Hegseth vs Claude. State of the Union

Hegseth vs Claude. State of the Union

Pete Hegseth, probably taking his boss’ lead decided to bully Anthropic to drop their barriers on the use of its AI, Claude. Do you use AI? I actually use Claude after trying Chat and Grok among others. BTW, what’s up with Siri? It is dumb by comparison. Apple should be ashamed. Anthropic and the Defense Department had a small dustup over its use by the military. Hegseth, with the president’s concurrence, wanted Anthropic to remove its restrictions on domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems from Claude. Hegseth demanded that Anthropic equip the Pentagon with an AI model “free from usage policy constraints that may limit lawful military applications.” If not then he would label Claude a “supply chain risk,” a designation for foreign adversaries, meaning that anyone wanting to do business with the US military could not do business with Anthropic. (Maybe he thought Claude was French). 

Hegseth said that he might even nationalize it. Anthropic refused. Trump, as is his wont, went ballistic saying “We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!” The United States of America will never allow a radical left, woke company to dictate how our great military fights and wins wars! The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY. Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology.” Good grief.

Actually, federal agencies were given six months to eliminate doing business with Anthropic. Ironically, the military’s action in Iran relied on Claude for intelligence assessments, target identification and simulation of battle scenarios.

The company said that “designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action – one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company.” Anthropic also said the “designation would both be legally unsound and set a dangerous precedent for any American company that negotiates with the government.” The company had voiced its constitutional, ethical, and technical concerns about unleashing AI capable of surveilling American citizens at home and executing people abroad according to its own judgment instead of a human being’s.  Surely they aren’t implying that the federal government would ever spy on its own citizens, would it? I presume that the company will sue the Defense Department. Certainly the designation will have an adverse impact on Anthropic business. Some say it would be a death blow. Amazon, Google and other partners would have to cease doing business with the company currently with a market valuation of $380 billion.

Incidentally, after banishing Claude, the Defense Department entered into a contract with OpenAI on the same terms as the one Antrhopic had insisted on making one wonder if all the dustup was just a personality issue between Hegseth and Anthropic.

State of the Union

Did you watch the State of the Union address? I didn’t. Nielsen says that 32.6 million people watched which is down from the 36 million last year. Since there are 36 million registered republicans, this means that it is likely that few democrats or independents watch the speech. But only a paltry 3.1 million watched the democrat response. Does this mean that we are getting more apathetic to politics? Trump’s 2017 speech had nearly 48 million viewers. President Bill Clinton had 67 million viewers in 1993.

The after speech media coverage was pitiful. Those on the right exhorted that the president had knocked it out of the ballpark and had exposed the democrats for what they were. One would have thought that the polls would have shown a mass migration of voters to the MAGA side. They didn’t. On the other hand, the left wing media fact checked the speech and called it overlong and partisan. One would conclude that meant a mass migration of voters to the democrat side. That didn’t happen either.

Neither happened. I could have predicted that only hardcore MAGAs would tune in and everyone else would tune out. It was a missed opportunity for the president to lay out his vision of economic recovery, immigration status and vision going forward, Instead, it was a political speech with Trump preaching to the choir. The democrats and independents either tuned him out or didn’t tune in at all. As pollster Scott Rasmussen said “In terms of its impact on public opinion and the midterm elections. I can say with a high degree of confidence, there won’t be any.”

By the way, Trump continued the tradition started by Ronald Reagan in having people in the gallery to be recognized. He had the men’s hockey team. The women were invited but said they had a conflict. I would have had every American medal winner there as well.