For the first time ever, a U.S. based company has been named a "supply chain risk" by the Trump administration. That's what happened to Anthropic when the company declined to change its terms of contract with the Pentagon. What Anthropic refused to do was allow Claude, its AI tool, to be used for surveillance of American citizens or for lethal warmaking activities unmonitored by actual humans. The Pentagon wanted to change the terms to all "lawful use" applications. We already know how meaningful lawful use is to Trump and his yes men. They've unilaterally gone to war in both Venezuela and Iran. That's not just unlawful. It's unconstitutional. Only Congress has the authority to declare war. At least the two Bush administrations had the courtesy to ask Congress for an authorization of military force before starting their disastrous Middle East wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More telling is the alacrity with which Sam Altman of Chatgtb stepped forward to replace Anthropic. Clearly, if enough money is involved, a financially shaky AI company will take government contracts no matter how bad the terms are regarding surveillance of Americans and lethal robotic warpower. Anthropic Co-founder and CEO, Dario Amodei even offered to help facilitate a smooth transition to Anthropic's successor. That wasn't enough for Trump who called the company a "RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY". He said it was full of "Leftwing nutjobs" and ordered that "EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropics technology."

Anthropic sued claiming its free speech rights are being violated by the Trump administration's overreaction. Libertarians can disagree on whether any free speech issue is involved when the government shuts out a private contractor and maligns the company. But we can all agree that Anthropic did the right thing in standing by its redline that Claude should not be used to spy on Americans or be used to automate lethal force with no humans at the controls. Likewise we can condemn Chatgbt for presumably more fully submitting to Pentagon demands.

The Soviet Union's Vladimir Lenin probably did not say "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." But the sentiment stands. Chatgbt and Palantir before it are perfectly willing to sell the government the technology to roboticize warfare and erect a domestic panopticon. The idea of the panopticon was proposed in 18th century England. The idea was that a prison be built in a circle with one guard behind blinds being able to observe every prisoner. But prisoners would never know when the guard's attention was directed at them. The theory being that prisoners would always be on their best behavior lest the guard be looking in their direction. Mass surveillance of Americans utilizes the same principle. All citizens would be motivated to be on good behavior lest being observed behaving in a way disapproved of by the government. The problem is that whoever controls the government gets to arbitrarily set the standard of behavior. A Trumpian would-be Napoleon gets to censor anyone who disagrees with his military adventurism. A progressive/green administration could go after anyone who insists on cooking with a gas stove. Do gooders and control freak bureaucrats can come up with innumerable behaviors they want to surveil out of existence. We're already seeing it in Britain which is prosecuting people for their free speech in denouncing rapists who have emigrated from another country. The ultimate victim is libertry for all. Not a direction I want to see. That's this week's Report From the Fields. I'm Richard Fields. See you again next week.