GoKawiilToday we’re talking about the messy, fast-moving situation at Anthropic, the maker of Claude that now finds itself in a very ugly legal battle with the Pentagon.
The back-and-forth is complicated, but as of a few days ago, the Pentagon had deemed Anthropic a supply chain risk, and Anthropic has filed a lawsuit challenging that designation, saying the government has violated its First and Fifth Amendment rights by “seeking to destroy the economic value created by one of the world’s fastest-growing private companies.” I can tell you right now: We’re going to be talking about the twists and turns of that case on The Verge and here on Decoder in the months to come.
But today I wanted to take a moment and really dig in here on one very important element of this situation that’s not gotten enough attention as this has spiraled out of control: how the United States government does surveillance, the legal authority that allows that surveillance to occur, and why Anthropic was distrustful of the government saying it would follow the law when it comes to using AI to do even more surveillance.
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My guest today is Mike Masnick, the founder and CEO of Techdirt, the excellent and long-running tech policy website. Mike has been writing about government overreach, privacy in the digital age, and other related topics for decades now. He’s an expert on how the internet and the surveillance state have grown up in interconnected ways.
You see, there’s what the law says the government can do when it comes to surveiling us, and then what the government wants to do. And most importantly, there’s what the government says the law says it can do, which is often exactly the opposite of what any normal person simply reading the law would think.
You’ll hear Mike explain in great detail here in this episode that we cannot — and should not — take the US government at its word when it comes to surveillance. There’s just too much history of government lawyers twisting the interpretations of simple words like “target” to expand surveillance in complicated ways — ways that usually only cause concern in legal circles, and only bubble up when there are huge controversies like whistleblower Ed Snowden’s major NSA revelations more than a decade ago.
But there’s nothing subtle or sophisticated about policymaking in the Trump era — and so with Anthropic, we’re having a very loud, very public debate about technology and surveillance in real time, on the internet, in blog posts and X rants, and over press conference sound-bites. There’s positives and negatives to that, but to make sense of it all, you really have to know the history.
That’s what Mike and I set out to explain in this episode — whatever your views on AI and government, this episode will make it clear that both parties have let the surveillance state get bigger and bigger over time. Now, we’re on the cusp of the biggest expansion yet when it comes to AI.
Okay: Techdirt founder and CEO Mike Masnick on Anthropic, the Pentagon, and AI surveillance. Here we go.
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