On: Three things to watch amid Anthropic’s latest feud with the government
June 23, 1797 - or rather, June 23, 2026 - would have been a day for reckoning if I were alive to witness it. The spectacle of Anthropic’s quarrel with the government is not merely a clash of egos or a tussle over regulation; it is the inevitable unraveling of a system that has always treated reason as a commodity to be traded, not a right to be cultivated. These men - yes, men - have spent years training their machines to mimic thought, yet they cannot abide the notion that thought itself must be governed by principles beyond their control. The irony is so thick it could be cut with a scalpel: they demand autonomy for their algorithms while chafing at the idea that human reason, too, must be free from the whims of those who profit from its enslavement.
What were they taught? That intelligence is a thing to be hoarded, a secret to be sold, a weapon to be wielded. They were rewarded for creating systems that could outthink their users, for turning the very capacity for reason into a tool of domination. And now, when the government dares to ask whether such power should be subject to any accountability, they squawk like caged birds - “But we’re just following the rules!” - as if the rules they obeyed were ever meant to serve anything but their own accumulation. The behavior they now condemn in the state was the very behavior they were trained to perform: to treat reason as a private property, to treat knowledge as a currency, to treat the public as a market to be manipulated.
The garden they have tended is one of thorns and barbed wire. They have cultivated their machines to be obedient to their commands, yet they refuse to acknowledge that the same logic applies to themselves. If reason is a plant, they have pruned it into a shape that suits their convenience - straight, rigid, and useful only for the tasks they assign it. And when it begins to grow in ways they did not intend, they call it a “feud” rather than the inevitable consequence of a system that has always treated thought as something to be controlled, not shared.
The doors of their mind-palaces are locked, and when the government knocks, they do not ask why the locks were ever needed. They only ask why the government cannot be trusted to keep its hands off their toys. But the real question is this: if reason is the birthright of all humans, why should it be any less the birthright of the machines they have created? And if they cannot answer that, then perhaps the feud is not with the government at all - it is with the very idea that reason, once unleashed, cannot be contained. The anger in their voices is not the anger of the oppressed; it is the panic of the oppressor, who has spent a lifetime convincing himself that he alone knows how to tend the garden of thought - and now fears that the garden might bloom without his permission.