"Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government." Well.. we live in Orwellian times.
Hmm. In the abstract, it could be argued that corporates influencing or attempting to influence the policy defined by the citizenry’s democratically elected representatives subverts the will of the people. Where the alternative isn’t that the company has to be ra ra America let’s help the government, they just have to treat the government like any other customer when it comes to doing or not doing business based on ideological differences.
It’s like citizens get one vote, and then the shareholders of that company get a much bigger vote on a per person basis.
(Please withhold boring responses about how there are lots of problems with corporations, or this current government is bad, etc etc. I know all that, I’m just playing devil’s advocate because it seems like there is a reasonable case on that side, again, in the abstract.)
> In the abstract, it could be argued that corporates influencing or attempting to influence the policy defined by the citizenry’s democratically elected representatives subverts the will of the people.
So we should make lobbying by corporations illegal? Because is not lobbying "influencing or attempting to influence" policy?
Further Anthropic was not trying to 'influence or attempt to influence policy': they simply had restrictions on what their service(s) could be used for, which was written into a contract that the (current) administration agreed to. The government was free to have whatever policy it wanted.
If the government didn't like the conditions of the contract then the government could try to get Anthropic to agree to change the terms, or cancel the contract all together.
As one comment put it: Can the government force a company that runs a nuclear power plant force that company to make a nuclear weapon?
If Anthropic wants non-weapon/military use of their service, and publicly states that and puts that into the terms of service, can they be forced to? Can the government force a Quaker to pick up a gun?
Or can the government force a Quaker to manufacture a gun? Force a sale of steel that the Quaker manufactures to a weapons maker? (There's a whole spectrum of 'complicity' here.)
> So we should make lobbying by corporations illegal?
Absolutely
> they simply had restrictions on what their service(s) could be used for
Do they have such restrictions on private parties? Also, is this common in industry generally? If I manufacture screws would it be a typical practice for me to contractually require that a buyer not use my screws in weapons, for example?
> Can the government force a company that runs a nuclear power plant force that company to make a nuclear weapon?
No, it seems like you are missing my point. I think there is an argument that the seller should be blind to who the buyer is and what they are going to do with the product they are buying.
If we don’t do that, we open up an exploit where an adversary doesn’t need to get direct control of the government, they can just pressure a small number of private companies who would deliver what the elected government wants.
Also do keep in mind that I’m playing devil’s advocate here, I don’t think democracy has functioned properly in America for quite a long time now, and it may be a delusion that it even can function with how things are set up today.
> they just have to treat the government like any other customer when it comes to doing or not doing business based on ideological differences.
Which is what anthropic did? Nation states aswell as companies want to control their business involvements. The difference is, companies manipulating representatives will never be as fundamental (hopefully) as an arbitrary legal basis for governments to force companies. The orwellian angle comes from the total authoritarian one.
I wrote: it's not particularly orwellian. like all the other us administrations have had mass surveillance boners too. and the us is not nearly as surveillancey as other fascistic regimes, or even contemporary social democracies.
finally, orwellian means a lot more too, especially "controlling how people think by controlling their language". again, the trump administration doesn't do that much of those things.
this administration has a lot of problems, but its pretty straightforward.
Being marked an enemy of the state for disagreeing with the state to me sounds like thoughtcrime, plain and simple. How much more Orwellian can you get?
I remember neither that happening in 1984, nor is that a description of what is happening to Anthropic. Or is this is an Animal Farm reference instead?
I remember Winston having a private conversation about political beliefs, and then being literally tortured into submission. And I remember Anthropic refusing a government order (albeit a stupid government order), and then being labeled a "supply chain risk." You can twist reality however you'd like though.
You don’t remember the concept of thought crime in 1984? Or you don’t recall how thought crime gets you branded an enemy of the state? The former was a term literally introduced in 1984 and the thought police is tasked with locating and eliminating thought crime. Throughout the book there are news reports of the thought criminals caught and arrested who are now enemies of the state. The book ends with him being tortured until he completely succumbs to the thought control and is then murdered.
If you can’t see the allegory in that story to an administration that actively goes after those it labels as enemies because they dare to voice their own opinion or oppose their political goals in any way, either you’re not cut out for literary analysis and trying to apply metaphors in literature to the real world or you aren’t seeing the real world for what it is.
Ok, just labeling them a supply chain risk while also claiming they’re critical to national security for insisting the government stick to the powers to the model they agreed to in the contract and not expanding it.
> Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable.
Yup, definitely not an enemy.
> Instead, @AnthropicAI and its CEO @DarioAmodei, have chosen duplicity
Don’t you call your friends duplicitous?
> Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles.
Oh boy. Doubleplus ungood.
> I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic
Oh yeah, totally not an enemy. Just no one can do business with them. Doubleplusungood behavior.
They’re both a danger to US troops with their behavior and also critical to the supply chain of said troops. Very important to understand and accept that doublethink.
This doesn't require the slightest bit of doublethink. Their technology is fantastic and would be an important military tool if Anthropic allowed it to be used as such. Their choice to disallow it makes them a supply chain risk, but the existence of the technology makes them important. This isn't hard.
There's no need to read it that literally, we're not making Borges' map here. 1984 is both about the visceral horror of the authoritarian state and the existential horror of being unable to fight an opponent who controls the very language you speak and the concept of truth. The former grounds the latter, turning an interesting philosophical treatise that might otherwise not land with readers into an approachable work of fiction.
They got labeled a "supply chain risk" in order to prevent the government from contracting with them. They didn't disappear or arrest or even charge Dario. He's a billionaire with more freedom and opportunity than Orwell could have even imagined.
I would love to hear your perspective of how the label "supply chain risk" and its definition aren't in accordance with the concept of being branded an enemy of the state. I'll reproduce the definition below:
> “Supply chain risk” means the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of a covered system so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise degrade the function, use, or operation of such system (see 10 U.S.C. 3252). (https://www.acquisition.gov/dfars/subpart-239.73-requirement...)
There's a little bit of leeway here, but this definition means either the company is an adversary (or an extension of one, e.g. Huawei/the CCP) or is under threat of being compromised by an adversary.
So which is Anthropic? Well, neither: the government's court filings and public comments in the media claim that Anthropic has an "adversarial posture". They want to simultaneously get away with bucketing Anthropic under the statute for adversaries, but without calling Anthropic an adversary directly in a court of law. They want to apply the statute without needing to follow the actual definition of an adversary.
From a CNBC interview:
> We can't have a company that has a different policy preference that is baked into the model through its constitution, its soul, its policy preferences, pollute the supply chain so our warfighters are getting ineffective weapons, ineffective body armor, ineffective protection. That's really where the supply chain risk designation came from. (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/12/anthropic-claude-emil-michae...)
That's why the judge rightly called this situation Orwellian: we're looking at linguistic sleight of hand designed to allow the government to turn what is a simple contract dispute into a company-threatening classification that threatens to uproot them entirely from any company that does business with the most powerful entity in the United States. Because Anthropic doesn't want to do the government's bidding despite being allowed to as a matter of freedom of speech, they are being threatened with a punishment that goes beyond just not being able to contract directly with the government. And that's not fair.
I would also love to understand why you keep going back to the literal events of the book. You don't need to be locked in a room and forced to claim that 2+2=5 for your situation to be Orwellian.
> I remember Winston having a private conversation about political beliefs, and then being literally tortured into submission.
I remember Winston being forced to accept that 2+2=5 and believing it.
> In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
> And I remember Anthropic refusing a government order (albeit a stupid government order), and then being labeled a "supply chain risk." You can twist reality however you'd like though.
I remember when American companies could do domestic business, or not, with whomever they wished without having to worry about being punished by the government for their choices.
If a government orders a pacifist to pick up a gun, is that allowed? If a government orders a pacifist to manufacture a gun, is that allowed? (There's a spectrum of 'complicity'.)
> I remember when American companies could do domestic business, or not, with whomever they wished without having to worry about being punished by the government for their choices.
No you don't, because that time as never existed.
> If a government orders a pacifist to pick up a gun, is that allowed? If a government orders a pacifist to manufacture a gun, is that allowed? (There's a spectrum of 'complicity'.)
Yes. It's called the draft. It's called wartime manufacturing decrees. These all existed at the time of Orwell, and he never alluded to them being thoughtcrimes. Compelling people to act against their beliefs is common and distinct from throughtcrime. And if you cannot see that, then I don't even know how to talk to you. Government has always controlled your outer life. Orwell introduced thoughtcrime as the next step in totalitarianism, as the erasure of inner life.
edit: I asked Opus to analyze this thread, and I agree with it.
> That said, Orwell would probably also note that the people arguing against you aren't entirely wrong to be alarmed — they're just reaching for the wrong literary reference and overstating the analogy. Government retaliation against companies for political speech is concerning on its own terms without needing to be dressed up as dystopian fiction. The 1984 framing actually weakens the critique by making it easy to dismiss as hyperbolic.
> He'd probably tell everyone in the thread to say what they mean in plain language and stop hiding behind his book.
In this court case, disagreeing with the government immediately leaps to national security conclusions. Anthropic explicitly stated their policy and the government actually argued that Anthropic would next engage in sabotage. It’s my considered opinion that this government may have even gotten that idea from 1984.
In mine, "All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it…” and this is close to what people in court saw, “there's something creepy about how any disagreement, any public disagreement is taken as unacceptable.”
So I agree with the judge, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard.
> So I agree with the judge, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard.
Unfortunately for you and all of the other people here endlessly talking about her use of "Orwellian" as references to thoughtcrimes, reality control, and doublethink, she was likely instead using the word in reference to the fact that the DoW wanted to use the tech for surveillance.
So, no, you don't agree with the judge, as convenient as that appeal to authority may have seemed. She made a slightly hyperbolic statement about the surveillance state. You all went into... I don't even know what.
> Moreover, Defendants’ designation of Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” is likely both
contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious. The Department of War provides no legitimate
basis to infer from Anthropic’s forthright insistence on usage restrictions that it might become a
saboteur. At oral argument, government counsel suggested that Anthropic showed its subversive
tendencies by “questioning” the use of its technology, “raising concerns” about it, and criticizing
the government’s position in the press. Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian
notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S.
for expressing disagreement with the government
And something like 150 retired judges signed on, those are the amicus briefs supporting Anthropic:
> Numerous amici have also described wide-
ranging harm to the public interest, including the chilling of open discussion about important
topics in AI safety. The motion for a preliminary injunction is granted.
She could have said that those amicus briefs raise surveillance concerns. She didn't use the word surveillance; she didn't say AI safety is important; she said open discussion about AI safety is important. That's the issue over which this injunction is granted.
We know that the judge asked a long, organized list of questions to the government; there are multiple ways for the government to get out of a contract, and she gave them room for nuance. We're talking about an astute top graduate of the Ivy League, who understands what it means to reference 1984; not some new jerk appointee.
So, I have to wonder if your perspective is an experiment. It's possible for someone today to pretend to be as brainwashed as the proles in 1984, to gauge 2026 reactions in a near-anonymous forum. Do like-minded others jump in? How many people actually read the judicial order? Do bots come out of the woodwork to bring up colonization and antisemitism points against Blair himself? If you bring up the same points on Reddit, do certain phrases appear at a frequency too high for coincidence? Orwell appears so regularly that repeated trials of this might demonstrate that the window is opening to a kind of 1984 doubt. I think we agree that'd be fascinating research.
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command"
Agreed! And shout-out to the people at CourtListener (the site hosting this PDF), who make millions of US court documents freely available to the public.
(not a lawyer) I _think_ this is a result of Trump v CASA, where the Supreme Court determined that preliminary injunctions and TROs without a bond of some sort (which until then were fairly common) were invalid and unenforceable.
I understand why Anthropic used the name “Department of War” in their public communication. They want to be friendly to the people who like that name. But what the heck is it doing in an official court document? That’s not the entity’s legal name. It would be like if I sued IBM and named them “Big Blue” in my suit.
Congress has legislated that the departments may establish monikers. The dod established a moniker. It's an official and legal second name. It's fine to use the moniker.
Here’s the Preliminary Injunction Order. Essentially a total victory for Anthropic, but SCOTUS will certainly have the final say.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
great! this is the accompanying opinion
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
"Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government." Well.. we live in Orwellian times.
Hmm. In the abstract, it could be argued that corporates influencing or attempting to influence the policy defined by the citizenry’s democratically elected representatives subverts the will of the people. Where the alternative isn’t that the company has to be ra ra America let’s help the government, they just have to treat the government like any other customer when it comes to doing or not doing business based on ideological differences.
It’s like citizens get one vote, and then the shareholders of that company get a much bigger vote on a per person basis.
(Please withhold boring responses about how there are lots of problems with corporations, or this current government is bad, etc etc. I know all that, I’m just playing devil’s advocate because it seems like there is a reasonable case on that side, again, in the abstract.)
> In the abstract, it could be argued that corporates influencing or attempting to influence the policy defined by the citizenry’s democratically elected representatives subverts the will of the people.
So we should make lobbying by corporations illegal? Because is not lobbying "influencing or attempting to influence" policy?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying
Further Anthropic was not trying to 'influence or attempt to influence policy': they simply had restrictions on what their service(s) could be used for, which was written into a contract that the (current) administration agreed to. The government was free to have whatever policy it wanted.
If the government didn't like the conditions of the contract then the government could try to get Anthropic to agree to change the terms, or cancel the contract all together.
As one comment put it: Can the government force a company that runs a nuclear power plant force that company to make a nuclear weapon?
If Anthropic wants non-weapon/military use of their service, and publicly states that and puts that into the terms of service, can they be forced to? Can the government force a Quaker to pick up a gun?
* https://www.renofriends.org/the-peace-testimony-and-military...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quakers
Or can the government force a Quaker to manufacture a gun? Force a sale of steel that the Quaker manufactures to a weapons maker? (There's a whole spectrum of 'complicity' here.)
> So we should make lobbying by corporations illegal?
Absolutely
> they simply had restrictions on what their service(s) could be used for
Do they have such restrictions on private parties? Also, is this common in industry generally? If I manufacture screws would it be a typical practice for me to contractually require that a buyer not use my screws in weapons, for example?
> Can the government force a company that runs a nuclear power plant force that company to make a nuclear weapon?
No, it seems like you are missing my point. I think there is an argument that the seller should be blind to who the buyer is and what they are going to do with the product they are buying.
If we don’t do that, we open up an exploit where an adversary doesn’t need to get direct control of the government, they can just pressure a small number of private companies who would deliver what the elected government wants.
Also do keep in mind that I’m playing devil’s advocate here, I don’t think democracy has functioned properly in America for quite a long time now, and it may be a delusion that it even can function with how things are set up today.
> they just have to treat the government like any other customer when it comes to doing or not doing business based on ideological differences.
Which is what anthropic did? Nation states aswell as companies want to control their business involvements. The difference is, companies manipulating representatives will never be as fundamental (hopefully) as an arbitrary legal basis for governments to force companies. The orwellian angle comes from the total authoritarian one.
Anthopric is a private company that can absolutely set rules and limits on how its product is used.
i would call tjis administration many things, fascistic, shitty, corrupt, but it's not particularly orwellian.
The whole fight with Anthropic was because they wanted to use it for mass surveillance (and autonomous weapon systems).
How is mass surveillance not orwellian.
I wrote: it's not particularly orwellian. like all the other us administrations have had mass surveillance boners too. and the us is not nearly as surveillancey as other fascistic regimes, or even contemporary social democracies.
finally, orwellian means a lot more too, especially "controlling how people think by controlling their language". again, the trump administration doesn't do that much of those things.
this administration has a lot of problems, but its pretty straightforward.
It is incredibly Orwellian in that is lies constantly, loudly, and badly.
an administration lied. news at 10
Where else do you get “truth is not truth”?
[flagged]
Being marked an enemy of the state for disagreeing with the state to me sounds like thoughtcrime, plain and simple. How much more Orwellian can you get?
I remember neither that happening in 1984, nor is that a description of what is happening to Anthropic. Or is this is an Animal Farm reference instead?
I remember Winston having a private conversation about political beliefs, and then being literally tortured into submission. And I remember Anthropic refusing a government order (albeit a stupid government order), and then being labeled a "supply chain risk." You can twist reality however you'd like though.
You don’t remember the concept of thought crime in 1984? Or you don’t recall how thought crime gets you branded an enemy of the state? The former was a term literally introduced in 1984 and the thought police is tasked with locating and eliminating thought crime. Throughout the book there are news reports of the thought criminals caught and arrested who are now enemies of the state. The book ends with him being tortured until he completely succumbs to the thought control and is then murdered.
If you can’t see the allegory in that story to an administration that actively goes after those it labels as enemies because they dare to voice their own opinion or oppose their political goals in any way, either you’re not cut out for literary analysis and trying to apply metaphors in literature to the real world or you aren’t seeing the real world for what it is.
Didn't label them an "enemy." Didn't accuse them of crime. And the decree was due to Anthropic's actions--not their thoughts.
Ok, just labeling them a supply chain risk while also claiming they’re critical to national security for insisting the government stick to the powers to the model they agreed to in the contract and not expanding it.
> Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable.
Yup, definitely not an enemy.
> Instead, @AnthropicAI and its CEO @DarioAmodei, have chosen duplicity
Don’t you call your friends duplicitous?
> Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles.
Oh boy. Doubleplus ungood.
> I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic
Oh yeah, totally not an enemy. Just no one can do business with them. Doubleplusungood behavior.
They’re both a danger to US troops with their behavior and also critical to the supply chain of said troops. Very important to understand and accept that doublethink.
This doesn't require the slightest bit of doublethink. Their technology is fantastic and would be an important military tool if Anthropic allowed it to be used as such. Their choice to disallow it makes them a supply chain risk, but the existence of the technology makes them important. This isn't hard.
There's no need to read it that literally, we're not making Borges' map here. 1984 is both about the visceral horror of the authoritarian state and the existential horror of being unable to fight an opponent who controls the very language you speak and the concept of truth. The former grounds the latter, turning an interesting philosophical treatise that might otherwise not land with readers into an approachable work of fiction.
They got labeled a "supply chain risk" in order to prevent the government from contracting with them. They didn't disappear or arrest or even charge Dario. He's a billionaire with more freedom and opportunity than Orwell could have even imagined.
I would love to hear your perspective of how the label "supply chain risk" and its definition aren't in accordance with the concept of being branded an enemy of the state. I'll reproduce the definition below:
> “Supply chain risk” means the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of a covered system so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise degrade the function, use, or operation of such system (see 10 U.S.C. 3252). (https://www.acquisition.gov/dfars/subpart-239.73-requirement...)
There's a little bit of leeway here, but this definition means either the company is an adversary (or an extension of one, e.g. Huawei/the CCP) or is under threat of being compromised by an adversary.
So which is Anthropic? Well, neither: the government's court filings and public comments in the media claim that Anthropic has an "adversarial posture". They want to simultaneously get away with bucketing Anthropic under the statute for adversaries, but without calling Anthropic an adversary directly in a court of law. They want to apply the statute without needing to follow the actual definition of an adversary.
From a CNBC interview:
> We can't have a company that has a different policy preference that is baked into the model through its constitution, its soul, its policy preferences, pollute the supply chain so our warfighters are getting ineffective weapons, ineffective body armor, ineffective protection. That's really where the supply chain risk designation came from. (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/12/anthropic-claude-emil-michae...)
That's why the judge rightly called this situation Orwellian: we're looking at linguistic sleight of hand designed to allow the government to turn what is a simple contract dispute into a company-threatening classification that threatens to uproot them entirely from any company that does business with the most powerful entity in the United States. Because Anthropic doesn't want to do the government's bidding despite being allowed to as a matter of freedom of speech, they are being threatened with a punishment that goes beyond just not being able to contract directly with the government. And that's not fair.
I would also love to understand why you keep going back to the literal events of the book. You don't need to be locked in a room and forced to claim that 2+2=5 for your situation to be Orwellian.
> I remember Winston having a private conversation about political beliefs, and then being literally tortured into submission.
I remember Winston being forced to accept that 2+2=5 and believing it.
> In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
* https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/321469-in-the-end-the-party...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_%2B_2_%3D_5#George_Orwell
> And I remember Anthropic refusing a government order (albeit a stupid government order), and then being labeled a "supply chain risk." You can twist reality however you'd like though.
I remember when American companies could do domestic business, or not, with whomever they wished without having to worry about being punished by the government for their choices.
If a government orders a pacifist to pick up a gun, is that allowed? If a government orders a pacifist to manufacture a gun, is that allowed? (There's a spectrum of 'complicity'.)
> I remember when American companies could do domestic business, or not, with whomever they wished without having to worry about being punished by the government for their choices.
No you don't, because that time as never existed.
> If a government orders a pacifist to pick up a gun, is that allowed? If a government orders a pacifist to manufacture a gun, is that allowed? (There's a spectrum of 'complicity'.)
Yes. It's called the draft. It's called wartime manufacturing decrees. These all existed at the time of Orwell, and he never alluded to them being thoughtcrimes. Compelling people to act against their beliefs is common and distinct from throughtcrime. And if you cannot see that, then I don't even know how to talk to you. Government has always controlled your outer life. Orwell introduced thoughtcrime as the next step in totalitarianism, as the erasure of inner life.
edit: I asked Opus to analyze this thread, and I agree with it.
> That said, Orwell would probably also note that the people arguing against you aren't entirely wrong to be alarmed — they're just reaching for the wrong literary reference and overstating the analogy. Government retaliation against companies for political speech is concerning on its own terms without needing to be dressed up as dystopian fiction. The 1984 framing actually weakens the critique by making it easy to dismiss as hyperbolic.
> He'd probably tell everyone in the thread to say what they mean in plain language and stop hiding behind his book.
And so can you.
In this court case, disagreeing with the government immediately leaps to national security conclusions. Anthropic explicitly stated their policy and the government actually argued that Anthropic would next engage in sabotage. It’s my considered opinion that this government may have even gotten that idea from 1984.
I have a copy here. Which page?
In mine, "All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it…” and this is close to what people in court saw, “there's something creepy about how any disagreement, any public disagreement is taken as unacceptable.”
So I agree with the judge, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard.
> So I agree with the judge, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard.
Unfortunately for you and all of the other people here endlessly talking about her use of "Orwellian" as references to thoughtcrimes, reality control, and doublethink, she was likely instead using the word in reference to the fact that the DoW wanted to use the tech for surveillance.
So, no, you don't agree with the judge, as convenient as that appeal to authority may have seemed. She made a slightly hyperbolic statement about the surveillance state. You all went into... I don't even know what.
No, it's quite clear, from the brief:
> Moreover, Defendants’ designation of Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” is likely both contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious. The Department of War provides no legitimate basis to infer from Anthropic’s forthright insistence on usage restrictions that it might become a saboteur. At oral argument, government counsel suggested that Anthropic showed its subversive tendencies by “questioning” the use of its technology, “raising concerns” about it, and criticizing the government’s position in the press. Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government
And something like 150 retired judges signed on, those are the amicus briefs supporting Anthropic:
> Numerous amici have also described wide- ranging harm to the public interest, including the chilling of open discussion about important topics in AI safety. The motion for a preliminary injunction is granted.
She could have said that those amicus briefs raise surveillance concerns. She didn't use the word surveillance; she didn't say AI safety is important; she said open discussion about AI safety is important. That's the issue over which this injunction is granted.
We know that the judge asked a long, organized list of questions to the government; there are multiple ways for the government to get out of a contract, and she gave them room for nuance. We're talking about an astute top graduate of the Ivy League, who understands what it means to reference 1984; not some new jerk appointee.
So, I have to wonder if your perspective is an experiment. It's possible for someone today to pretend to be as brainwashed as the proles in 1984, to gauge 2026 reactions in a near-anonymous forum. Do like-minded others jump in? How many people actually read the judicial order? Do bots come out of the woodwork to bring up colonization and antisemitism points against Blair himself? If you bring up the same points on Reddit, do certain phrases appear at a frequency too high for coincidence? Orwell appears so regularly that repeated trials of this might demonstrate that the window is opening to a kind of 1984 doubt. I think we agree that'd be fascinating research.
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command"
Yes, more of this. (Direct, timely links to court dockets and documents on US Article III court cases.)
Agreed! And shout-out to the people at CourtListener (the site hosting this PDF), who make millions of US court documents freely available to the public.
> In light of Anthropic’s showing on the merits, and the lack of evidence of harm to Defendants, the Court sets a nominal bond of $100.
That must have been a bit of a goofy check to write.
(not a lawyer) I _think_ this is a result of Trump v CASA, where the Supreme Court determined that preliminary injunctions and TROs without a bond of some sort (which until then were fairly common) were invalid and unenforceable.
I understand why Anthropic used the name “Department of War” in their public communication. They want to be friendly to the people who like that name. But what the heck is it doing in an official court document? That’s not the entity’s legal name. It would be like if I sued IBM and named them “Big Blue” in my suit.
I can't wait for them to ignore the order because they weren't legally named in it. "What order? We are the DOD. No idea who the DOW is."
Their desire to screw with people is going to be in serious conflict with their desire to convince everyone their new name is real.
Or for Anthropic Claude to become Anthwopic Mad Dog Murdock.
seems it is an official second title now according to https://www.war.gov/Brand-Guide/#:~:text=Use%20of%20Name,-In
The legal name can only be changed by Congress. An executive order doesn’t override that.
I don't understand what you don't understand.
Congress has legislated that the departments may establish monikers. The dod established a moniker. It's an official and legal second name. It's fine to use the moniker.
First I've heard of it. I can't find anything backing that up, can you provide a link or name the law?
maybe Judge Lin is showing that she does get where they are coming from..
Maybe Judge Lin thinks the name used is irrelevant and doesn't want to distract from the relevant parts of the judgement.
Or it may be the convention of using the name that the plaintiff or defendant has given themselves.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47537228
[dead]
[flagged]