Except that's not exactly what happened. Anthropic and the DoD signed a contract with explicit terms. Both sides agreed to the terms. Anthropic was perfectly willing to deliver services which meet the terms of the contract. It's not like Anthropic suddenly declared "you're about to attack Iran, we're going to disable our services because we don't agree." That would be legitimate grounds for a grievance.

Declaring a company a supply chain risk is a nuclear option. It should be invoked only after DoD has exhausted every other option to remedy the situation, including finding other suppliers. To me, that would imply the supplier is providing something like spyware or trojans or intentionally defective munitions, something surreptitious which undermines the ability of DoD to wage wa...er...sustained combat operations. Something which can't easily be detected ahead of time. Not something you were told about months ago.

What's really going on is DoD has a lot of leverage and this administration gets their jollies throwing their weight around. "Nice AI business you got here. Sure would be a shame if something was to happen to it, like being declared a supply chain risk."

That's the thing. As soon as POTUS gets his fingers into company operations, that's when I, as an investor, start looking for the door. The one thing I'm sure of is Trump won't use his influence to boost shareholder value.

It would be an interesting research project to see whether that's actually happened to Intel, US Steel, and the other companies Trump has demanded stakes of.

Some might cheer the nationalization of AI companies. They should be careful what they wish for. I doubt investors would continue to pour unlimited billions into AI if they knew they were going to be run by and for the government. I doubt governments will pour the same billions into the same parts of AI deployment.

If you think AI is dangerous and want to slow it down, that's a feature rather than a bug. If you want rapidly advancing capabilities (to pick a random example, to run fleets of armed, autonomous drones), perhaps nationalization isn't really what you want. Not that I expect many politicians to recognize this tradeoff.

I disagree. As long as the money winds up in the hands of someone, anyone other than this larcenous administration, that's a win.

No, it's not fair that the importers will likely keep it. It's also not fair that other prices rose to meet the higher market price and that people got fired. Neither of those last two will be made right. But IMHO, the important part is to keep the ill-gotten goods out of the hands of the evildoers so they aren't rewarded for their evil doing.

It wouldn't surprise me if they meant wall clock time, especially if there's human review and intervention in some large number of transactions.

That came up a few times here on /., regulators and politicians wanting to mandate that cars sold in the US must have AM radios so they could receive emergency broadcasts. My expectation was this was much more about preserving talk radio than emergencies.

If podcasts replace talk radio, will we see a mandate to include a 5G radio and Spotify subscription with each new car?

(Obligatory plug: listen to Bay Curious for all sorts of fun stories about the SF Bay Area!)

OK, I'll back off. I'm sure the SQAWMD publicly claimed to have less self-centered reasons.

Being a grumpy cynical older man, I don't actually believe that for a minute. I expect they have an anti-gas, anti-fossil fuel religion and nothing you or I could say would possibly dissuade them.

Interesting. I assumed the LetterBot automatically posted for the user.

If I were the intern working at Senator Krupt's office, the first thing I'd do is write a filter "Does this letter look like it was written by a human or a bot?" Bot emails would immediately go to the e-circular file and wouldn't even be counted.

Some studies say it's comparable to secondhand smoke. IIRC, and I don't have references, the latest thinking is secondhand smoke is no where near as dangerous as the hype made it out to be.

And you can mitigate it by using a vent fan, but there again, that would be letting people take responsibility for their own health and the health of their dependents.

Yeah, no doubt it will be an arms race, just like against hackers. I have no doubt regulators who accept public comments will start screening and summarizing comments with AIs in an escalating cycle of throwing more and more inference into each side of the battle.

It's kind of like job hunting today. A LLM creates a job description from bullet points, another LLM creates an application from bullet points, a third LLM compares the job description against the application, a fourth either conducts the interview or analyzes interview notes. People will be an annoying impediment shortly.

Cool. The appropriate response is for you to buy an electric cook top to replace the propane one.

An inappropriate and unethical response would be to demand that since you don't like propane, no one else can have one either.

I assume the SCAQMD board had better reasons than "we personally don't like gas appliances". Given they're politicians and regulators, I'm not entirely sure.

"They can't strong arm us. Only we can strong arm people."

And yet, I get to watch a ton of stuff I don't own and would never want to buy. For far less money than if I bought everything I watch.

It's almost as if a lot of people have figured out that buying isn't always a great deal.

Refunding the tariffs will be a nightmare. The Treasury can refund the payments to the importers but how in the world would the importers find all their customers and refund the tariff they paid? Especially if the import was an input to some subsequent product (which most imports are)? Is Maytag going to issue steel tariff refunds to every customers?

On the other end of the spectrum, my wife has bought imported items on eBay. Is she going to apply for a refund? Is eBay? The vendor?

The refund paperwork might easily cost over $100 billion when you add it all up.

Funny: I saw a headline that someone (Republicans? The administration?) was asserting refunding the tariffs would be corporate welfare. On the one hand, importers probably would not refund the tariffs to their customers, they'd just keep the windfall. And vendors who raised prices because their imported competing products got more expensive wouldn't even have a paper trail of who they'd want to issue refunds to.

That's not the way US courts generally operate. They can only rule on the issues brought before them by the plaintiffs. If the plaintiffs didn't raise the other rules, the court can't rule on them.

That said, many commentators have pointed out that other provisions, such as section 122 of the Trade Act of '74, explicitly allow tariffs but only using a specific process, for specific reasons, and for a limited duration. That's qualitatively different from what Trump asserted the IEEPA allowed him to do (any tariffs with no process for as long as he wants). I'm not at all sure the SCOTUS would have an issue with that limited delegation of legislative power.