My prediction: nothing will come of this, and these investigations will either be concluded favorably or dropped no less than six months after the midterms.
There's only one voice that matters in this administration, and he has already made it quite clear that he both does not consider AI to be an issue, and he is more than happy to trample over his agencies to enforce his opinion.
You're right. Nothing will come out of this. It is very important for these companies that they are sued now by the super-friendly administration and be gently punished (Punishment: Don't do it again, Ok? Defendents: We promise we won't do it again) or settled for a measly sum of a few million (no admission of guilt).
Then you can be never tried again for the same crimes. There is some law against being tried for the same crimes multiple times.
Ffs one of the CEOs of one of the companies is about to be in charge of a us military task force lol. The ftc investigating military leadership over safety concerns... Bet... Definitely going to yield results that benefit the public. Lol. Doesn't get more textbook oligarchy than that.
Under that framework I could see Anthropic being blocked from IPO-ing. Amodei was just slightly more confrontational than the other players by wanting to stick to their ethics (which is a really low bar). Given Trump is the pettiest person ever and does everything by vibes, I wouldn’t exclude something dramatic, like pushing Amodei out and replacing him with someone he can control better.
Just speculating here, there is no way to predict how that will play out
Too conspiratorial to think that they (the AI companies) want to be blocked or at least temporarily delayed from IPO? Finances are too bad to do it but delaying for ambiguous reasons will sink their valuations. Trump can’t let the stock market collapse before the midterms. Hence this whole big safety dog and pony show. Keep the market up until the midterms, then hand off the bag.
Hmm, my instinct is to say that’s too far fetched, but given how corrupt that whole thing is I really don’t know. I would add that to the list of possibilities and reevaluate how plausible that is once we see Anthropic’s 2026 numbers.
Though it’s pretty depressing that we can’t just dismiss it directly…
The problem is that there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that Democrats would be doing the exact same thing if they were in power.
They will also put up only PR-oriented #resistance, aiming all attacks at Trump (as you have) and ignoring the AI companies themselves.
They'll save their criticism for loudmouth AI CEOs that agree to jump out and catch a few bullets (that will bounce off harmlessly, it doesn't matter what the public thinks about them) aimed at Democratic politicians who just voted for something they said that they were against because the Republicans didn't have enough for a majority.
Loudmouth CEO: "Actually people should be grateful that they're losing their jobs - if they actually loved their jobs, and loved the world, they'd be happy that it was being done better than they ever could, because AI is perfect and guided by us wise, wonderful people."
Democratic Congressman who just voted to take away a state's ability to stop a data center being built in the middle of a reservoir: "Do you have no shame sir! You give a bad name to the majority of CEOs who are beautiful people who defend us from the inscrutable Chinese hordes. It's thoughtless talk like this that is leading to the rise in subversion among the paranoid terrorists that are emboldening the bullies who show up to city council meetings and anti-data center protests! I'm going to demand that we not award you the 634th no-bid contract that you asked for, and when we are forced to admit that we can't actually cancel that award, I'll ask that you be officially censured by Congress!"
Even worse than whataboutism is hypothetical whataboutism....
AI is shaping up to be a major concern amongst the non-tech segment of the population. Some of the arguments are good, some are dumb, but people largely are forming up against AI and datacenters. Yes, you should expect politicians to act on that; it's how the system is meant to work.
Silicon Valley was freaking out last democrat admin because anti trust laws were actually being enforced finally by Lina Khan, I actually completely disagree and I think this admin has been very obviously worse.
They just need to hire the right lobbyists, get a meeting at the White House, agree on the terms and call it a settlement.
And if the FTC chair is not agreeable, they will be threatened by said lobbyists and eventually be fired.
If this sounds far-fetched, it is exactly what happened to Gail Slater, then-head of the DOJ's antitrust division and her deputies in 2025 over HPE’s bid to acquire Juniper.
> They just need to hire the right lobbyists, get a meeting at the White House, agree on the terms and call it a settlement.
I wonder if this is just self-consciously a self-dealing thing explicitly designed to block off further investigations. Clear them, then they can't be properly investigated for that activity in the future.
It doesn't really work that way, although I wouldn't rule out someone in the administration thinking it does. There's nothing an FTC investigator can do to "clear them" in a way that would prevent a future investigation for future instances of the same activity. An FTC decision not to bring a complaint or to request only trivial damages doesn't create a binding precedent for similar investigations later.
https://america.gov isn't even calling artificial intelligence "super intelligence". Trump just says words. People should stop trying to find meaning in them.
> It is therefore the policy of my Administration that, to the maximum extent permitted by law, the executive branch shall use the terms “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in place of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” and will not acknowledge the usage of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in any applicable setting.
My colleagues at NIST just got a memo directing them to refer to AI as “SI” so it does seem to be filtering down to the agencies. This is a problem because “SI” is also a classification marking.
I know you said /s but I'm feeling all serious or something this morning, so ...
- The US government's official policy is metric (and has been for something like 50 years now).
- The population uses a mix of metric and US customary units, not imperial.
UK is kinda similar, I suppose, but their typical usage of metric/imperial tilts more heavily in favor of metric. I wonder how many other countries are also still doing mixed measurement systems at this point?
I get the sarcastic intent in your comment; but it's more useful to focus on what Trump does than the things he says.
One of his strategies is to say unbelievable things like he's gonna revoke Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship or something weird like "superior intelligence", and the news will cover that instead of whichever agencies he's getting or how much he appears in the Epstein files.
"People" don't have that luxury. Especially internationally.
From an international perspective, America is Trump, in a way that is far more acute than even when it was Obama or GWB. Back then you could understand POTUS as sitting on top of an enormous apparatus that didn't just act out his whims; in the current situation we have to treat him as a sort of dimwit emperor.
I think you can say the same about how it is viewed domestically, as well.
Perhaps the right wing always thought that the government was the personal weapon of the sitting president, and that is why they are so comfortable with actually making it so, but the left wing has predominantly seen it as an enormous bureaucracy governed by policy and laws that only changed relatively slowly, and not at the whim of an individual.
Now when I see data and the source is the federal government, my reaction is "this is probably fake, or at least biased heavily." Makes me a little sad to have that reaction, e.g. I used to like going to the NIH web site to find information, but now I assume it has been curated to meet an ideological narrative.
I also do not have a lot of confidence that this situation will be a one-off aberration and the democrats will bring sanity back and implement better safeguards against the next demagogue. On the contrary, I think it is very plausible they will see this as an opportunity they had not dreamed of before.
>“Review all Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigations commenced under the previous administration to ensure that they do not advance theories of liability that unduly burden AI innovation.”
That's not an inherently bad practice. I'd much rather there be two way flow between industry and government than have people who have never tried to run a business doing regulation or those who have never worked in government trying to comply with regulations. Strong ethics rules and culture is the way you manage the downside, not bans.
The hell do you work where ethics culture exists in business? I gotta be looking in the wrong places, because all I ever see is lip service granted to ethics until they threaten the bottom line, then suddenly they disappear.
Well you see, you just frame your ethics that anything done in service to the bottom line is inherently good. Easy as, anyone complaining about rapacious behavior or a decrease in their quality of life is the real evil (tm)
The AI discourse is full of cases where companies and their employees respect ethical boundaries at a cost to their bottom line. There was a famous incident, Project Glasswing, where Anthropic announced that they needed to do a large, collaborative cybersecurity project before they could ethically sell their newest model.
Of course, this story also points towards how people sometimes get confused. Most opportunities companies have to be unethical are complex, so if you're not already inclined to trust a company, it's easy to come up with reasons to distrust any claims of ethical behavior they make. Maybe they didn't want to do the unethical behavior in the first place, maybe they've made up self-serving ethical standards, maybe they're just being performatively ethical as a marketing strategy and they'll misbehave when nobody's looking.
Such commentary tends to go viral, because it's easy to propose and impossible to refute in a short comment or video.
Things are more corrupt in the US now. That would have worked in Trump 1.0.
I predict they’ll be forced to install an “ombudsman” in the data cleaning / training team, so Trump can inject propaganda and filter out science. (As has been done to many US news outlets already).
Also, they will somehow each put >> $1B into his personal checking account, and hope presidential pardons cover bribing the president after the next few elections.
I assume you’ll keep the same disdain when the ombudsman is replaced by the democrats in two years and continues the same work with new talking points?
I am legit curious though: what changed specifically in your information gathering process that revealed these things?
For example pretty much everything happening now has been well described by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn specifically about American politics since the 1960s. I mean similarly for the entire black community and don’t forget Martin Luther King was killed because he was trying to organize sanitation workers.
Chris Hedges has been reporting about the state of things daily for two decades now. Similarly for Jacobin magazine.
Ron Paul (whatever you think of him) was talking explicitly about this corruption in the context of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the bail out of the banking market in 2008.
Ross Perot famously described how Nafta was a big sellout to the multinational corporations and would devastate US industry - on stage at the 1992(?) presidential debate and everybody just made fun of him because he was short and had slightly larger ears because he was an older guy.
The US president sells early access to his official tweets at $100k per month. Things have definitely gotten worse even if they were shit to begin with.
The teapot dome wasn't the president making policy decisions specifically to enrich himself. The man involved conducted his illicit affairs in secret, and went to prison for it.
The blatant nature of it now and complete complicity of large swaths of the government in the corruption are a level that has never been seen before. The Teapot Dome scandal involved the equivalent of tens of millions of present day dollars. The actions of the president alone now are what would have been considered dozens of individual career-ending scandals only a couple generations ago.
At the state/city level, California and Los Angeles have much more blatant corruption. From the High Speed Rail to LA's billions of homeless money (now some invoices showing house purchases, ubers to and payments at strip clubs). I think more politicians are just shameless about it lately. Karen Bass was reelected anyway, and Gavin is gaining support in a run for presidency even. Buying votes has never been easier.
Conversely, you could say that congress has delegated "judicial and legislative" powers to the executive, whose will is embodied in a democratically elected president.
"Gail Slater" is not a democratically elected person of any kind, and exists as a function of the executive, and hence of the president's policies. Insofar as the DOJ's anti-trust's leaders depart from the will of the elected president, it is that leader to be fired and replaced. Or else: what ever was the point of electing a president?
There's nothing in principle wrong in a president disagreeing with the execution of his executive powers, delegated to Gail, and hence firing him. Indeed, if that were not the case, the election of a president could never change the operation of the executive, making the election pointless.
If you disagree with the anti-trust decision, the issue isn't with the political mechanism by which it was over-ruled, but with the election of that president.
Just a way to pretend like they're doing anything in front of the public. What's there to investigate? Risks are pretty wide open. Crimes have been committed and admitted to.
What a shame that the focus in the article seems to be on "winning." Seems like winning comes first and safety comes second, and the only question is how far apart they are. That's not surprising, but also not encouraging.
If the FTC weren't investigating three of the largest and fastest growing companies in the country for one thing or another, it would be kinda surprising to me.
Do we really think that FTC under this administration, which is in bed with top tech billionaires giving gifts for inauguration will do anything against them?
Imagine if a car company like Ford or Toyota came out and said their new cars are kind of out of control and they needed special indemnities and protection from liabilities if they want to keep selling cars.
Replace this with Tesla, Waymo, etc and it's not far fetched. It might take a while, but liability is going to need a new legal doctrine to describe why it's not their fault that their car & their code killed someone.
Imagine further that there's actually nothing unusually wrong with the cars at all, but the manufacturers are deliberately playing up perceptions of risk in order to encourage regulatory intervention that they know they can influence and/or work around, but which competing solutions can't.
I mean... there is Boeing, which is arguably more horrifying.
With AI it seems to be internal testing produces wild results, which is unsurprising to me, all of these models can be jailbroken, and as long as that's the case, they're all likely to be exploited maliciously.
Not just internal, Anthropic’s S-1 literally covers the risk of ending humanity. They are telling their investors a public company could eradicate humanity. Give us money, the risk you have to evaluate in your financial framework is that we could eliminate humankind.
I’m repeating it because that has to be internalized: the largest IPO ever will be for a company that casually consider they might kill us all and their own employees too. Including their children.
At least it is not compromised by anthropic/openai/deepmind. It has that going for it.
Perhaps it does not need saying but if you leave it to nonprofits overflowing with industry operatives and ai blood money, you get whatever openai or anthropic want you to hear (METR report).
FTC starting the process of immunizing OpenAI, Anthropic, and a few other well-connected AI companies from liabilities or future prosecutions for any of their fully premeditated actions.
We could put Sam Altman and gdb on it; after all, they know a ton about AI. Elon Musk probably has some important insights too! They'd probably know best if a new competitor or any of these open source models should be allowed to exist. This should alleviate all sorts of problems (for OpenAI).
Claude says my token spend is $15k per week. I’m being charged $50.
They can only do that because of circular finance deals and other fraud. Those deals are also the reason a machine that’d run ~ Claude Opus 4.6 locally costs $5000 instead of the original $1400 MSRP.
For antitrust purposes below-cost pricing is not expressly illegal. It is only illegal if there is a “dangerous probability” that the firm in question will be able to recoup its losses after eliminating its competitors by taking away all their demand and then jacking up prices when they’re the only game in town. In the case of your Claude tokens, even if they’re being sold below cost, they’re being sold for more than anyone else is selling tokens. So it’s hard to argue that they’re going to drive everyone else out of the market with their pricing.
The law doesn't matter, it was not made for this. Let a judge make their own interpretation. If you talk about level playing fields, then you should act like it. Not allow VCs to make piles of money to put everybody else out of business.
Judges are supposed to make their interpretation on the law. The law wasn't made for this? Then you better pass something that is. The alternative is to abandon the rule of law. "Just once, just for this urgent problem" rarely remains confined just to this problem. Keep the rule of law; pass a new one if you need to.
Their margins are 90-95%. If I have a gym that charges $50 for an hour pass, but $100 for a month "subscription", would you feel the same way, that you got $36k of value?
That percentage is speculative for now, we don’t actually know their margin. What we know is that Anthropic said publicly they have 80% gross margin IFF they use their own adjusted EBIDTA metric, which ignores revenue sharing, training costs, and stock based compensation
This is how tons of startups operate, I used to be able to get across the whole city in an Uber for $5, easily quarter of the cost at the time. They undercut taxis until they barely existed then jacked up the prices.
VC creates little wars of attrition in every industry and calls it "disruption" but it mostly pulls the money out of workers' pockets.
There's only one voice that matters in this administration, and he has already made it quite clear that he both does not consider AI to be an issue, and he is more than happy to trample over his agencies to enforce his opinion.
Then you can be never tried again for the same crimes. There is some law against being tried for the same crimes multiple times.
which is putting it very mildly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49824686
Just speculating here, there is no way to predict how that will play out
Though it’s pretty depressing that we can’t just dismiss it directly…
They will also put up only PR-oriented #resistance, aiming all attacks at Trump (as you have) and ignoring the AI companies themselves.
They'll save their criticism for loudmouth AI CEOs that agree to jump out and catch a few bullets (that will bounce off harmlessly, it doesn't matter what the public thinks about them) aimed at Democratic politicians who just voted for something they said that they were against because the Republicans didn't have enough for a majority.
Loudmouth CEO: "Actually people should be grateful that they're losing their jobs - if they actually loved their jobs, and loved the world, they'd be happy that it was being done better than they ever could, because AI is perfect and guided by us wise, wonderful people."
Democratic Congressman who just voted to take away a state's ability to stop a data center being built in the middle of a reservoir: "Do you have no shame sir! You give a bad name to the majority of CEOs who are beautiful people who defend us from the inscrutable Chinese hordes. It's thoughtless talk like this that is leading to the rise in subversion among the paranoid terrorists that are emboldening the bullies who show up to city council meetings and anti-data center protests! I'm going to demand that we not award you the 634th no-bid contract that you asked for, and when we are forced to admit that we can't actually cancel that award, I'll ask that you be officially censured by Congress!"
AI is shaping up to be a major concern amongst the non-tech segment of the population. Some of the arguments are good, some are dumb, but people largely are forming up against AI and datacenters. Yes, you should expect politicians to act on that; it's how the system is meant to work.
And if the FTC chair is not agreeable, they will be threatened by said lobbyists and eventually be fired.
If this sounds far-fetched, it is exactly what happened to Gail Slater, then-head of the DOJ's antitrust division and her deputies in 2025 over HPE’s bid to acquire Juniper.
Wall Street Journal archive link: https://archive.ph/IMer9
I wonder if this is just self-consciously a self-dealing thing explicitly designed to block off further investigations. Clear them, then they can't be properly investigated for that activity in the future.
> It is therefore the policy of my Administration that, to the maximum extent permitted by law, the executive branch shall use the terms “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in place of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” and will not acknowledge the usage of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in any applicable setting.
Good thing the US uses the imperial system one less source of confusion /s
- The US government's official policy is metric (and has been for something like 50 years now).
- The population uses a mix of metric and US customary units, not imperial.
UK is kinda similar, I suppose, but their typical usage of metric/imperial tilts more heavily in favor of metric. I wonder how many other countries are also still doing mixed measurement systems at this point?
One of his strategies is to say unbelievable things like he's gonna revoke Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship or something weird like "superior intelligence", and the news will cover that instead of whichever agencies he's getting or how much he appears in the Epstein files.
From an international perspective, America is Trump, in a way that is far more acute than even when it was Obama or GWB. Back then you could understand POTUS as sitting on top of an enormous apparatus that didn't just act out his whims; in the current situation we have to treat him as a sort of dimwit emperor.
Perhaps the right wing always thought that the government was the personal weapon of the sitting president, and that is why they are so comfortable with actually making it so, but the left wing has predominantly seen it as an enormous bureaucracy governed by policy and laws that only changed relatively slowly, and not at the whim of an individual.
Now when I see data and the source is the federal government, my reaction is "this is probably fake, or at least biased heavily." Makes me a little sad to have that reaction, e.g. I used to like going to the NIH web site to find information, but now I assume it has been curated to meet an ideological narrative.
I also do not have a lot of confidence that this situation will be a one-off aberration and the democrats will bring sanity back and implement better safeguards against the next demagogue. On the contrary, I think it is very plausible they will see this as an opportunity they had not dreamed of before.
>“Review all Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigations commenced under the previous administration to ensure that they do not advance theories of liability that unduly burden AI innovation.”
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americ...
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/us-government-regulat...
and the 2008 financial crisis: https://sunlightfoundation.com/2008/11/24/the-revolving-door...
just to name two obscure examples that had some small impact on society
Of course, this story also points towards how people sometimes get confused. Most opportunities companies have to be unethical are complex, so if you're not already inclined to trust a company, it's easy to come up with reasons to distrust any claims of ethical behavior they make. Maybe they didn't want to do the unethical behavior in the first place, maybe they've made up self-serving ethical standards, maybe they're just being performatively ethical as a marketing strategy and they'll misbehave when nobody's looking.
Such commentary tends to go viral, because it's easy to propose and impossible to refute in a short comment or video.
I predict they’ll be forced to install an “ombudsman” in the data cleaning / training team, so Trump can inject propaganda and filter out science. (As has been done to many US news outlets already).
Also, they will somehow each put >> $1B into his personal checking account, and hope presidential pardons cover bribing the president after the next few elections.
Should this be the way it happens? No
Is it? Yes
The main thing I’ve seen recently is people learning how the world works then being shocked when it’s nothing like what is sold publicly
I am legit curious though: what changed specifically in your information gathering process that revealed these things?
For example pretty much everything happening now has been well described by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn specifically about American politics since the 1960s. I mean similarly for the entire black community and don’t forget Martin Luther King was killed because he was trying to organize sanitation workers.
Chris Hedges has been reporting about the state of things daily for two decades now. Similarly for Jacobin magazine.
Ron Paul (whatever you think of him) was talking explicitly about this corruption in the context of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the bail out of the banking market in 2008.
Ross Perot famously described how Nafta was a big sellout to the multinational corporations and would devastate US industry - on stage at the 1992(?) presidential debate and everybody just made fun of him because he was short and had slightly larger ears because he was an older guy.
The blatant nature of it now and complete complicity of large swaths of the government in the corruption are a level that has never been seen before. The Teapot Dome scandal involved the equivalent of tens of millions of present day dollars. The actions of the president alone now are what would have been considered dozens of individual career-ending scandals only a couple generations ago.
"Gail Slater" is not a democratically elected person of any kind, and exists as a function of the executive, and hence of the president's policies. Insofar as the DOJ's anti-trust's leaders depart from the will of the elected president, it is that leader to be fired and replaced. Or else: what ever was the point of electing a president?
There's nothing in principle wrong in a president disagreeing with the execution of his executive powers, delegated to Gail, and hence firing him. Indeed, if that were not the case, the election of a president could never change the operation of the executive, making the election pointless.
If you disagree with the anti-trust decision, the issue isn't with the political mechanism by which it was over-ruled, but with the election of that president.
Let's not kid ourselves.
With AI it seems to be internal testing produces wild results, which is unsurprising to me, all of these models can be jailbroken, and as long as that's the case, they're all likely to be exploited maliciously.
I’m repeating it because that has to be internalized: the largest IPO ever will be for a company that casually consider they might kill us all and their own employees too. Including their children.
What about the price of gas?
FTC is still mostly not compromised by industry sleeper agents. FBI is still independent also.
CAISI NIST is very compromised by EA sleeper agents. very luckily they have no law enforcement role.
Perhaps it does not need saying but if you leave it to nonprofits overflowing with industry operatives and ai blood money, you get whatever openai or anthropic want you to hear (METR report).
When Trump is gone they'll forget about him. If we elect someone far-left next they'll suddenly be mega-woke. Watch.
How is this a fair, level, playing field, U.S.? Making a large pile of money to put millions of people out of a job, it warrants some investigations!
They can only do that because of circular finance deals and other fraud. Those deals are also the reason a machine that’d run ~ Claude Opus 4.6 locally costs $5000 instead of the original $1400 MSRP.
Eh, their AI is going to put millions of people out of a job ...
If this is not unfair competition, then what is?
The concern is predatory pricing [1]. Which may or may not result in job loss (the surviving company could hire/acquire the dieing companies).
[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Therefore, the only solution is to ensure people act according to the spirit of the law, not the actual law.
If you talk about "fair competition" then "fair" also applies to how the law works. If one party is always one step ahead, then that is not fair.
According to this analysis, at 70 tokens per second for Kimi K3, you could expect to run >800 parallel streams on that setup:
https://inferencex.semianalysis.com/run/kimi-k3-on-b200
VC creates little wars of attrition in every industry and calls it "disruption" but it mostly pulls the money out of workers' pockets.