Hacker News

When you say "HN", do you mean you? Who else was surprised? The place is full of people constantly commenting about how bad the US is, how corrupt the government is, how terrible CEOs (particularly Altman) are, late stage capitalism, etc., etc.

It's more than that, supposedly Sama donated another 25mil through a PAC.

I'm sure the Crypto AI Czar (David Sacks) being a major Anthropic hater didn't hurt either

Or that Kushner put a billion in OpenAI recently

EDIT: wow they for a huge discount too and OpenAI bought stakes in Thrive...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thrive-capital-bought-shares-in...

https://openai.com/index/thrive-holdings/

> 25M isn’t even that much money. Not only are they whores, they’re cheap whores.

I don't know, Anthropic is providing 10K open source developers with $200 subscriptions to their bot, for up to 6 months. 200 * 10000 * 6 = $12 Million total. That's even cheaper, I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from all this.

Quite tangential, but this reminded me of a line from Human Target:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6tqvzt?start=872&mute=fal...

"I'm sorry, you... You think I'm a prostitute?"

looks at offered cash

"A $40 prostitute?"

There is no need for such derogatory language, sex workers would be deeply offended that you compared them to the Trump apparatus.

It’s a lot of money for a “what have you done for me lately?” scenario

Like, this is opex

That's something that has bothered me about this entire administration, particularly the bizarre and disturbing involvement of the Diablo-cheating billionaire.

Everyone knew that a lot of politicians have been for sale, but I didn't realize how cheaply they were for sale. Musk able to buy his way into being in charge of an idiotic department with basically no regulation while still being allowed to CEO like five companies, and he did it for like $100 million. That's a lot of money, more than I'll ever be worth, but it's way less than I would think it would cost to buy the presidency, in charge of billions (and maybe trillions?) of dollars of sales and contracting.

In this context they're not the whores, they're the johns. Trump / the PAC would be the whores, but what else is new?

A whore doesn't have to charge any given john very much when they can service a large number of them.

It's a loss-leader. Once the patronage system has solidly taken hold, then they raise the prices. Our only consolation is that the fascist-supporting techbros are going to be victims of their own enshittification dynamic - they think they're paying customers, but they're actually the product. The autocracy will continue to increase its meddling to maintain its own political legitimacy. Moldbug's enlightened benevolent monarch who needn't care about politics is a pipe dream.

The scam part is the fiction perpetrated on the American public that there was a bona fide dispute with Anthropic.

I’ve always heard it called “business as usual”

Not a week goes by without me thinking "what would HST have made of THIS fresh bullshit, if he were alive today"

I've said it a million times, but I'll repeat it.

There are a lot of conspiracy nuts like Alex Jones, and the amusing thing to me is that there is a conspiracy of elites who are exerting large amounts of unelected control of the government, and who are actively working to keep you down to enrich themselves, and it's not even a secret.

We call these people "billionaires", and at this point they don't even bother hiding it. Trump had a streamlined bribery system with his stupid cryptocurrency and being in charge of a publicly traded company while in office, Musk bought his way in so he could be in charge of a new department and start defunding any organization that has ever tried to investigate him, and there are hundreds of examples.

Instead morons like Alex Jones will go on the radio and blame lizards or something, and then his listeners will take that and then start blaming Jews or Mexicans, while cheering on the actual conspiracy that's making their lives terrible.

This interpretation is kinda obvious to anyone who has seen similar schemes in other countries. It‘s done almost by the book, except there‘s no criminal case against Anthropic management or shareholders, because USA is not yet there.

It's bizarre seeing the outright bribery.

A lot of things that people call "bribery" is really just ensuring that your preferred candidate gets in office. You couldn't give money directly to the candidate for personal use. Donations went to the campaign of the guy who already agreed with you. The FEC used to take a dim view of outright pay-for-service, even dressed up.

This is new. And now people need to decide how they feel about that. They get one chance to say "no, that's not how we do things." Even if the administration suffers a blow this November, if they hear that this is mostly acceptable to their base, it will be what every politician does from here on.

This has already happened, its a key reason why the dollar is down 15% since the new admin took power.

> When the rule of law degrades into pay-to-play politics, the inevitable result is a mass exodus of both capital and top-tier talent.

No, it's not inevitable. What you've described is the way a lot of countries work, such as China. China attracts plenty of capital and external talent, including people from other countries such as Taiwan and the United States. You have be all-in on the CCP's rules, though.

Vietnam works in a similar way. Untold billions of FDI in the past 20 years from Japan, the U.S. and China. Talk with top executives there, and you'll frequently find close connections or family ties with leaders in Hanoi.

> If openly bribing a crony gov to cancel your competitor is now the de-facto standard of making business in the US

It very clearly is, the present AI instance is far from the only recent case.

> I don't see how any rational investor could still see US companies as a secure investment.

They evaluate the propensity and ability to profitably engage in open corruption the same as they evaluate other capacities of the company. “Secure” isn't a binary category, and the risk here is much like any other risk.

> When the rule of law degrades into pay-to-play politics, the inevitable result is a mass exodus of both capital and top-tier talent.

That is the expected result of increasing perceived risk. yes, probably one of those “slowly and then all at once” things.

>I don't see how any rational investor could still see US companies as a secure investment.

Investors just care for the returns. As long as they can identify and bet on the side doing the bribing, they're fine...

>I don't see how any rational investor could still see US companies as a secure investment.

2025 was also the first year that the majority of stocks were traded off-market (i.e. hedgie darkpools, no public price discovery).

----

Hope ya'll bought your gold before Monday.

#RemindMe2days [gold@5290USD, this post]

Bit melodramatic. The US still has the most talent, most capital, and best property protections of anywhere in the world. Name a country that (1) doesn't have any quid-pro-quo system with the govt, and (2) has pro-growth pro-capitalist policies.

the inevitable result is a mass exodus of both capital and top-tier talent

To where?

> I don't see how any rational investor could still see US companies as a secure investment.

It’s the best investment - just bribe your way to contracts

Don't overlook the media consolidation under Bari Weiss.

Sweet, excellent idea for the government to tie itself to a bubble.

If it doesn't pop while Trump's in office, his successor will inherit this mess, bubble will pop, and that person will have to deal with managing the fallout.

The time to lock-in gainful employment is now (if you can).

He's young, he's got enough time to outdo himself.

The corruption is never-ending, but I think with this case people were especially struck by some of the details like OpenAI claiming their "red lines" were exactly the same as Anthropic's.

Not even trying to justify the switchover would have raised less eyebrows than giving it a clearly nonsense justification.

> Transitioning?

To be fair, there has been a notable recent shift in the sense that nobody even tries to hide what is going on anymore.

We've moved beyond manufacturing consent to ass out corruption on full display, "try to stop me."

In his defence, previously money won, rather than bribing someone to get a competitor nuked from orbit.

Sure you could smear an opposition company, but just straight bribing the government is new, at this scale

There was a long stretch where money would be more of a deciding factor than who you know, and I think we're crossing the threshold where who you know is becoming all that matters.

Flippant be hanged! IMO, it all started with W Bush, who put the icing on that cake by invading Iraq based on a televised lie. He was "sneaky" but the current administration doesn't even try to sneak. The mid-terms may be our final chance to save our nation.

> generally forbidden in Socialist EU

This is one of those cases where you wish your critics were right. One in 40 people in Brussels is a lobbyist, but apparently it's forbidden.

Which prominent economist has argued that bribes are an essential part of Capitalism?

What's your argument here? He's not allowed to discuss crony capitalism because you imagine that he thinks LLMs suddenly became reliable.

which part is unproven enough to not seem like a kleptocracy?

> But here’s the kicker > Let that sink in

The biggest tell for AI writing is just being AI adjacent. I've started avoiding reading AI articles here because (surprise) they all feel like a chatGPT transcript.

It's a short and quick blog post. Bloggers used to do that once in a while (before twitter made it the only allowed mode of expression to please the advertisers.)

Other posts from G.Marcus are much longer. Go read them, but be prepared for some "adversarial thinking" if you strongly believe in the scaling hypothesis. Might border on "bubble popping ". You're all for free speech and the free market of idea, so it won't be a problem.

However, he has a low threshold for bullshit. And SamA is probably not getting any higher in his esteem this week.

Why not??

I know you trying to mock Marcus, but the reality is that all the big LLM providers have been shifting to integrating symbolic reasoning into their models for over a year now since they noticed that scale-alone is a dead-end. Also DeepMind's AlphaFold, which won the nobile price, is neuro-symbolic AI - so I think both of those points very much justify Marcus's long criticism of pure subsymbolic LLM "AI" as a path to real causal reasoning.

No, that’s not accurate at all, and in case you are genuinely confused:

1. Anthropic should be free to sell its services under whatever legal terms and conditions it wants.

2. The Pentagon should be free to buy those services, negotiate for different terms, refuse to buy those services, and terminate contracts subject to any termination clauses.

You may or may not agree with what the Pentagon wants to do, but if things had stayed there, there would be no real issue.

The problem is that the Pentagon is trying to bury Anthropic as a company, calling it a danger to the United States because it exerted its non-controversial right in (1).

Any “explanation” that doesn’t address that is confused itself or trying to confuse the issue.

I leave it to you as to which category the linked source falls under.

Do you actually believe things this administration says? Is there some kind of drug that makes this possible?