A lot of things that people call "bribery" is really just ensuring that your preferred candidate gets in office. You couldn't give money directly to the candidate for personal use. Donations went to the campaign of the guy who already agreed with you. The FEC used to take a dim view of outright pay-for-service, even dressed up.
This is new. And now people need to decide how they feel about that. They get one chance to say "no, that's not how we do things." Even if the administration suffers a blow this November, if they hear that this is mostly acceptable to their base, it will be what every politician does from here on.
Having a preferred candidate you give money to is already bribery - whatever the law says. You fund your favorite pony to get the power. They then scratch your back or lend a sympathetic ear.
It very clearly is, the present AI instance is far from the only recent case.
> I don't see how any rational investor could still see US companies as a secure investment.
They evaluate the propensity and ability to profitably engage in open corruption the same as they evaluate other capacities of the company. “Secure” isn't a binary category, and the risk here is much like any other risk.
> When the rule of law degrades into pay-to-play politics, the inevitable result is a mass exodus of both capital and top-tier talent.
That is the expected result of increasing perceived risk. yes, probably one of those “slowly and then all at once” things.
No, it's not inevitable. What you've described is the way a lot of authoritarian states work, such as China. China attracts plenty of capital and external talent, including people from other countries such as Taiwan and the United States. You have be all-in on the CCP's rules, though.
Vietnam operates in a similar way. Untold billions of FDI in the past 20 years from Japan, the U.S. and China. Talk with top executives there, and you'll frequently find close connections or family ties with leaders in Hanoi.
Investors just care for the returns. As long as they can identify and bet on the side doing the bribing, they're fine...
I the problem is that from the companies’s side you just have a whole country to exploit, so I’m fairly certain the investments still work.
To where?
I'm in Europe, I'd like to see it come here. The news I see suggests China's ahead of us in this race, but I don't know if that's for all talent, or if it was just an artefact of a lot of Chinese people in the US on work visas returning home.
Or indeed whether the news about China doing well here was real or hallucinated by an LLM.
It’s the best investment - just bribe your way to contracts
Tldr; Rich people can bribe more, hence Rich people can be more rich+er..
I think a lot of poor tech multi-millionaires hate this in US but all rich billionaires must be loving it...
2025 was also the first year that the majority of stocks were traded off-market (i.e. hedgie darkpools, no public price discovery).
----
Hope ya'll bought your gold before Monday.
#RemindMe2days [gold@5290USD, this post]
Do you have any sources for that?
This HST quote seems severely outdated by now. They have already been caught, committed all the sins of stupidity and some more. All of it to the clapping mob of people who yearn for some kind of social revenge.
And it’s happening everywhere these last years.
Who could possibly know we have so many wife beaters?
But women are generally ignored in our society.
There are a lot of conspiracy nuts like Alex Jones, and the amusing thing to me is that there is a conspiracy of elites who are exerting large amounts of unelected control of the government, and who are actively working to keep you down to enrich themselves, and it's not even a secret.
We call these people "billionaires", and at this point they don't even bother hiding it. Trump had a streamlined bribery system with his stupid cryptocurrency and being in charge of a publicly traded company while in office, Musk bought his way in so he could be in charge of a new department and start defunding any organization that has ever tried to investigate him, and there are hundreds of examples.
Instead morons like Alex Jones will go on the radio and blame lizards or something, and then his listeners will take that and then start blaming Jews or Mexicans, while cheering on the actual conspiracy that's making their lives terrible.
They can steal as long as they are our thieves.
To get through to these people you have to validate their deep fears. Not just say - shut up, you are stupid, vote for me.
Other things are used too. A lot of the attention given to culture wars issues distracts attention from other issues. Its not just the right either. It allows people to pose as left wing while actually not being left wing on economic and business issues which are the traditional definition (the labour party in the UK - to be fair the left within it does seem to the reviving now).
With the Epstein affair, the shock people feel about sex crimes is being used focus just on those to avoid investigating the corruption in the US and other countries . The UK's two high profile arrests, of former Prince Andrew, and the far more important Peter Mandelson (former cabinet minister, for EU Commissioner, very close to multiple Prime Ministers) have been for passing on sensitive information but this is almost certainly a tiny fraction of what was going on.
Discredit By Association is written all over his yelling face.
- The Kushner family has invested in OpenAI.
- OpenAI uses Oracle cloud. Ellison is close to Trump.
- Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan (the “spy sheikh") has invested $500 million in World Liberty and is also invested in OpenAI.
- Altman is a protege of Thiel, whose Palantir integrates the external AI at the Pentagon.
- The scam occurs right before the Iran war starts. The Groq sale scam (where Trump Jr.'s 1789 Capital bought shares just months before the sale) occurred right before Christmas. So both were timed to be overshadowed by larger events or holidays.
If it doesn't pop while Trump's in office, his successor will inherit this mess, bubble will pop, and that person will have to deal with managing the fallout.
The time to lock-in gainful employment is now (if you can).
There is this constant boogeyman narrative with him I find very disingenuous
I'm sure the Crypto AI Czar (David Sacks) being a major Anthropic hater didn't hurt either
Or that Kushner put a billion in OpenAI recently
EDIT: wow they got in at a huge discount too and OpenAI bought stake in Thrive...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/thrive-capital-bought-shares-in...
Like, this is opex
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6tqvzt?start=872&mute=fal...
"I'm sorry, you... You think I'm a prostitute?"
looks at offered cash
"A $40 prostitute?"
Sir Winston Churchill supposedly asked Lady Astor whether she would sleep with him for five million pounds. She said she supposed she would. Then he asked whether she would sleep with him for only five pounds. She answered,"What do you think I am?" His response was, "We've already established that; we're merely haggling over price."- Marcus Felson, Crime and Everyday Life, Second Edition, 1998
Everyone knew that a lot of politicians have been for sale, but I didn't realize how cheaply they were for sale. Musk able to buy his way into being in charge of an idiotic department with basically no regulation while still being allowed to CEO like five companies, and he did it for like $100 million. That's a lot of money, more than I'll ever be worth, but it's way less than I would think it would cost to buy the presidency, in charge of billions (and maybe trillions?) of dollars of sales and contracting.
Decades of believing we are blessed with some sort of perpetual exceptionalism has made the American people not only susceptible to corruption but actively unknowingly promote it. Propaganda has convinced them to invite it into their house and let it know where all your money is and your bank account information.
While the specifics may differ, this is neither their first time doing a deal like this nor will it be their last.
I don't know, Anthropic is providing 10K open source developers with $200 subscriptions to their bot, for up to 6 months. 200 * 10000 * 6 = $12 Million total. That's even cheaper, I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from all this.
There is a cabal of extremists steering technology contracts in this administration and among their donors. The names are familiar - Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Elon Musk, David Sacks, Palmer Luckey, etc. A future administration will need to purge all their companies from our government and investigate them for corruption and treason.
Good luck, democrats will put some of that easy money on their pockets and look the other way, like they always did.
Those people also get down voted to oblivion. Their text is gray. I can't read it unless I click the timestamp.
Clearly, HN doesn't want us to listen to them.
Yes, sometimes they can be combative and inflammatory. But even the ones that are otherwise reasonable get down voted because how dare we insult capitalism and billionaires?
It's just a variation on Snowball being chased off Animal Farm.
There is not a single Democrat candidate I agree with or would gladly donate to. That party is almost as much of a joke as the Republicans are, and they all fuck kids anyways.
Besides, that money would only end up being spent on an absentee, self-obsessed, do-nothing Governor who wants to play more corrupt politics like his Aunt. Scam artists across the board.
According to him. These are same people that said we'd have self driving cars by 2017. That we'd be able to buy things with BitCoin. But here we are, it's 2026 and all of it has turned out to be a lot less revolutionary and world changing than advertised. We're just barely getting the internet as it was advertised before the dot com bubble, and to be honest, it kinda sucks. AI can do some cool stuff, but I'm very sceptical about all the hype.
I'd love to hear if Anthropic actually would accept this deal, if offered.
The tech industry was never perfect. It was never a charity. But there was a time, several years ago now, when people were more driven to build things that delighted others.
I asked gemini.
The one detail was that the contract enforced the law with anthropic, but with openai it was legal uses.
Sounds like hair splitting, but this article explains the real story.
He should get together with Musk and commiserate about how worldly success is no substitute for adoration on Twitter.
That said, I doubt he's wrong about the nature of this debacle. A thousand years from now, the ghosts of Altman and Amodei are still going to wander the earth in search of ways to dunk on each other.
Marcus is so overrated. He's not even good at straight factual reporting. The terms were not "pretty similar". He missed the whole point of the recent controversy.
> Anthropic deserves a chance at EXACTLY the same terms
No, those terms are bullshit.
*has transitioned
You would think he might have something interesting technical to say... but no.
You had your answer around the time that he decided to side with Altman when he could have kept his own counsel.
So it's more that only psychopaths will continue to push up the mountain when they already have many hundreds of lifetimes worth of wealth. Imagine being in that situation and still wanting to be involved in backstabbing power games rather than enjoy time with your kids.
Not even trying to justify the switchover would have raised less eyebrows than giving it a clearly nonsense justification.
No, capital (i.e. money) decides. It’s called capitalism not marketism. The difference is important because it means that if you’re already rich (or are perceived as such, and thus can get loans, extensions, and the like) you can continue to survive longer than the alternatives.
US government officials said "we're thinking of ruining Anthropic if they don't play ball".
Sam Altman publicly said "oh no, don't do that, that's terrible, they're right to not play ball".
Sam Altman signed a deal to play ball after he said that, and it turned out he had been working on this deal even before the US government officials said the thing about ruining Anthropic.
In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.
It sure look like the US is transitioning from the former to the latter.
As someone from genx I can definitively confirm this is how it always worked. If you're younger do not delude yourselves into thinking this is all somehow new and things were better in the past. They weren't.
I had been finding it super unsettling: Like, why would DoD go nuclear over wanting to build fully autonomous weapons… with Claude?
But no, it’s just run-of-the-mill Trump administration corruption. Phew!
[1] - https://nautil.us/deep-learning-is-hitting-a-wall-238440/
In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.
It sure look like the US is transitioning from the former to the latter"
I honestly can't understand how anyone sees things this way. The US isn't transitioning at all. It is and has been a complete oligarchy for at least 70 years.
I've taken to discounting any political talking-head that wont consistently acknowledge and push that axiom as THE fundamental assumption of all political discourse.
> In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.
> It sure look like the US is transitioning from the former to the latter.
The US probably always was like that. Now they just don’t bother hiding it.
It has always been an old boys club where connections and hand greasing decided it all. President Trump is the product of this system, not its creator or builder.
> In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.
> It sure look like the US is transitioning from the former to the latter.
One has to wonder on what planet Gary Marcus has lived so far.
Sure you could smear an opposition company, but just straight bribing the government is new, at this scale
> In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.
> It sure look like the US is transitioning from the former to the latter.
I thought this was already pretty clear - since Elmo bunny hopped on Trump’s rally stage
> In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.
> but after Brockman had donated 25M to Trump’s PAC
Sounds like they paid Trump and the government, can it get more capitalistic?
Oligarchy and capitalism don’t contradict each other
They lie and cheat to accumulate power
> In capitalism, the market decides.
> In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.
Author is confused about what Capitalism is. It worked exactly as expected, Capital used itself to advance it's own needs - maximizing (own) growth.
Capitalism is not about markets, it's about Capital.
There is a reason why lobbying is an accepted practice in one of the most Capitalistic countries in the world, and generally forbidden in Socialist EU.
This is one of those cases where you wish your critics were right. One in 40 people in Brussels is a lobbyist, but apparently it's forbidden.
This style tends to increase the likelihood of others responding in kind. The end result is often a less substantive conversation.
In oligarchy, connections and donations decide."
Who's gonna tell him there never was a difference?
Is there evidence the donation cause them to win the contract? Seems like the evidence is that their competitor backed out, no?
I suspect this is a conspiracy theory feeding on people's pre-existing hatreds.
I got baited into clicking another AI post.
Everyone here needs to take a deep breath, step back, and remind yourselves that everything you're claiming is unproven and is a conspiracy theory. The language of the contracts is not publicly available
I don’t understand anyone who believes that. What do you expect to happen during the midterms exactly that would bring the US back on some mythical track of rule of law, with a just and fair government? The corruption runs so deep, the institutions have been gutted, there are no good people in charge left. This ride is going to last a while, and the way out (if there’s one) looks nothing like the way in.
Republicans are on track to win the mid-terms…
S&P500 is all you need
Fed cuts interest rate, jobs go up, 401k go up, RSU go up, credit card points go up, everyone is happy
This is literally the politics of running massive business interests, which I understand is relevant for technology and everything…
… but isn’t Gary Marcus’s whole game that AI is not capable and people are wrong/lying about AI tech capabilities?
I feel like this is a handy moment for Gary where he can say he could basically ignore all of his previous claims (because they’re all technically wrong) and shift into “AI is bad for society because it’s more crony capitalism” or something kind of muddy argument.
My intention is for other people to think what I believe which is Gary Marcus is a hack and has no business being listened to with respect to technical evaluation of AI because he’s not technically competent enough to do. The existence of his polemics waste everybody’s time and generally waste resources like we’re wasting right now.
His entire schtick has been as the debunker in chief of claims of AI capabilities
If you actually look at his polemics they increasingly have nothing to do with his original argument because his original argument not only is flawed but is ignorant of the technical capabilities
Transitioning? That happened post WW2. How many more wars in the Middle East do we need to convince people?
Though, I think it’s hard for Marcus’ generation to see this. Odd given Vance’s connections to Thiel et al.
To be fair, there has been a notable recent shift in the sense that nobody even tries to hide what is going on anymore.
We've moved beyond manufacturing consent to ass out corruption on full display, "try to stop me."
Other posts from G.Marcus are much longer. Go read them, but be prepared for some "adversarial thinking" if you strongly believe in the scaling hypothesis. Might border on "bubble popping ". You're all for free speech and the free market of idea, so it won't be a problem.
However, he has a low threshold for bullshit. And SamA is probably not getting any higher in his esteem this week.
And they are the majority. Thats what Sam Altman understands
The biggest tell for AI writing is just being AI adjacent. I've started avoiding reading AI articles here because (surprise) they all feel like a chatGPT transcript.
Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads weren't fair play either.
1. Anthropic should be free to sell its services under whatever legal terms and conditions it wants.
2. The Pentagon should be free to buy those services, negotiate for different terms, refuse to buy those services, and terminate contracts subject to any termination clauses.
You may or may not agree with what the Pentagon wants to do, but if things had stayed there, there would be no real issue.
The problem is that the Pentagon is trying to bury Anthropic as a company, calling it a danger to the United States because it exerted its non-controversial right in (1).
Any “explanation” that doesn’t address that is confused itself or trying to confuse the issue.
I leave it to you as to which category the linked source falls under.
2. Agree
> The problem is that the Pentagon is trying to bury Anthropic as a company, calling it a danger to the United States because it exerted its non-controversial right in (1).
My take is that the DoD very much wanted to continue using Claude. However, Amodei refused to budge on relinquishing final say over Claude usage. The DoD took this as a personal offense (how dare this guy, does he know who we are, etc) and lashed out in retaliation. The whole sequence of events makes sense when viewed under this lense.
