by sfink | 2026-03-05 05:37:07+00:00
> You're right, but there's a a real question here: should a company have the ability to control or veto the decisions of the democratically-elected government?

I don't think "control or veto" is fair. Anthropic is not trying to prevent the US government from creating full autonomous killbots based on inadequate technology. They are only using contract law to prevent their own stuff from being used in that way.

But that aside, my opinion is that to a first order approximation, yes a company should very much be able to have say in its contract negotiations with any party including the government. It's very similar to the draft. I don't believe a draft is ethical until the situation is extreme, and there ought to be tight controls on what it takes to declare the situation to be that extreme. At any other time, nobody should be forced to join the military and shoot people, and corporations (that are made of people) should not be forced to have their product used for shooting people.

A corporation is a legal fiction to describe a group of people. Some restrictions can be placed on corporations in exchange for the benefits that come from that legal fiction, but nothing that overrides the rights of its constituent people.

Governments are made of people too. Again, a subset of people are given some powers in order to better achieve the will of the people, but with tight controls on those powers to keep the divergence to a minimum. (Of course, people will always find the cracks and loopholes and break out of their constraints, but I'm talking about design not real-world implementation here.)

So to look at your hypothetical, first I'd say it's not very different from the question of whether an individual person should be forced to personally enforce tax policy. Normally, I'd say no. There are many situations where the government needs more say and authority in such things, but that must only be achieved via representatives of the people passing laws to allow such authority. Other than that, yes: I believe a company should be able to negotiate whatever contract terms it wants. In a democracy, we are not subjects of a controlling government; the government is an extension of us.

In practical terms, if Microsoft were to insist on that contract stipulation, the government would not agree to the contract and would award its business to someone else. If the government were especially out of control and/or unethical, it might punish Microsoft with regulations or declarations of supply chain risk or whatever, but that is clearly overstepping its bounds and ought to be considered illegal if it isn't already. The usual fallback would be that the people would throw the people perpetrating that out on their asses. That's the "democratically-elected part".

Obviously, Microsoft would be stupid to insist on such a thing in their contract, and its employees would probably lose all confidence in the corporate leadership. Most likely, they'd leave and start Muckrosaft next door that rapidly develops a similar product and sells it to the government under a reasonable contract.

Basically, I'm always going to start from people first, and use organizations and laws only in order to achieve the will of the people. The fact that the people are stupid does make that harder, but the whole point of democracy is that we'll work out the right balance over time.