay Area and has a track record.
As for your legal arguments, it doesn't seem like they are currently correct, but I guess things can always change.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
This is also a reminder that, contrary to popular understanding, judges are indeed political appointees. This one was appointed by Joe Biden, works in the Bay Area and definitely has a political bias in both the track record and in activism.
https://grokipedia.com/page/Rita_F._Lin