> All of these endpoints use existing providers with decades-long history at this point
That is just factually inaccurate. Their data centers aren't old and they lease a lot of compute from companies that didn't exist 5 years ago.
They all transit the same wires as all other traffic. Copy them at any regional bottleneck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A. Additionally, i'd admit that maybe someone(s) at these companies knows. But if we think there isn't any person who would agree to do this then I think we're being naive.
> Their data centers aren't old and they lease a lot of compute...
Again, they transit the same wires as everyone else. Here i'll also add that these companies have been actively courting government relationships (and Anthropic attempting to repair damaged ones), why would they stand on principles here and not any of the other many frontlines they've visibly acquiesced?
I just think it's easier to re-route their traffic than, as you say, touch every single datacenter and its employees in some way.
Oh, is that all?
> Again, they transit the same wires as everyone else
Which shared wires does Google's traffic go across? Do they share that network with others or do they not function as a Tier 1 network? How about Amazon? And the NSA is doing deep packet inspection of all the traffic going to these places to pull out the data they are interested in? What systems allow them to do this at the scale that would be necessary to accomplish this task? Anthropic, OpenAI, etc have their models hosted and provided by these and other Internet giants. So you now have to be able to somehow also get access to every "regional bottleneck" that those places have. Google has 40+ regions alone, as does Amazon. And each of these regions don't just have a single point of inbound/outbound traffic, so now you're over 200-300 points of interception that you would need just to grab the data you're suggesting they are.
And that's just the start of it. When I use Vertex or the Bedrock, my AI API requests from my instances doesn't leave their networks. So where does that traffic get intercepted?
> I just think it's easier to re-route their traffic than, as you say, touch every single datacenter and its employees in some way.
That would be really, really loud and really obvious. Messing with routes like that is very easily detectable.
Or, maybe, they don't care about this traffic at all and doing all of the huge amount of work necessary to accomplish what you're proposing isn't worth 0.1% of the effort it would require.
If the government needs the chat messages, the companies are already saving them. They can just request them through a variety of legal means. None of this vast conspiracy nonsense is needed. Just a couple lawyers and a willing judge. The NSA stopped their collection of phone metadata because they can just request what they need from the telecoms directly.