Comment by satvikpendem

5 hours ago

So it seems like David Sacks was right that the US government only really got involved because the Amazon/ AWS CEO complained about latent security threats [0] and that the government was reluctant to actually issue the export control.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48529358

Sacks has said so many obviously false things in reference to government actions (Jan 6th, Ukraine, etc) that there is no reason to trust anything he says.

If the Trump administration wants him to say something, he says it. Maybe what he is saying is true, maybe it isn’t. There is no way to know.

The story they are telling is exactly the same whether it was true or they were just shaking down Anthropic for no reason.

  • I think this is oversimplifying things.

    There are many different factions within the administration. Sacks was part of the "deregulate the tech sector" faction, which on this issue is aligned with the "beating China overrides anything" faction.

    That's distinct from the Pete Hegseth faction (I don't really know how to characterize his faction other than anti-woke maybe?).

    Sometimes these factions agree, sometimes they don't.

    In general your approach is right - you can't trust most things coming out of this administration. But you can try to unpick was actually happened by who is saying what, when. That is useful even without liking the people.