{"id":8058,"date":"2026-03-07T01:56:32","date_gmt":"2026-03-07T01:56:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=8058"},"modified":"2026-03-07T01:56:32","modified_gmt":"2026-03-07T01:56:32","slug":"opinion-the-pentagons-attack-on-anthropic-is-political","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=8058","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | The Pentagon\u2019s Attack on Anthropic Is Political"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div id=\"\">\n<p class=\"css-8hvvyd\">I had Dario Amodei on the show last time a couple of years ago. It was in 2024 and we had this conversation where I said to him, at some point, if you are building a thing as powerful as what you were describing to me, then the fact that would be in the hands of some private C.E.O. seems strange. And he said, yeah, absolutely. \u201cI think it\u2019s fine at this stage, but to ultimately be in the hands of private actors, there\u2019s something undemocratic about that much power concentration.\u201d He said, I think if we get to that level \u2014 it\u2019s likely I\u2019m paraphrasing him here \u2014 that will need to be nationalized. And I said, I don\u2019t think if you get to that point, you\u2019re going to want to be nationalized. And now we\u2019re not. Here we are at that point. But actually it\u2019s all happening a little bit in reverse. The government \u2014 there was a moment when they threatened to use the Defense Production Act to somewhat nationalize Anthropic. They didn\u2019t end up doing that. But what they\u2019re basically saying is they will try to destroy Anthropic so it doesn\u2019t \u2014 to punish it, to set a precedent for others so it doesn\u2019t pose a threat to them. If it is such a political act and if these systems are powerful, and over time \u2014and again, I think people need to understand this part will happen \u2014 we will turn much more over to them, much more of our society is going to be automated and under the governance of these kinds of models. You get into a really thorny question of governance. Yes. Particularly because the different administrations that come in and out of U.S. life right now are really different. They are some of the most different in kind that we have had, certainly in modern American history. They are very, very misaligned to each other. So the idea that a model could be well aligned to both sides right now, to say nothing of what might come in the future, is hard to imagine. Like this alignment problem. Not the A.I. model to the user or the A.I. model almost like to the company, but the A.I. model to governments. The alignment problem of models in governments seems very hard. Yes, I think I completely concur that this is incredibly complicated. And part of the reason that this conversation sounds crazy is because it\u2019s crazy. Part of the reason this conversation sounds crazy is because we lack the conceptual vocabulary with which to interrogate these issues properly. But I think the basic principle that I as an American come back to when I grapple with this kind of thing is like, OK, well, it seems like the First Amendment is a good place to go here. It seems like that is \u2014OK, yes, there\u2019s going to be differently aligned models aligned to different philosophies. And they\u2019re going to be, different governments will prefer different things. And the models might conflict with one another. They\u2019re going to clash with one another. There\u2019ll be an adversarial context with one another. And so at that point, what are you doing? You\u2019re doing Aristotle. You\u2019re back to the basics of politics. And so I as a classical liberal say, well, the classical liberal order, the classical liberal order principles actually make plenty of sense. We don\u2019t want the government to be able to dictate what different kinds of alignment \u2014 the government does not define what alignment is. Private actors define what alignment is. That would be the way I would put it. But I do understand that this is weird for people, because what we\u2019re talking about here is again, this notion of the models as actors, actors that are \u2014 in some sense, we\u2019ve taken our hands off the wheel to some extent. Before we got to this point, there was already a lot of discourse coming out of people in the Trump administration and people around the Trump administration, people like Elon Musk and Katie Miller and others, who are painting Anthropic as a radical company that wanted to harm America as they saw it. I mean, Trump has picked up on this rhetoric. He called Anthropic a \u201cradical left woke company,\u201d called the people at it \u201cleft-wing nut jobs.\u201d Emil Michael said that Dario is \u201ca liar\u201d and has a \u201cGod complex.\u201d There\u2019s been a tremendous amount of Elon Musk, who runs a competing A.I. company, has very different politics than Dario, just like attacking Anthropic relentlessly on X, which is the informational lifeblood of the Trump administration. One way to conceptualize why they have gone so far here on the supply chain risk is that there are people there, not maybe most of them, but who actually think it is very important which A.I. systems succeed and are powerful and that they understand Anthropic as its politics are different than theirs, and so actually destroying it is good for them in the long run, completely separate from anything we would normally think of as a supply chain risk. Anthropic represents a kind of long-term political risk. Yes. I mean, I don\u2019t know that the actors in this situation entirely understand that this dynamic \u2014 part of my point all along has been that I think a lot of the people in the Trump administration that are doing this do not understand this. Like, they don\u2019t get what \u2014 they don\u2019t get these issues. They\u2019re not thinking about the issues in the terms that we are describing. But if you do think about them in the terms that we\u2019re discussing here, then I think what you realize is that this is a kind of political assassination. If you actually carry through on the threat to completely destroy the company, it is a kind of political assassination. And so, again, this is why First Amendment comes right to be there for me. And that\u2019s why this is a matter of principle that is so stark for me. That\u2019s why I wrote a 4,000- word essay that is going to make me a lot of enemies on the right. That\u2019s why I took this risk, because I think this matters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had Dario Amodei on the show last time a couple of years ago. It was in 2024 and we had this conversation where I said to him, at some&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":8059,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[5952,570,57,8876,62],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Opinion | The Pentagon\u2019s Attack on Anthropic Is Political - Frisco Times<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=8058\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Opinion | The Pentagon\u2019s Attack on Anthropic Is Political - Frisco Times\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I had Dario Amodei on the show last time a couple of years ago. 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