Judge Rules Trump Administration’s Blacklisting of Anthropic Was Illegal

bushido

It was a master stroke in international politics though, the US created an arms race towards sovereign ai, small models, and self-hosting - exactly like they wanted to. (sarcasm intended)

firefoxd

The law is too slow. It's like a horse carriage in the age of twitter. Why can't they expedite for special cases? Not even defending Antropic or any company. Just that if a tweet can cause damage in seconds, the law shouldn't be too far behind.

Arubis

Judge rules horse must return to barn.

skeledrew

> unlawfully retaliated Can it be at all lawful to retaliate though?

protocolture

There was a guy in the comments of the first article on this topic, who claimed to be an expert on this law and was adamant that the decision by the Trump admin was perfectly legal. Not just for accountability sake, but if that gentleman could come back in here and outline what he thinks is going on that would be quite interesting.

trimethylpurine

I don't agree. When anthropic contractually stopped the US government from using the platform for certain purposes that they could not prevent the average user from pursuing they created a de facto national security risk. Prevent everyone from doing it or don't prevent anyone. You can't single out and cripple only one country. I don't imagine that this was Anthropic's intent anyway. They were just trying to say that it shouldn't be used for warfare. Respectable, but short sighted considering that they couldn't stop other people from using it for that same purpose.

replwoacause

Most of what Trump does is illegal.

thinkcontext

Good for Anthropic for standing up for themselves but think of the masses of companies that decided not to take the risk. The tone was definitely set at Trump's inauguration with all the tech execs front and center on display. They knew that if they didn't play ball Trump would use government power against them. Law firms blackmailed into doing pro bono work for Trump's pet causes, intelligence analysts not able to tell the truth, energy companies giving up wind leases and switching to fossil fuels. And of course the constant shakedowns for cash.

glerk

No fine imposed on the Trump Administration corporation (doing business as the federal government of the US of A)? Does the current legal system allow Anthropic to sue for loss of revenue, reputational damage, etc.?

bamboozled

So what if it’s illegal, what can be done about it, the corruption is so extreme there will be no recourse. I hope I’m wrong…

hingler36

At this point, does precedent even matter? Based on recent rulings, I feel like this exact scenario could play out again and the result would be the exact same.

frog42

So can they now sue the government and recoup their inflated theoretical losses to be paid out of tax revenue? It feels like any outcome here will have no negative effect on the major players actually involved.

sb057

There are several hundred federal judges, and cases like this can be brought before virtually any of them. As a consequence at least one judge has ruled practically every single action by the Trump administration is illegal. These rulings are typically overturn at some point in the appeals process up to the Supreme Court, which has mostly upheld them as legal.

jghn

Since SCOTUS is stacked, it really doesn't matter.

cubefox

Note that this is a ruling on (just) one of two independent lawsuits, as stated in the article.

perarneng

Does anything matter if it's illegal or not when it comes to the current government? This is not a flamewar im interested from a practical perspective if things like this has any effects at all in practice.