Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…And then the deeper problem sitting underneath the whole action, the First Amendment by way of a Supreme Court case from just last year. But do courts think that way, or are they sort of more narrowly constrained to look at just like this one, um, this one law as it applies to this one situation? How, how broad can they zoom out and consider the government's, you know, apparent motivations and patterns? We're actually lucky to have like a very on point Supreme Court case from last year where the Supreme Court said that New York State was going after the NRA on ideological grounds and that even though, uh, or even if like the, the law under which the, uh, New York was trying to go after the NRA, uh, was itself appropriate. In other words, like even if all the actions aside from the ideological motivation have been appropriate, if they're using their lawful powers to attack ideological enemies on ideological grounds, then that is a First Amendment violation and you can prevent the government from taking those steps. And you can look fairly broadly to see that. You can look at like what is the government communicating? What is it saying about its actions? What is it telling other people about why it's making these decisions and how they should proceed? And I think that all the evidence that we've seen of at least some ideological motivation on the part of the Trump administration should at least raise like serious First Amendment hackles, even if we don't think that like the m- the models constitute anthropic speech, even if we're not worried about the model output as like information that we as listeners have a right to hear, just like going after anthropic on ideological grounds, even if they were on totally otherwise good legal authority, would itself constitute a serious First Amendment question. And I think that, I think that's a challenge that Anthropic could consider bringing, but it's, it's one that would still trigger all the problems that we were talking about earlier, where if Anthropic wants to have an ongoing relationship with this administration, they are faced with, you know, a really serious trade-off where, where there's still all these other tools and just constantly returning to court is just a perilous exercise. So I do think that there are real First Amendment questions about the validity of this action, even aside from all the speech concerns, just like punishing, seemingly going after, um, Anthropic as an ideological adversary presents very serious First Amendment problems on its own to, you know, to begin with. Now the genuine contrarian. We Ron Shapira hosts Doom Debates, and his reaction to the ban surprised me as much as anything all week. Clown show or not, he is glad it happened, and he'll tell you precisely why breaking the ice is worth more to him than getting it right.…

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