AlexCoventry

The headwinds are way worse now, though. Oil is choked, war is brewing, and corruption is at an all-time high.

> an AI company that produces virtual fetish porn and makes money renting GPUs to Anthropic

Whatever Anthropic is paying is too much, since it means xAI will get to observe Anthropic's software, weights and operations in detail. It's probably contractually prohibited from doing so, but I doubt that would stop Musk, given what's at stake.

For what it's worth, I think anything selling energy or fertilizer which is not sourced from the Middle East is a pretty good bet right now. Depends on how the US/Iran conflict plays out, of course, but I'm not optimistic.

A: This has not happened yet. B: Are you actually optimistic that it won't?

That's a request for an opinion, not an emotion.

Run coding agents in a docker container with limited permissions. FWIW, I run it with

  --cap-drop=ALL
  --pids-limit=4096
  --runtime=runsc

I'd need to see some transcripts of his conversations with coding agents, to believe this.

He was establishing the context of The current blog post. Very unlikely that he was doing it for Google juice.

Isn't society #1 going to outcompeted #2?

It's excellent for R&D.

From other comments, it came down to when Musk could reasonably be judged as aware of the injury.

They jumped into a contract with Hegseth, after Hegseth made it abundantly clear through his negotiations with Anthropic that any counterparty of his would have to assist with domestic mass surveillance and unsupervised lethal autonomous weapons, or face severe penalties.

> signs a deal with Elon!

Expect grok to improve dramatically as Musk reverse-engineers the Anthropic services running on his hardware.

Have you tried to talk him out of it, and have you considered blowing the whistle on him? He could kill people!

It's potentially PR (it hit the front page of HN, and probably not organically) for Trump, Oracle or SAP, just from reading the first few paragraphs.

Sounds like bitterness and resignation, to me.

Right? It's exactly how we train AIs, after all. It's not like this is mysterious.

I've been using them for decades without issue, FWIW.

He describes in detail how curl is software-engineered to within an inch of its life. Do you really think most code is that highly polished?

You don't think AI is going to be able to understand things and apply their ability to formulate solutions better than you, in the near future?

Yeah, I have an allergic reaction to tiktok being mixed up in any serious intellectual pursuit. :-)

Bandwidth is the killer, in distributed LLM training.

You only need to train a range of small models in order to establish a plausible scaling law, IMO.

I don't think this is giving up. He's getting inside information on how Claude works, and a huge stream of Claude usage data. This will all inform future grok development, IMO.

So now Elon Musk gets to read all of our Claude conversations?? :-(

Yes, if this turns into a mass famine/deindustrialization, Americans are going to own it the way Germans owned the holocaust.

I think people are more concerned about the massive deindustrialization and famines which could result from the Strait of Hormuz being chaotically strangled, not the hit to their pocket books at the gas pump

That's very unfortunate. How did it have access to the production DB in the first place?

I'm thinking twice about running Claude in an easily violated docker sandbox (weak restrictions because I want to use NVIDIA nsight with it.) At this stage, at least, I'd never give it explicit access to anything I cared about it destroying.

Even if someone gets them to reliably follow instructions, no one's figured out how to secure them against prompt injection, as far as I know.

> For instance, why not just use eminent domain if they don't care about contracts and want whatever they want?

They were threatening Anthropic with the Defense Production Act[1], which almost comes to the same thing as eminent domain, forcing the provision of goods and services instead of forcing relinquishment of property.

> Do you not believe that or believe it doesn't matter at all?

I don't think it matters at all. The Trump administration is full of scofflaw bullies. Their threats against Anthropic are actually relatively tame, compared to their bullying of Minnesota and the horrific human-rights violations they've committed against immigrants, despite multiple court orders trying to rein them in. Anyone doing business with them is either enthusiastically complying, has some kind of hold over them beyond law or contract, or is setting themselves up for harsh punishment.

> I also think the whole argument implies something about Anthropic's position that's not as clean in reality.

Anthropic software is embedded in military and intelligence services, and that takes time to wind down. My understanding is that it will take months.[2] So yeah, it's a messy, time-consuming divorce, but the origin of the conflict is actually very clear cut.

The NSA has two sides, defensive and offensive. Given Anthropic's approach to restricted release of Mythos, I assume they're releasing it to the defensive side. Anthropic has always taken the position that they're willing to help secure the US, they're just not willing help turn it into a tyranny. Apparently someone has convinced Trump and Hegseth that there's more at stake with Mythos than looking tough on a dissident company.

> Isn't it also a possibility that one company negotiated poorly and took a position of perceived moral authority that Trump et al threw a hissy fit over and over reacted to?

Not really. It's the Trump administration which has negotiated poorly, by capriciously pushing its counterparty around, trying to force it into illegal/immoral/dangerous activity.

> Trump even said they were "shaping up" recently.

He's also repeatedly said he has a workable deal with the Iranians. Do you trust his claims about any of his counterparties?

> And I think there are plenty of other far more plausible conclusions to draw from the events.

I'd be interested in your interpretation.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2026/02/24/anthropic-pentagon-claude-h... https://archive.ph/iQebR

[2] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-news/2026/03/dod-conf...

The Trump administration's handling of Anthropic showed that regardless of what the contract or the law says or means, they will severely penalize any vendor who refuses their demands. And OpenAI stepped right into that relationship immediately after the administration showed that. So either they were signing up for a supply-chain risk designation and whatever other punishments the Trump administration dreams up, or they're complying.

If this sounds crazy to you, though, I'd like to know, and understand why. I miss ChatGPT/Codex.