ANS -- Our Government wants autonomous killing machines.

You have probably heard something about the company Anthropic.  Here is Rachel Hurley's take on it.  It's pretty much just suppositions at this point (she says that), but whatever the answer is, it's pretty scary. 

--Kim

Rachel Hurley 

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Okay - I've read a shit ton about this Anthropic / OpenAI / Department of Defense situation - and here is my take.

If you have no idea what I am talking about - here is the short version. The Pentagon wants carte blanche for when using AI to build mass surveillance tools and autonomous killing machines. The AI company they are using said no. So the Pentagon threatened them.

Anthropic - the company that makes Claude - got handed a deadline this week. Remove the guardrails that stop your AI from doing autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, or else. Anthropic said no. Within hours, Pete Hegseth - a man whose previous claim to fame was hosting Fox & Friends and allegedly not washing his hands for years - designated an American AI company a national security threat. The same label we put on Chinese telecom companies. For the crime of refusing to build a surveillance panopticon.

The general consensus seemed to be that the other big AI companies agreed with Anthropic's stand - and then ChatGPT's Sam Altman - who this morning said he supported Anthropic's position - swooped in and cut a deal with the Pentagon. So, OpenAI gets the contract, Anthropic gets banned from the federal government, and Sam says his deal has the exact same safety red lines Anthropic was holding.

So either the Pentagon banned Anthropic for conditions it then accepted from OpenAI - which makes no sense - or somebody is lying about the terms.

There are a lot of theories on the internet about what really just happened:

1. OpenAI agreed that the Pentagon decides if rules are being followed; Anthropic wanted to decide itself.

2. OpenAI's safety rules can be technically removed later; Claude's are baked into training.

3. OpenAI only banned these activities on its own servers - once the model is running on the Pentagon's own servers, there will be no oversight.

4. OpenAI accepted existing law as sufficient; Anthropic argued current law doesn't cover AI-powered surveillance

But the best theory floating around is the ugliest one. It wasn't about the red lines at all. It was a power play. Anthropic went to the government and said, "You can't use our AI for that." The government responded, "You can't tell us what to do." And they made an example of them.

And if you don't think this affects you - let me be clear - the surveillance stuff isn't hypothetical. DOGE already has access to Treasury data, IRS records, Social Security files, and federal payment systems. Databases that were siloed on purpose, by design, for decades. An LLM that can reason across all of them simultaneously creates something that has literally never existed in American history. The query it enables: "Who donated to this organization, lives in this zip code, traveled to this country, and posted this opinion online?"

And the weapons piece - this isn't about one drone with a gun. The military wants AI that completes a kill chain in milliseconds. AI that coordinates ten thousand drones simultaneously.

The thing nobody wants to say out loud is that once you build autonomous killing logic for foreign wars, it comes home. It always comes home. Every dual-use technology in American history follows this exact pattern.

Ilya Sutskever - one of the most important figures in AI history, a man who basically never talks publicly - broke his silence to say Anthropic was right. Two hundred and twenty engineers from OpenAI and Google signed a letter supporting Anthropic. Three U.S. senators launched formal challenges within hours. Europe publicly invited Anthropic to relocate.

And Pete Hegseth reposted Sam Altman's deal announcement like he just won the Super Bowl.

That's the tell. If the terms were really identical, why is the guy who banned Anthropic celebrating? He's not celebrating safety terms. He's celebrating compliance. He's celebrating that one company bent the knee and the other one got destroyed for not bending.

Everyone watched this week and learned exactly one thing: say no to the Pentagon and they will try to kill your business. Say yes and they'll throw you a parade.

The court challenge is coming. Whether it works will determine if AI safety commitments mean anything at all, or if they're just marketing copy that evaporates the second a man with stars on his shoulders makes a phone call.

#ratcclips

ANS -- Doing something about Citizens United

Citizens United was one of the worst decisions the Supreme Court ever decided.  Some states are thinking of doing something about it -- including California.  Keep an eye on this one.

--Kim

Robert Reich 

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Friends,

You may remember that back in November I mentioned that Montana was considering a bill that would effectively negate the Supreme Court's awful Citizens United decision, which held that corporations are people under the First Amendment and therefore entitled to spend unlimited amounts of corporate money in elections.

A similar bill has just been introduced in California.

Montana is a great and beautiful state. Some 1,145,000 people live there. But California! Almost 40 million people live in the Golden State. If California were an independent country, it would have the fourth-largest economy in the world (behind Germany and ahead of Japan).

So the possibility that California might pass this legislation is a very big deal.

As you know, corporate political spending was growing before Citizens United, but the decision opened the floodgates to the unlimited super PAC spending and undisclosed dark money we suffer from today.

Between 2008 and 2024, reported "independent" expenditures by outside groups exploded more than 28-fold — from $144 million to $4.21 billion. Unreported money also skyrocketed, with dark money groups spending millions influencing the 2024 election.

Most people assume that the only way to stop corporate and dark money in American politics is either to wait for the Supreme Court to undo Citizens United (we could wait a very long time) or amend the U.S. Constitution (which is extraordinarily difficult).

But there's another way, and there's a good chance it will work. It will likely be on the ballot this November in Montana (it's currently in signature gathering phase). And there's now a chance California could enact it!

As I've pointed out, individual states have the authority to limit corporate political activity and dark money spending, because states determine what powers corporations have.

In American law, corporations are creatures of state laws. For more than two centuries, the power to define their form, limits, and privilege has belonged only to the states.

Corporations have no powers at all until a state government grants them some. In the 1819 Supreme Court case Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, Chief Justice John Marshall established that:

"A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it, either expressly, or as incidental to its very existence….The objects for which a corporation is created are universally such as the government wishes to promote. They are deemed beneficial to the country; and this benefit constitutes the consideration, and, in most cases, the sole consideration of the grant."

States don't have to grant corporations the power to spend in politics. In fact, they can decide not to give corporations that power.

This isn't about corporate rights, as the Supreme Court determined in Citizens United. It's about corporate powers.

When a state exercises its authority to define corporations as entities without the power to spend in politics, it will no longer be relevant whether corporations have a right to spend in politics — because without the power to do so, the right to do so has no meaning. (Delaware's corporation code already declines to grant private foundations the power to spend in elections.)

Importantly, a state that no longer grants its corporations the power to spend in elections also denies that power to corporations chartered in the other 49 states, if they wish to do business in that state.

And what corporation doesn't want to do business in California?

All a state needs to do is enact a law with a provision something like this:

"Every corporation operating under the laws of this state has all the corporate powers it held previously, except that nothing in this statute grants or recognizes any power to engage in election activity or ballot-issue activity."

Sound farfetched? Not at all.

The argument is laid out in a paper that the Center for American Progress published last fall. (Kudos to CAP and the paper's author, Tom Moore, a senior fellow at CAP who previously served as counsel and chief of staff to a longtime member of the Federal Election Commission.)

Which is exactly what the new California bill does. Here it is: AB 1984. (I kind of like the name.)

The heroes of the day are Assemblymember Chris Rogers and Senator Mike McGuire, who have stepped up to sponsor and co-author the measure, respectively.

I hope Gavin Newsom gets 100 percent behind this effort. If he has his eye on the White House in 2028, this would be a feather in his electoral cap. The Citizens United decision is enormously unpopular. Some 75 percent of Americans disapprove of it.

It's time to make Citizens United history. California (and Montana) can lead the way.

What are your thoughts?