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Comment by tristanj | Hacker News Reader

Anthropic is going through the classic Ideological Resistance phase where they fight with the government on principles, that every major tech company also went through. Google, Facebook, Apple, Reddit, Microsoft (especially Microsoft) all had this phase.

Then the companies realize fighting the US government is a lot of effort, expensive and creates a lot of drama, and it's easier to reach a mutual understanding.

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They should’ve kept their distance from the government as long as they could don’t volunteer to be helpful. Don’t volunteer to go meet with politicians keep as low profile as you can for as long as you can. Nothing good comes with associating with them.

Have a legal department trained to be the buffer between you and the government any contact any questions goes through them and since you’re paying them a ton of money, they are the only people the politicians should get to know, oh, and again and again do not volunteer anything.

> keep as low profile as you can for as long as you can

this is the antithesis of a tech company whether it is VC funded or not, but especially if it is. you don't attract new users by laying low. you don't attract investors by laying low. laying low isn't even in a tech company's vocab.

I think they meant keep a low profile from the government, not customers. Anthropic is doing the opposite by loudly asking for regulation.

If the company is "hot" attracting a lot of users, then of course the gov't is going to come knocking too. They're going to want access to all of that user data even if it's not a service they could use directly. Sure, you don't have to go courting government contracts, but it's not like government employees are not going to see the same PR civilian users see.

In a world where the government has been turned into a massive customer of last resort and the game is a kind of first past the post of government capture, that’s simply not a game they can avoid, even if they’ve also been committing unforced errors.

That was always Microsoft's modus operandi, and it almost cost them their company. You can ignore politicians, but politicians won't ignore you.

> it almost cost them their company.

Boy, they put on a great show.

I wonder if this Google antitrust thing is going to end up a similar nothing-burger due to their deep protection.

Boy, they put on a great show.

If you think that's how it was perceived in Redmond, you don't know anyone there.

See this is the issue with engineers, they think they are fighting with the government while the C-Suite wine and dine with them instead. Just like all the engineers at Google who actually bought into the whole "Don't do evil" while building the "death star" of destruction of personal information.

There is no good corporation, and no matter how much the people inside the company thing they are influencing the corporate decisions, they are just number on a spreadsheet. If they all quit tomorrow, yes it would be troublesome for the company for a bit, but then they would find replacements and thats it. You as an employee only have one power at the corporation: Dont work there. Thats it, everything else is just for show. Sure you can pick the JS framework that the company will use; thats about as much corporate value as the one that picks the toilet paper in the bathrooms.

Reddit is that way ---->

You’re a better commenter than this thread leads on.

It was probably a sweat, for most except the highest of leadership.

Probably not comfortable for them, either.

But did Bill Gates, for example, really fear existentially for MS?

I’m sure there’s a lot of nervous, scrambling people at Google right now, getting back to my point.

> They should’ve kept their distance from the government

Can they do it if they have anything of value for that government? Eventually the government comes knocking and they have to say "no". Depending on who's in power the response can range from "fine, no lucrative contracts for you" to "you shall pay through your teeth for this". By the time you win a legal battle, which is not guaranteed with a captured justice system, the damage was done and a lesson was learned.

It's like saying no to the mob (today the comparison is as apt as it gets). You get your knees bent the wrong way, and someone else gets the payoff.

If they had kept their distance, they probably wouldn't exist today. The dependency on government has been critical for any tech company. They'd have been replaced by a different company that is willing to cater to the government's every whim.

That said, the founders of these companies could have lobbied the government to ban corporate lobbying.

It's like; if there's gov money on the table, then it'd be a mistake to let your competitor take it. However, if you ensure that government money is never on the table for anyone, then that's one less thing for everyone to have to compete over and throw money at. Everyone can save their money for other things.

The government should never have allowed political lobbying to become a competitive market.

Also, political campaigns should not be allowed to raise private funds. That is insane. The government should fund all candidates' campaigns and allocate equal funding. Candidates shouldn't be allowed to spend their own money on their own campaign either IMO.

You think their competitors, even without malice, wouldn't have put them in the same predicament if they were quiet?

The companies willing to collaborate would have brought light to the issues.

I'm not sure tech companies were ever like that, but even if they were, that world is long gone by now.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley...

> Anthropic is going through the classic Ideological Resistance phase where they fight with the government on principles

Considering how miniscule their ideological demands were, I think this is more of a classic "any amount of push back, no matter how miniscule will be punished to achieve full power" then anything to do with "Ideological Resistance".

Are you sure it’s about principles and not primarily the bribery involved? OAI leadership has bribed the administration.

It may be due to principles and the principled stand Anthropic has taken has caused trouble, but they have also not delivered a bribery as far as we can see.

When there is a protection money racket in play, it’s hard for me to take other factors as seriously. This is gangster economics not a philosopher’s circle.

Here’s another take on this with more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48593212

What bribery are you talking about?

the one they legalized: Lobbying and settle out of court with the Trump family.

Greg Brockman gifted $25 million. Altman has reports of gifts as well

You're talking like it's business as usual. None of these companies had anything similar to this retaliation

Microsoft had it worse. Bill Gates was openly hostile and dismissive of the US government during Microsoft's anti-trust investigation, he believed anti-trust law was illegitimate and shouldn't apply to tech companies. He did not take the investigation seriously and repeatedly argued with investigators in his court deposition. In response, Microsoft got raked over the coals by the government, the company was almost broken up, and Gates stepped down as CEO after the debacle.

Now Microsoft stopped fighting the government, and is one of the US government's biggest partners, with massive DoD Azure cloud contracts.

Microsoft had it worse because Gates was a megalomaniac who was so self-absorbed he didn't understand he was supposed to bribe via "donations". Tech companies all learned the same as other sectors; it's more profitable to have lobbyists greasing the wheels of corrupt politicians from the get go, and "donate" to their success for a lifetime of consultation and quid pro quo.

This is also why all virtues signaled by corporations should be treated as lies unless they are legally bindable, and there are actual consequences for false and misleading advertising, fraud, etc other than a rounding error and cost of doing business.

It's only been several years since all AI companies signaled virtues about morality and ethics by not working with the military. Now they all do.

This is the first time I have seen refusing to pay bribes framed as a moral failing and character flaw.

Perhaps it's not that he "didn't understand he was supposed to bribe" but rather that he thought that system was bad and antiquated and that he was taking a principled stand for the modern (of the time) technology industry to move away from those historical norms.

It didn't work, but he's not bad for trying.

Bribes are a feature of politically-controlled economies, not a bug.

Thirty years ago when this was all going down, I believed the narratives of the time. Greedy Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer pushing IBM's OS/2 out of the consumer market with aggressive DOS and Windows OEM deals.

I mean, they absolutely did do that, but I think the motivation was competitive survival.

The Steve Ballmer interview really shed a lot of light on this, particularly the portion about the IBM and Microsoft OS/2 divorce: https://youtu.be/CYC49_aeop0?t=1476

I find it simultaneously amusing and depressing that you took my comment as a promotion of bribery, rather than a stark commentary on the sytemic corruption that has destroyed Americas democracy, and is destroying liberal democracies worldwide.

How the system has self-corrected to empower the most greedy and sociopathic of behaviours, across all private and public institutions, the entire time; so much so that the average person can't even comprehend the root causes, or any solution beyond a simple band-aid non-solution.

That's such a bad state of existence for people within that Government. How could anything be improved by new companies from now on? A corrupt government would never make bribes illegal, but a scrum style bribe-outcome management could become measured and used publicly? No idea where all this goes..

It should be patently obvious where all of this goes.

There's a difference between ignoring the government while you're blatantly breaking the law and they're suing you for it, and not proactively reaching out to the government while they're breaking the law.

To be fair, most of those companies had those phases with administrations that were a lot less petty than the current one.

You mean like when the Obama administration wasn't petty and didn't jail a journalist for not revealing sources on a story with no real importance and merit?

Every administration is made of people. People are petty. This is why the government should be as big as necessary and no bigger.

Good old whataboutism, obviously any administration that does at least one bad thing is equally corrupt. There's no possible reason to distinguish between how corrupt two different corrupt actions are or how many of them there are beyond a single one, right?

It’s possible, but it’s quite obvious at this point that large part of the population isn’t capable to do this distinction.

I mean yeah that sucked. Won’t excuse that one bit.

Therefore that must mean this administration has totally been above board and has steered clear of weaponizing any petty grievances.

Nah, with Google etc it was more realizing their own interests aligned with the interests of the new administration.

By which I mean, they are both interested in being filthy rich, making hay while the sun shines, and stopping centrist forces from adding wealth taxes or anti-monopoly regulations.

Biden and Harris were getting too uppity about such things for their tastes.

Have you seen who Sergey Brin is budding around with these days, and what he -- a formerly very "left liberal" person involved in very vocal anti-Trump protestations inside and outside of Google -- is saying these days? Third richest dude in the world is terrified of wealth taxes being put in place by his former friends, and dating a MAGA "gut-health" influencer.

A gentleman's agreement was brokered between SV and the GOP involving some mutual backscratching.

Which Dario and crew aren't a part of. Yet.

The fighting these companies had with the government was very nominal.

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ (2014)

> Then the companies realize fighting the US government is a lot of effort, expensive and creates a lot of drama, and it's easier to reach a mutual understanding.

"Cash rules everything around me, CREAM, get the money, dollar dollar bill, yall"

Indeed, the diff: These previous big tech companies where fighting their neo-liberal agenda against a liberal government, now there's an autocratic fascist one fighting a liberal company.

>(especially Microsoft)

Are you joking? When was this? Remember, Microsoft was the very first partner to deliver working warrantless surveillance capabilities (against their customers) to the NSA as part of the unconstitutional PRISM program, and this was back in 2007, nearly two decades ago.

And that's over 30 years since the company was founded and a full decade after the US Gov sued Microsoft on antitrust grounds going into the process with every intent on breaking up the company...

Also saying they were the first is laughable. Warrantless telephone surveillance by law enforcement began all the way back in 1895...but really in the way that you would recognize today all the way back in 1994.

>Warrantless telephone surveillance by law enforcement

Not a part of PRISM. Microsoft was the very first PRISM partner, as I said.

Oh man, 2007? Wait, wait don't tell me, when was windows 95 a big deal?

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