The Pentagon is violating Anthropic’s First Amendment rights

https://www.fire.org/news/pentagon-violating-anthropics-first-amendment-rights

17 Comments

  1. GiftLongjumping1959 on

    How about when the government forced a sowing machine manufacture to start making M1 carbines

    Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it

  2. RockysDetail on

    Man, it’s hard to believe that the Pentagon would violate anyone’s Constitutional protections.

  3. TheDevilsAdvokaat on

    American government behaves lawlessly these days. The corruption stems from the very top.

    The FBI and DOJ need to be investigated too over their Epstein failings.

    I hope once Trump and the rest of the rubbish have been cleared away perhaps a new agency can be set up to investigate all the illegal things the current government has done.

    It’s amazing that a Department of Justice can be guilty of obstruction of justice but they are in the Epstein case. What other things have they obstructed? And yes the FBI needs to be investigated too.

    I hope one day the US can go back to being a law abiding country. They;re certainly not at the moment.

  4. The tech industry angle nobody’s talking about here: this sets a precedent for how the government can pressure AI companies specifically to modify their products’ behavior.

    Anthropic built safety guardrails into Claude as a deliberate product decision — the same way a newspaper makes editorial decisions about what to publish. The Pentagon demanding they remove those guardrails isn’t just a 1A issue, it’s the government saying “your product’s design choices are subject to our approval.”

    Imagine applying this logic broadly: the government could pressure any software company to change how their product works because the current design is inconvenient for a government use case. That’s a massive expansion of what we accept from the state-private sector relationship.

    The NRA v. Vullo precedent from 2024 (9-0 decision) is directly relevant here. The government can’t use its regulatory power to coerce private entities into changing their speech or expression. And yes, how an AI model responds is a form of expressive output that courts are increasingly recognizing.

  5. Anthropic isn’t perfect but they come out looking like the hero no matter how you slice this. They are fighting for no (or less) AI mass surveillance of citizens and no AI kill chains without human interaction.

  6. Exciting_Turn_9559 on

    The constitution is no longer in effect due to the Republican party going full fascist. This ends in civil war, new borders, new constitutions. Just make sure the rich are neutered in at least one of them.

  7. Turns out there’s a certain amount of honor system to our peaceful rule through laws and regulations.

  8. BoardsofCanada3 on

    I don’t want the slop corporation to win, I just want the government to lose.