[notepad0x90]

That's the devil in the details. Sam altman's insult upon injury, treating the public as idiots on top of being a collaborator. The answer to your question is the government decides what is legal, as in the executive branch, in the pentagon the commander in chief decides. So essentially, they can do whatever they want so long as they call it legal.

As I said in a sibling comment, mass surveillance cannot be considered legal in the US under any context. not even war, emergency, terrorism, nuclear strike, national security reasons, imminent danger to the public,etc.. targeted surveillance can, scoped surveillance of a group of people can, but not mass surveillance. In other words Sam Altman is saying "This thing can never be legal short of a constitutional amendment, but so long as trump says it is, we'll look the other way".

What a two-faced <things i can't say on HN> this guy is!

I really hope Google poaches all his top engineers. If any of you are reading this, I ask you this, I get working for money, but will Google or Anthropic offer you all that much less? Consider the difference in pay when you put a price on your conscious.

[soraminazuki]

Google? They have a terrible track record on upholding moral principles. They helped Chinese censorship, wrote software for American killer drones, and offered their services to genocidal regimes. They fired dissenting employees. They are one of the worst companies to be rooting for.

[notepad0x90]

This isn't about moral principles. In china, censorship is legal. In the US mass surveillance is not. Even for those "genocidal regimes", it was lawful use. even now, both anthropic and openai agree that their models can be used in war and censorship just like with china, since those things are lawful. Even with genocide, from what i understand, the safeguard is that humans have to be in the loop, not that it won't aid the efforts.

I don't expect companies to be moral, but I do expect them to be patriotic, and to obey the law. And I also expect the government to punish them sufficiently when they fail to do so. The morality part is for the people to legislate or some other way enact laws to reflect their beliefs. Companies don't get a vote at the ballot box and they certainly are not agents for moral arbitrage between a government and its people.