Now, the U.S. government is threatening to terminate the government’s contract with the company if it doesn’t switch gears and voluntarily jump right across those lines.
Companies, especially technology companies, often fail to live up to their public statements and internal policies related to human rights and civil liberties for all sorts of reasons, including profit. Government pressure shouldn’t be one of those reasons.
Whatever the U.S. government does to threaten Anthropic, the AI company should know that their corporate customers, the public, and the engineers who make their products are expecting them not to cave. They, and all other technology companies, would do best to refuse to become yet another tool of surveillance.