But at the moment I must use a US model for the best results for complex queries. So I'm glad that there's one company I'm at least somewhat ok with supporting. I'm not even that picky. All I want is a reasonable guarantee that I'm not supporting a company who's tools are used for autonomous drone warfare in American wars, and a few other basic things like that.
I guess someone might feel moved to respond to this by pointing out all the other companies outside of AI that I should be avoiding too. Please do! I'm actively trying to be more mindful of the companies I support rather than just chasing the lowest bills. I'm in the process of migrating my company away from MS 365 to Nextcloud on Hetzner, which is going slow but well.
The commenter you responded said presidency not country. There are multiple parties and possibilities here.
Dont allow systems to be built with your AI that automate mass surveillance or automate kill decisions.
those systems will be built regardless. That type of boycott being asked from companies is essentially asking companies to not make profit where there's profit to be made, when those doing the asking is not also taking in any sacrifices for this boycott.
Instead of asking companies to be altruistic, those wanting such systems to be illegal should be using the civic system we have today to make it so - yes, this costs effort, resources and time. Like all hard things.
There already is a mass surveillance. Presumably most electronic communication is monitored. I guess LLMs can likely do a somewhat better job but probably not worth the cost for the marginal benefit over existing technologies?
Similarly for "Terminators" or other AI killing machines... Isn't it cheaper to use a human? We have autonomous weapons already, like cruise missiles... Other than the movies what does a reality with LLMs pulling triggers look like? Cars are also "killing machines" and we're letting computers drive them...
Unfortunately if these things do start making sense for whatever reason they're probably going to happen. Private companies in general have no way to prevent their technology from being used for "defense" applications. Once that genie is out of the bottle it's not going back in.
I wonder if a US company has ever wholesale emigrated before?
Source: A Norwegian that just cancelled his ChatGPT plus subscription and will consider Gemini or Claude instead.
Sam Altman immediately capitulating to the Trump administration after bragging like four hours ago about he wouldn't shows a distinct lack of integrity. It's not like ChatGPT is categorically better than Claude, I just didn't bother change to Claude before purely out of my previous inertia with ChatGPT.
Isn't it supposed to be freedom of something? Does this trigger any laws or something? Just for curiosity sake
Oh, you fell for the ads
edit: Disregard the above, do I take my car or walk to a car wash 50m away
Separately:
An opinion piece in the NYT suggested that Anthropic should not have restrictions and that "lawful use" provision should properly constrain the government. The fact that we have to hope Anthropic holds to their commitment is a show of no-confidence in the rule of law and the legislature of the United States to protect the people.
Seriously. All they said was "don't do mass surveillance and don't create autonomous killbots" and the president literally frames it as "Anthropic vs. the Constitution" and calls them woke radicals. How any citizen doesn't immediately have their stomach churning is beyond me.
Oh wait, out of [Fox, WSJ, NYT, WaPo, NPR, Newsmax] only Fox doesn't have an article up about it, and Newsmax left out the part about domestic mass surveillance. I am shocked!
Reminds me of that scene in the dark knight when Bane says "Do you feel in charge?". Well do you, Pete? Why should Pete Hegseth be in charge of anything? "Department of war" lol. These punks need to step aside and let the adults take over for the good of humanity.
Props to Anthropic for standing their ground and not getting bullied by their inferiors. You earned a lot of respect today.
Props to OpenAI for being slick and playing the game, hopefully they can take control of this decaying corpse from the inside and transform it into something better.
There have been presidents in decline who were semi-captured by their staffs. Biden, Reagan, and Roosevelt all were. It may be that Trump gets trotted out now and then to deliver his standard speech (his speeches all have roughly the same content, regardless of subject or venue), but the work of the White House involves him less.
Watch to see which threats get followed up with action, and which ones don't.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/02/trump-gop-repub...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Blair_(political_advisor...
Six-month phase out period, that's something. I guess the DoW's been using Claude quite a bit.
"Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow."
with major civil and criminal consequences to follow.
WTF !!!
Also see what happened to Joseph Nacchio in the early 2000s [1]:
> He was convicted of 19 counts of insider trading in Qwest stock on April 19, 2007[2] – charges his defense team claimed were U.S. government retaliation for his refusal to give customer data to the National Security Agency in February, 2001.
Unfortunately, I think the same thing is in the cards now for Anthropic's CEO, that is if he doesn't choose to play ball.
So many people wrote think pieces about how Trump couldn't possibly be a fascist because fascism involves state takeover of corporate power. Hm...
What I don't get is why they really want it. I can't think of a worse platform in general to do anything with combat that is, anything in a data-center. I would take the Quake 3 Arena engine on a new ultra insane mode combined with a tiny self hosted model to detect humans, uniforms, vehicle make and model plus a simple Friend or Foe over all the big AI platforms any day. Add an optional feed from an encrypted meshtastic like network to sync nodes using pre-defined Ostiary like commands. Ultra-fast, light-weight on all resources, decentralized.
The enemy could neutralize all the big platforms in one day by simply activating a few dozen of the sleeper agents in the US or a couple High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) deployed by a few stratospheric balloons as China flew over every major military installation in the US. Adding to this having a network dependency to the big platforms from autonomous weapons is an extreme vulnerability. Any design that depends on a central command is a single point of success.
Too bad government devs will have a much harder time using some of the best tools out there.
He is losing the ICE war, because the protesters used tactics of the civil rights movements of the past pretty effectively and now he is stuck between losing the narrative of protecting Americans by further escalation or losing power as a direct consequence of said escalation and more Americans getting murdered by government agents.
Of the 8 or so wars he pretended to have stopped only two are still in a non-active state. The world is more dangerous than it ever was in our lifetime.
But I’m glad the man got a noble peace prize and probably put it right next to the golden pager he got from jerusalems favorite war criminal.
Let’s not forget the fourth anniversary of putins three day special operation just passed. A special operation by a special boy, that should have been ended on day one of his presidency.
He is losing the war of the public opinion, as he is approaching the midterms with the lowest approval rating and on top of that the whole Epstein thing is sticking to his shoes and gets smellier by the day and he can’t shake it off.
The Supreme Court took away his bonking stick, and he ordered a pretty impressive armada to the front door of Iran but khameni is old and rather wants to die a martyr than on youtube getting hung by the neck and dragged through Teheran behind a dumping truck.
And now those damn woke lunatics at anthropic won’t allow him to spy on his political enemies and every American and if necessary kill them autonomously, probably with the same red button he uses to order fresh BigMacs into the oval office.
The poor man is really not having a good time. But I’m sure he can dry his tears with a few of those crypto billions he made from selling the presidency.
This is such an interesting timeline. In fourty years none of the younger people are going to believe us, we are all going to eat our rat pudding in a trump home for the elderly under constant ai supervision, because they think we’re insane.
Not a hard sell, but just "These are the two demands the government gave us, and here's why we did not agree to them"
It makes the company so attractive to most of the public - not just those who dislike Trump, but also those don't trust government.
I think we'll see many many dupes. Hopefully the comment threads will be merged eventually.
At least, so goes the theory.
The government has their hands in all of them, using "national security" as the justification, with threats if they don't comply [1][2], with the alternative being to shut down [3].
Does it prevent harm? Probably.
[1] https://sg.news.yahoo.com/yahoo-ceo-fears-defying-nsa-could-...
[2] https://lieu.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/report-yahoo...
[3] https://www.crn.com/news/security/240159745/two-email-provid...
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2026/01/22/micro...
Also, implicit in the government's requirements is that they require mass domestic surveillance capabilities. Imagine a large government tool that for each citizen there is an antagonist OpenClaw-like set of agents surveilling and potentially acting against every public interaction and occasionally hallucinating.
Also I wonder what's happening with democracy in the US, with this level of presidential control to mess up everything, is US moving towards dictatorship?
I mean maybe, but not because the president can decide to cancel a contract with a vendor. That seems to be a pretty reasonable power for the president to have.
Rarely see a company tell the government no though.
> Demand from other agencies to use Grok has been anemic, people familiar with the matter said, except in a few cases where people wanted to use it to mimic a bad actor for defensive testing.
[0]: https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/elon-musk-xai...?
The only question is whether the safety of the models were really done well enough to protect the people and be a net positive force in the world.
I guess if they would be safely trained to do more good than bad (how Dario and SamA said), there wouldn't even be a need for the contract terms.
There is a whole situation with dealing with military contract during Trump 1, and it didn't go well for Google, I doubt Sundar will go the same route once again.
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1161445529692...
> THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! That decision belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military.
> The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY.
> Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again! There will be a Six Month phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic’s products, at various levels. Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow.
> WE will decide the fate of our Country — NOT some out-of-control, Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMPThere's been a concerted effort to hide the fact that the US President is posting insane shit every day for years.
If only we had a constitutional process for removing presidents from office as they become obviously unfit for the office…
He is gonna get slaughtered in midterms, be hamstrung his last two years and then go away.
I don't know why suddenly the narrative here turns to spinning this as "Trump is evil" when this is actually keeping the AI company out of the government's reach.
The level of cognitive dissonance here is unreal.
Text (it is short):
> President Trump on Friday ordered all federal agencies to stop using artificial intelligence technology made by Anthropic, an order that could vastly complicate intelligence analysis and defense work.
> Writing on Truth Social, Mr. Trump used harsh words for Anthropic calling it a “radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about.”
> Still, Mr. Trump announced a “Six Month phase out” for the Pentagon and some other agencies, a period of time that could allow for more extended negotiations between Anthropic and the Defense Department. Calling the company “Leftwing nut jobs,” he said they had made a mistake trying to strong-arm the Pentagon.
> Mr. Trump’s statement came as the Pentagon and Anthropic were, despite an escalating war of words, continuing to negotiate a compromise. While some current and former American officials had expressed hope of some sort of deal before the Pentagon’s 5:01 p.m. deadline, Mr. Trump’s comments will undoubtedly complicate matters.
The Truth Social post, which is, well, you can decide for yourself: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1161445529692...
The Al Capone executive.
No surprise most CEOs are either licking his butt or staying silent, there's clearly a climate of fear.
https://x.com/sama/status/2027578652477821175?s=20
Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.
In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.
AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of > our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.
We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only.
We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our > strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.
We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.
Amazing / weird that this sounds like a lot of the stuff Amodei said Anthropic asked for
What to watch: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a memo to staff on Thursday night that the company will uphold the same red lines as Anthropic on surveillance and autonomous weapons, but still hopes to strike a deal with the Pentagon.
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/27/anthropic-pentagon-supply-c...