Comment by epistasis

3 days ago

Back during the Iraq war days and government overreach into privacy violations, the tech companies were on the side of the American people. They fought to defend the 4th amendment.

That has all changed today, except for Anthropic. You think Apple is going to stand up to an unlawful DoJ demand these days? Hell no. Tim Cook has lit Apple's reputation on fire. I've been a super dedicated Apple user for 25 years, but I'm heading for the exits now. All that trust has been burned.

Stay strong Anthoproc, you are seemingly the only really large SV company with any principles and backbone. I won't forget what happens here, either way it goes.

75 comments

epistasis

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heavyset_go  3 days ago

Platforms went into full "Islamic extremist" panic for decades and would handover whatever the government wanted in the name of national security, would allow users to be spied upon over time, silence users and remove content, and users' private data was collated for, for example, research purposes.

That said, Anthropic finances PACs[1] that push legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)[2] that would make Anthropic the gatekeepers and censors of all user-generated content on the internet, in order to save the children. That same legislation would force you to scan your face and ID to access or create user-generated content online, again, to save the children. Anthropic would get paid to train on, and censor, all user-generated content that's shared online into perpetuity. If passed, it would also mark the death of free anonymous speech on the internet.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/anthropic-gives-20-million-t...

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/congresss-crusade-age-...

txrx0000  3 days ago

Anthropic is not on the side of the people. None of these companies are. They've made it clear that they want to gatekeep LLM capabilities.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

These companies use safety and intellectual property as excuses to achieve centralization. But if you think about it for more than a second, they're basically saying "intelligence for me but not for thee."

I don't want to live in a world where a handful of entities control all of the intelligence, and I don't think you do either. The best future we can hope for is one where everyone can run an open-source AGI on their own gaming PC. And by run I mean local matmuls, not API calls to a remote server.

  • j45  2 days ago

    Safety and regulations very much can be used by companies as a moat to slow down competitors and inhibit future ones.

pamcake  3 days ago

I'd hold off making that call on Anthropic here until at least after Friday. I'm not sure if persisting that "constructive dialogue is taking place in good faith" and saying nothing else in public signifies backbone considering preceding and consecutive public statements by government officials... It certainly doesn't instil confidence in honesty or transparency.

  • torginus  3 days ago

    What happens on Friday?

  • bpodgursky  3 days ago

    I mean they got threatened with the Defense Production Act. Firmly standing their ground without an inch of give may backfire spectacularly too, if the DoD injects itself into model training.

    I think they pretty clearly demonstrated good faith and where it ends up is a tactical choice I'm not in a great position to judge.

    • tehjoker  3 days ago

      If DoD seizes the IP, the issue is they will need the cooperation of their scientists at least in the short term, if they want it to remain a fronter model. The labor angle isn't entirely guaranteed though the white collar worker has very little spine in this country.

      9 replies →

    • we_have_options  3 days ago

      yeah, but the question I'd be asking myself is,

      Hey, so what you are saying is that unless we use the AI that we control, to take control of the mass surveillance and autonomous drone strike systems, you will force us to take control of these systems?

      I mean, did H just Open Clawed the entire US military?

JumpCrisscross  3 days ago

> That has all changed today

Anecdote, but I knew a couple senior folks at Apple during the San Bernardino encryption dispute [1]. My understanding is Cupertino was surprised—going all the way to the top—how much backlash they got for what they felt was the natural reaction. (Not to unlock.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...

Cthulhu_  3 days ago

It hasn't really changed, the only thing that's truly different is what they publish. But the Snowden leaks confirmed what many people already suspected - the American agencies have silent, backdoor access to all US based internet companies.

I don't know if it can be verified whether end-to-end encryption like Whatsapp and co claim to offer is actually safe. I suspect it isn't, but, I don't know enough.

  • j45  2 days ago

    If it dies off in the news cycle or social media likely lots of perks don’t know or remember.

vjvjvjvjghv  3 days ago

“ the tech companies were on the side of the American people”

They are on the side of making money. And the bigger they are, the more pressure. The big tech companies are now so big that they can’t afford to leave any money in the table if they want to keep their growth rates.

js8  3 days ago

"The tech companies were on the side of the American people. They fought to defend the 4th amendment."

I doubt it. The largest tech companies of the time were Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Oracle and IBM. It would be nice if you were more specific.

  • j45  2 days ago

    You should ask people who were there instead of doubting.

    News articles are extremely available and things were so early that they did all fight like hell as a new industry.

    The internet itself was the new unknown tech to politicians and their lobbyists just like ai is now.

    Little is actually new except it’s maybe be to you just like the current crop of politicians the tech of the day that might impact power or connection between people.

    • js8  2 days ago

      I am asking, maybe you misread my comment?

      IBM, for instance, was part of military-industrial complex before the term was coined. That's why I am quite skeptical of the claim.

      1 reply →

yodsanklai  3 days ago

I don't think a big company can be on the side of anything, except making money, unless there's a majority owner. This is by design. If fighting the government is going to hurt the company more than not doing it they won't do it. The US government also has the possibility to blackmail people decision individually (like they do with European politicians or international court judges).

kdheiwns  3 days ago

Tech companies in the early 2000s were nerds who grew up in an environment where tech was for losers and a waste of time. A lot of those people had strong values and did it because they enjoyed it and wanted other nerds like themselves to have cool stuff.

Now companies are dominated by MBAs and nepotism. Most join tech for a quick cash out. Having values is seen as a loss, because if you can get a billion, why not? You're invincible if you're rich and none of these downsides apply to you. Screw everyone else. They could just be a billionaire themselves if they don't like it.

As a result, zoomers today meme about people like the unabomber making a good point.

  • matheusmoreira  3 days ago

    > As a result, zoomers today meme about people like the unabomber making a good point.

    I don't blame them.

    As a nerd I think my spirit was broken by the absolute apathy of the normies. It was easy to ignore up until the early 2000s. It's become unbearable after social media and the iPhone reached the masses. It's not nerd stuff anymore. They influence every design now. They shape every decision. They are actively exploited at every turn. They are profiled, surveilled, controlled. It's gotten to the point even we nerds can't escape this fate no matter how much we want to. We try to tell them about it and we're made out to be tinfoil hat nutjobs. It's happening and they don't care.

    It feels so hopeless and it's honestly very radicalizing. It breeds sociopathy. In the end I can't find the will to blame the billionaires either. I think I'd do the same if I could. Make billions and then just create a small paradise for me and all the people I care about. A subset of society where the principles I hold dear actually apply. Society is too fucked up and nobody cares, so I'll just create my own fiefdom.

    • Torwald  3 days ago

      The problem is not that the normies don't care, the problem is a society that seems to need that to function well for everybody. The problem is the existence of government. Instead of a state we need a society based on private property, that would solve these problems. It is about who has the possibility to apply force and a state government enables that in a wrong way.

      3 replies →

  • hackit2  3 days ago

    That can be so far from the truth it hurts thinking about it. Governments passed laws that mandated that businesses must legally comply with DOJ or Government Investigates on people of interest. Otherwise they will be blocked in those countries. No users = No money. Most government consider they're extending you the privilege to conduct business with their citizens, and by virtue of granting you those rights you're burden with complying with the countries laws/security and/or audits.

iwontberude  3 days ago

Your critique of Apple and Tim Cook is unsubstantiated and misleading. That same Tim Cook stood up to the FBI and refused to participate in breaking into phones for them when they were pressed in 2015-2016. The same Apple that later fought against the government forcing document scanning in iCloud and was able to keep them off device. They have been fighting the whole time. Apple is was first to normalize whole disk encryption on commercial machines, they have made Safari a weapon against tracking which is abused by governments. Also every single company in the US is subject to National Security Letters and Apple uses warrant canaries to inform the public within the limits of the law.

And then to appeal to Anthropic is just offensively, willfully ignorant.

  • dns_snek  3 days ago

    > That same Tim Cook stood up to the FBI and refused to participate in breaking into phones for them

    I hope you have more evidence for this than just that press release. As far as I'm concerned that was nothing more than a stunt because while Tim Cook "fought" against the FBI, intelligence agencies and private cybersecurity companies already had the capability to break into ~all smartphones.

    That single instance created an unreasonable amount of belief that iPhones are unbreakable, which is good news if you're the FBI and you want criminals to put way more trust into their iPhones than they should.

    The same Apple actively aids Chinese government's suppression of civil liberties [1]. To think that there's any ideological conviction (and moral high ground) behind their [apparent] pro-privacy stance is painfully naive.

    [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/11/apple-limits-i...

tolerance  3 days ago

> Back during the Iraq war days and government overreach into privacy violations, the tech companies were on the side of the American people.

Companies such as?

SanjayMehta  3 days ago

All our Intel Macs are getting repurposed for Ubuntu LTS - whatever version which supports our CAD tools.

  • mixmastamyk  3 days ago

    Recommend Mint instead. Flatpak instead of snap.

    • SanjayMehta  3 days ago

      Some tools go out of their way to whine piteously if they can't find Ubuntu in /etc/issue et al. We were using Mint, just got tired of messing with installation scripts every time an upgrade came. And as the transition to Linux accelerates, it's just more convenient to stick with whatever the vendor wants.

      4 replies →

    • bsharper  3 days ago

      You mean you DON'T want to see every utility installed via snap listed as a mount point? /s

efnx  3 days ago

Can you substantiate these claims with with anything? What unlawful DoJ demands has Apple given in to? Anthropic is still very early in their trajectory compared to Apple with its ~50 year run, so it's not exactly an Apple to apples comparison.

verisimi  3 days ago

There are such things and secret courts with secret rulings. You and I have no idea what is actually occurring because of this secrecy; we can only talk about that which is stated publicly.

akimbostrawman  3 days ago

>the tech companies were on the side of the American people. They fought to defend the 4th amendment.

So not only will we pretend PRISM didn't happen but somehow they even fought it?