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Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

Plot twist but makes perfect sense for both companies.

Anthropic gets the compute they so desperately need to keep growing. Elon rents out compute that xAI couldn't make use of due to little demand for Grok. SpaceX gets revenue on the books for IPO.

PS. I want to translate this part:

  We’re very intentional about where we’ll add capacity—partnering with democratic countries whose legal and regulatory frameworks support investments of this scale

To real speak:

  We're putting profits above anything else. Yes, Elon is a far right guy who supported Trump, a president who isn't very democratic, but we're just really desperate for more money. We're also trying to make you forget that xAI is funded by Middle East non-democratic governments. Heck, we'll even buy compute from China if we can sell Anthropic models there.

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>we'll even buy compute from China if we can sell Anthropic models there.

Considering that Anthropic mass-bans Chinese users accounts based on using VPN (used to circumvent the Chinese firewall) and then demands an ID or a residence permit of a country where Claude officially works to ensure that the user doesn't live in China, seems unlikely.

If the Chinese government tells Anthropic they can freely sell Claude in China, Dario is suddenly going to be kissing China's ass instead of saying how we can't let China win the AGI race for democracy and western values.

After they told the US government no on a very large contract. I find that hard to believe.

They told the US government no on using Claude for approving lethal military strikes.

China can get plenty of value from Claude without needing to use it for anything similar.

They very specifically avoided a trap where the next time the US blows up a school full of children they were very obviously going to blame Claude for it.

While I agree with the sentiment, $200 Million is really not a big contract for Anthropic when they're on $44 Billion annual revenue. It's less than half a percent.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-ai-defense-department-...

Which naive souls are downvoting this? Anthropic is speed running Google's "don't be evil" mantra.

> funded by Middle East non-democratic governments

What's the problem here exactly? Are you insinuating any non-democratic government is bad and evil and only democratic governments are the correct and right way to govern? sort of like: "there is only one true prophet, and it's the one I follow, and all the others are false!"

> Are you insinuating any non-democratic government is bad and evil

The ones run by people who chop up journalists certainly are.

No, I didn't say that.

My point is that Anthropic cares a lot about "democracy" but will buy compute from a data center mostly funded by non-democratic nations.

Who do you think is the sources of funding for Anthropic's lead investors?

Your tone suggests I'm unaware of the fact that Middle East money heavily invests in American AI companies and data centers.

Anthropic brought up the "democratic" justification, not GP. GP was just pointing out that Anthropic doesn't actually care. If it can get a sweetheart deal from an autocrat, it'll take it.

But assuming there are people that care, if a government doesn't derive its right to govern from the will of the people it governs, under what definitions can it be considered legitimate? Divine right of kings?

I would say ruling over people without their consent is blatantly morally wrong, yes. In the same way anything non consensual is wrong

Yes, especially in the context of supporting US imperialism and capitalists interests (perpetual war + extraction machine) over what would actually benefit Americans: peace + cooperation initiatives. Something also tells me that American civilians would rather cooperate with peaceful governments than those that feed the blood machine.

America could do so much to compel the world to work in from a human rights perspective rather than petrodollars. I can't imagine any serious person would say the average American benefits from US imperialism. All US politicians did was traded away were secure middle class lifestyle for cheaper widgets, hardly anything worth caring about.

Who benefits from American petrodollar policies? Not Americans, all the wealth gets extracted to the elites while civilians suffer from the imperial blowback/boomerang.

Look at what the new deal coalition brought in and they nearly burnt out enough to allow neoliberalism to flourish during their fall. What do we have in return? No universal healthcare, no universal childcare, a broken welfare system, increasing income inequality, losing the ability to make a better life.

IDK what world you're living in, but in the real world Americans are the richest people on earth and richer than ever before in real terms. And yes international seigniorage is part of that.

Don't forget the whole, "maybe this will make it easier for xAi to distill anthropic models and we can make another attempt at mechahitler"

Thank you for the "real speak" section. Accurate and hilarious.

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