Comment by nashashmi
8 days ago
The difference is that local US companies have agency to refuse government overreach while Chinese companies are weaker in this regard. Chinese companies are more vulnerable to its govts pressure.
8 days ago
The difference is that local US companies have agency to refuse government overreach while Chinese companies are weaker in this regard. Chinese companies are more vulnerable to its govts pressure.
National Security Letters.
Or, worst comes to worst, as Snowden has revealed, the NSA will just clandestinely hack American companies, as they did to Google when they rolled out TLS for search.
As it has been proven multiple times with the current US administration, no, US companies do not have the agency to refuse government overreach, they can just purchase favours (which I highly doubt is different from PRC and its government).
> The difference is that local US companies have agency to refuse government overreach
We're on HN, not The Onion's comment section. People will take this seriously rather than sarcasm.
It was sarcasm, right?
I was referring to Google’s lawsuit on US government to refuse their subpoena. Google has agency to refuse by going to court and even publicizing the events against a gag order.
A case 20 years ago? Oh boy. Next you'll be bringing up Apple and the FBI.
Look, in 2026, US big tech companies - and _especially_ frontier LLM companies, which are the topic here - clearly do not have agency to refuse government overreach. The US regime broke their contract with Anthropic, in turn Anthropic rightly raised this as an issue, what happened next? They were threatened to be killed as a company if they didn't play ball.
Let alone the dozens of millions every corp is donating to the dear leader's golden ballroom, giving golden statues, making movies about his wife and so forth. North Korea has nothing on the US any more.
Also google "Qwest NSA refusal". Around the same time as the Google subpoena you brought up. Grat example of just how much agency US companies have to refuse overreach.