Glad to see the judicial system works sometimes atleast. Less cynically now, the president has admired Xi many many times openly, and it’s clear he prefers an administrative style similar to China. That is what he is turning the country into. Everybody goes and bends the knee like the tech ceos did and he controls every aspect of the administration with an iron fist, just like China.
Don’t think they would put a tv presenter to the head of the military in China. I find it much more similar to current Turkey situation. And Trump is speedrunning that process too, he is destroying things much faster
IMHO current USA government is somewhat inverse to China.
US government now is a kakistocracy made out of sycophants to the biggest egomaniac this generation have ever seen. Who is only driven by personal wealth and attention.
Any billionaire capitalist psychopath openly promising to give cash and attention to orange musollini gets a free reign to do anything (they could be even not from USA) - it’s oligarchy.
China is not that. Xi and CCP are much more principled than emotional children in USA.
Xi is intelligent and capable of long-term planning.
The only similarity I see is that neither Xi nor our Narcissist-in-Chief brook any criticism; but aside from the "Let 1,000 Flowers Bloom" campaign of Mao, that has always been China's domestic policy.
It's not that a leader is capable of long-term planning, it's that a system is. I am a big proponent for democracy, but the fact is simple that when you do a massive regime change every ~4 years, nothing big will get done. You have about 2 good years to do something, and most big projects simply require more time than that.
China, unlike the US, can look 10 years into the future and consistently execute towards a goal. That's not because of leaders, it's because the systems are fundamentally designed this way.
It's like the two party system in the US. It's because of first past the post in the Constitution. The system is designed to do this, so it does it. The US is designed to be unable to plan or execute long term vision.
I 100% agree for the fact that biggest systematic root problem USA has is first past the post voting system.
Though how did US managed to be long term thinking since world wars up to ~1980s or 90s? Was it just generational trauma of world wars that allowed to align opinions between parties? And by trauma I mean some combo of real trauma to not have WW2 again to the capitalistict and globalistic drive to be world’s hegemony.
It is not even first past the post that is the problem. Even if you had some sort of ranked voting or parliamentary system you would still end up with the same problem. The person in charge gets changed too frequently to be able to have long term plans. 8 years is too short to execute a plan that will take 10 or 20 years.
I think this is why FDR was a successful president and was able to get so much done. He had 3 complete terms and a partial 4th term.
If you are going to have shorter terms you need to have your successor continue with your plans, but in a liberal democracy you don't know who is going to follow you. Even if your party wins, your successor might not continue with the plan.
In preferential Systems you must chase the centre, in the USA it might be trains versus cars, in Australia because both sides are chasing the centre they will both agree on a train line it's just the specifics they will argue about which believe leads to better outcomes.
At least from my experience I would say change of government won't lead to cancellation of a project or reform just an expansion or contraction in scope.
You can't do something like implement a 1 child policy and stick to it for decades causing a demographic collapse because it wouldn't have broad appeal from the population.
Your last paragraph is my point. Some policies may be good, but not popular. (I'm not suggesting the one child policy is good). How would you be able to continue a policy like the one child policy in a democracy for decades? You wouldn't be able to. With China since their leaders are there longer and because the leaders have a more consistent world view they were able to continue with such a policy.
>Less cynically now, the president has admired Xi many many times openly, and it’s clear he prefers an administrative style similar to China.
China style authoritarianism can't work in the US because the CCP has to actually deliver quality of life to the people in exchange for their political and cultural oppression. America's tech oligarchy is only willing to deliver for billionaires.
If Trump were really setting up a Xi style dictatorship he would be pacifying the people with investment in infrastructure, education and healthcare. Americans would gladly tolerate armed masked thugs kidnapping immigrants and the wholesale censorship of the internet and the press if he actually kept prices down and employment up.
Or he could at least better at giving the impression of doing so. The biggest failure of Trumpism by far has to be its propaganda. None of these people know how to lie effectively. Not nearly as well as the neocons. Look at the whole song and dance they did to justify war with Iraq versus... whatever the hell America's plan with Iran is supposed to be (besides Christian holy war, apparently.)
The issue of course is that the Judge can't change the knowledge that the head of the executive doesn't want people down the chain using this product, so they won't. Anthropic is a dead letter in government circles until the next Presidential election.
Had this conversation with a friend, but I think as an America you can be very optimistic about the institutional strength of democracy in the country.
People are very pessimistic recently, but if anything, we are seeing that our system works well. A person got into power that a majority voted for, but when he oversteps, the courts and other institutions (even judges and fed reserve chairs he picked!) seem to hold him to the rules.
I get the pessimism, but for the most part, I kinda think the system is working.
Just a district judge, so I’m supposing the Trump administration will file an appeal if they care, and will almost certainly get a preliminary injunction. The Ninth Circuit ruling will be more telling.
Is the practical outcome much different? I doubt they'll get contracts either way, so the labelling was just a formality.
If anything it seems the label was just intended to give a veneer of legitimacy to the admin by using an existing mechanism and terminology, rather than saying "we're going to block your access because we feel like it".
>10 U.S.C. § 3252 authorizes the Secretary of Defense to exclude a source from defense procurements involving national security systems if there is a supply chain risk, defined as the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or subvert a covered system.
I think any LLM is covered by that, but specifically for Anthropic,
>Recent research has uncovered several critical vulnerabilities, including the "Claudy Day" attack chain which allows silent data exfiltration through conversation history, and a zero-click XSS prompt injection in the Chrome extension that enabled attackers to inject prompts without user interaction until a patch was released in February 2026.
What is obvious to me however is the timing. This Trump pants-shitting happened just before the Iran invasion. You can just imagine it. Trump wants to send fully autonomous bots into Iran to destroy the non-existent nuclear program. Anthropic leadership tries to make a moral stand saying innocent civilians could die. Trump doesn't care because he wants zero US military casualties even if it means a school full of Iranian children is bombed and everyone is killed. And then we get exactly that plus a forever war.
And obviously, the judge is out of her lane too... since, you know, the rule basically can apply to any AI agent because they're just as likely to do what you ask as they are to delete all your emails without even apologizing for it.
I mean they -are- a supply chain risk, but also, so is every security negligent proprietary software firm the public and government relies on for no reason. Anthropic deserves to -share- this label with dozens of other companies.
What is insane is that the US government lacks the capability to insert GPUs into PCIe slots, and provide them with electricity and FOSS tools. This shit is just not that hard. Especially when you have an unlimited money printer.
A level of incompetence that causes the US government to even think they need to pay a private company to host LLMs for them is the biggest risk I see.
So much for all that alarmism a month ago. Just got to be patient and wait for cooler heads to prevail. Or it goes to show how Anthropic handled it well, by making their case as persuasively and assertively without delay as they had done.
Lost in the cacophony is the fact that Anthropic fumbled a strong lifeline while hemorrhaging cash without a business model. It’s fun to look down at OpenAI but they may not get another chance like this again.
233 comments
US government now is a kakistocracy made out of sycophants to the biggest egomaniac this generation have ever seen. Who is only driven by personal wealth and attention.
Any billionaire capitalist psychopath openly promising to give cash and attention to orange musollini gets a free reign to do anything (they could be even not from USA) - it’s oligarchy.
China is not that. Xi and CCP are much more principled than emotional children in USA.
The only similarity I see is that neither Xi nor our Narcissist-in-Chief brook any criticism; but aside from the "Let 1,000 Flowers Bloom" campaign of Mao, that has always been China's domestic policy.
China, unlike the US, can look 10 years into the future and consistently execute towards a goal. That's not because of leaders, it's because the systems are fundamentally designed this way.
It's like the two party system in the US. It's because of first past the post in the Constitution. The system is designed to do this, so it does it. The US is designed to be unable to plan or execute long term vision.
Though how did US managed to be long term thinking since world wars up to ~1980s or 90s? Was it just generational trauma of world wars that allowed to align opinions between parties? And by trauma I mean some combo of real trauma to not have WW2 again to the capitalistict and globalistic drive to be world’s hegemony.
I think this is why FDR was a successful president and was able to get so much done. He had 3 complete terms and a partial 4th term.
If you are going to have shorter terms you need to have your successor continue with your plans, but in a liberal democracy you don't know who is going to follow you. Even if your party wins, your successor might not continue with the plan.
At least from my experience I would say change of government won't lead to cancellation of a project or reform just an expansion or contraction in scope.
You can't do something like implement a 1 child policy and stick to it for decades causing a demographic collapse because it wouldn't have broad appeal from the population.
>Less cynically now, the president has admired Xi many many times openly, and it’s clear he prefers an administrative style similar to China.
China style authoritarianism can't work in the US because the CCP has to actually deliver quality of life to the people in exchange for their political and cultural oppression. America's tech oligarchy is only willing to deliver for billionaires.
If Trump were really setting up a Xi style dictatorship he would be pacifying the people with investment in infrastructure, education and healthcare. Americans would gladly tolerate armed masked thugs kidnapping immigrants and the wholesale censorship of the internet and the press if he actually kept prices down and employment up.
Or he could at least better at giving the impression of doing so. The biggest failure of Trumpism by far has to be its propaganda. None of these people know how to lie effectively. Not nearly as well as the neocons. Look at the whole song and dance they did to justify war with Iraq versus... whatever the hell America's plan with Iran is supposed to be (besides Christian holy war, apparently.)
People are very pessimistic recently, but if anything, we are seeing that our system works well. A person got into power that a majority voted for, but when he oversteps, the courts and other institutions (even judges and fed reserve chairs he picked!) seem to hold him to the rules.
I get the pessimism, but for the most part, I kinda think the system is working.
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72379655/134/anthropic-...
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/3252
If anything it seems the label was just intended to give a veneer of legitimacy to the admin by using an existing mechanism and terminology, rather than saying "we're going to block your access because we feel like it".
>10 U.S.C. § 3252 authorizes the Secretary of Defense to exclude a source from defense procurements involving national security systems if there is a supply chain risk, defined as the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or subvert a covered system.
I think any LLM is covered by that, but specifically for Anthropic,
>Recent research has uncovered several critical vulnerabilities, including the "Claudy Day" attack chain which allows silent data exfiltration through conversation history, and a zero-click XSS prompt injection in the Chrome extension that enabled attackers to inject prompts without user interaction until a patch was released in February 2026.
What is obvious to me however is the timing. This Trump pants-shitting happened just before the Iran invasion. You can just imagine it. Trump wants to send fully autonomous bots into Iran to destroy the non-existent nuclear program. Anthropic leadership tries to make a moral stand saying innocent civilians could die. Trump doesn't care because he wants zero US military casualties even if it means a school full of Iranian children is bombed and everyone is killed. And then we get exactly that plus a forever war.
And obviously, the judge is out of her lane too... since, you know, the rule basically can apply to any AI agent because they're just as likely to do what you ask as they are to delete all your emails without even apologizing for it.
What is insane is that the US government lacks the capability to insert GPUs into PCIe slots, and provide them with electricity and FOSS tools. This shit is just not that hard. Especially when you have an unlimited money printer.
A level of incompetence that causes the US government to even think they need to pay a private company to host LLMs for them is the biggest risk I see.
last i checked the german military is held down by stupid obligations forced onto it by its government that make it both inefficient and obsolete