I’ve seen enough takes on the Anthropic/DoD conflict since it all went down last week, and I’m surprised at how often this important principle is being left out of the conversation:
There are many freedoms enjoyed by Americans—and therefore American businesses. One of them is that we don’t have to work for the government if we choose not to.
If I want to be employed by the government, I can choose from the range of options the government offers. If they want to hire me, I can work for Reclamation and help maintain dams, or for the Social Security Administration to process claims, or for the military to defend the United States. But once I’ve decided to work for Reclamation, it doesn’t mean the U.S. Government can also require me to work as a janitor, a Congressional aide, or a spy. Note that it doesn't matter if what the government wants is entirely legal. If we can’t come to an agreement, they can fire me or I can quit.
Anthropic chose to quit, and it’s nonsense that this is some sort of veto over the powers of a democratically elected government. You can argue that Anthropic shouldn’t have the beliefs they have about AI and military action or government surveillance. You can make a moral claim that they should want to support the military. But if your argument is that Anthropic refusing to do so is some sort of corporatocracy, then you're ignoring essential rights.
The point isn’t that corporations should have power over government. The point is that people, and therefore their businesses, have power above government. That power appears in the voting booth, of course. But it also comes in all the other freedoms we enjoy because of the limits on Constitutionally designed government.
The Department of Defense offered Anthropic a job, which the company accepted. When the terms of employment changed, Anthropic quit to uphold their values. This is fundamentally how a free society with a limited government should operate.
Footnote: I get that there are laws entitling the government to force its citizens into certain behavior, but these are constrained by the first, fourth, fifth, and fourteenth amendments of the Constitution, as a start. All of these favor Anthropic’s right to refuse the government’s demands.