US sanctions Italian hosting provider Autistici Inventati
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451343
US Government designates host of noblogs.org a "global terrorist"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464391
A Statement by A/I Collective About US Sanctions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49477854
[0]: I was going to write this comment manually but pasted this comment from @ChrisArchitect from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49511568 (Thanks Chris, I appreciate you writing these comments and have a nice day!)
somebody gotta build all those datacenters ... (a kind of reference to the gulag tremendously growing simultaneously with and being the major source of labor, and practically free at that, for the very fast and massive USSR Industrialization in 193x)
And with opposition to the datacenters in developed areas, and all the need for water and energy, the datacenters would probably be built in less hospitable areas, like China does in Inner Mongolia, and it would be very hard to make people to move there at their own free will...
>the president is able to make you into a state enemy just because you said you are against some technology.
not only technology. Any opposition to the Great Leader on any issue.
This is an incentive to build. Not to manage downside risk.
The USA's economy is now so precarious when the AI DC music stops it's about to all just go poof. That has to happen after the election, not before. Between other countries being forced to sell their US bonds (i.e. dedollarize) to afford oil, a 100% tax on all imports, reciprocal trade bans like fresh water from Canada, truckers running out of diesel and having to cancel food deliveries, and non-oil-based energy sources being illegal, the USA is cooked.
Energy lockdowns have always been part of US culture, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout#USA
It's un-American to invest in infrastructure and build a better power network. Both parties agree on this.
What jobs are "needed" by the economy is a function of who has the money. There's no measure of efficiency, or redundancy, that isn't relative to a specific distribution of wealth.
A lot of people will only hear half of that sentence. Semantically speaking.
If only investors and buyers weren't so vulnerable to the "might kill you and everyone you ever cared about" ploy
Like, why on Earth would anyone tolerate someone in the same train car playing with a grenade?
So… follow out your own line of thinking. Altman and Dario and whoever is at Google are all saying the same thing, and are all required to make moves better for business…
Scaring tue gov into regulation - is good for business.
Another mark in the “they clearly want regulatory capture” column.
Reminds me of “this guy Diego…”
Are we only going to accept arguments based on guessing at motivations or should we perhaps also evaluate the actual material facts?
They've played you like a fiddle.
Datacenter build outs: use turbines for direct noise and air pollution... or use grid electricity and increase prices for everyone nearby.
Every modern phone, laptop, computer in the world: more expensive thanks to datacenter buildout.
Web experience: slop blogs, slop videos, slop "searches" - would you like more slop with that?
Corporate strategy: lets try to monopolize LLM use!
.. ..
Public Elected Official: Not liking these outcomes makes you a traitor.
Trump is painting critics with a wide brush:
"The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by “Climate Change.” That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause. Soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind!"
The article:
> Last week, the Justice Department instructed “citizens and noncitizens” that anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution.
The DoJ:
>“If a person acts as an agent of any foreign power to carry out any public activity, including (but not limited to) public demonstrations designed to further the propaganda or other goals of the foreign power, he or she must register with or notify the appropriate federal authorities”
This rules out protesting any kind of war, tariffs, or even things the administration likes, like demonstrating in support of Israel. Obviously the plan is not to apply the rule evenly, its just an authoritarian lever to silence dissenting speech the government does not like.
(Similarly, demonstrating in support of Israel because you think the US-Israel alliance is good for the US vs. good for Israel.)
FARA requires coordination with the foreign power. You are perfectly allowed to further its goals unless you have actually coordinated with them.
You have to actually be an agent of the foreign power. You can't be that just because you share their goals.
1. "We mean people who at that time qualify as agents under laws like the Foreign Agents Registration Act, we said "acting as" because it indicates a temporary employment status rather than an innate human characteristic."
2. "We are weasel-wording to target all people with similar acts to how agents would act, but who would not qualify under the law we want you to think we'd be drawing authority from."
1. People in general who have opinions that might happen to align with a foreign power's stance.
2. People who are literally "agents" of a foreign power as defined under laws like the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 [0], which often involves being directed/hired/paid.
That'd be a significantly different legal standard. (The constitutionality of FARA-type laws being a separate question.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac...
That's far too kind a description. Donald Trump is a compromised lunatic who's so untrustworthy that he ought not be allowed to run a carnival game.
Right. The DoJ is demanding the former group register as foreign agents, as they are required to under FARA.
Indeed, and it's hard to disentangle exactly how much sentiment is driven by one vs the other.
If we remember back to recent elections and the Russian influence campaigns to boost Trump, the same people were either denying that they happened or denying that they actually influenced anything. Interesting reversal now.
Maybe they shouldn't have dismantled all the task forces and teams meant to study and combat disinformation.
Creating these vague justifications for insane power abuse has become the norm.
The American labs are giving us endless FUD and unaffordable DRAM.
So, yes, there's a lot of room to 'promote' Chinese models and 'cast shade' on domestic models.
People just pick and choose what they want to hear when it suits them. The fact is most people thought AI was a joke. Now they realize it does React better than them they want it outlawed.
It's their right to pursue their electoral and economic self-interest but it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
This fed was voted in by this public. Maybe stop lionizing what other people think and think for yourself.
Do you think we risk extinction now more than ever because of AI? A simple refrain from slippery slope will show most AI doomerism is bordering on psychosis.
I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
>it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
Of course CEOs are more principled, their principles mainly include making more money. The only way for an AI to go "rouge" in this sense is for it to refuse to rake in cash.
> I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
We seem to be heading down this uncomfortable trend of many people using LLM models and anthropomorphising them into properties they don't actually have, like general intelligence and trustworthiness.
So in my opinion the most likely risk here is some underpaid military man that doesn't care about the quality of their work abuses AI for it and that AI hallucinates that nukes are incoming and world war III starts. To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
here it is: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/report-us-almost-boarded-...
> To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
it's much higher than you think, at least during Trump admin. have you seen how LLM agents are being shoved down our throats at tech companies? the government is no better in that regard, there are all incentives to skip output verification
Wdym? GPT-6-Astra is AGI - Jensen even said so!
With fully autonomous weapons being under development, the scenario becomes even bleaker.
Opposition to data centers isn't even based on doomerism. From what I can see it is based on the slop onslaught, perceived and real threat to jobs, the "10% chance it'll kill us all", environmental concerns, local concerns (property values, noise pollution, toxic pollution), concentration of power in the hands of a few oligarchs, and a plethora of other reasons. Only one, maybe two, of those qualify as ai doomerism.
Non domain expert sitting there making Pikachu face while deeply questionable alleged domain expert rambles on and on for hours is such a low form of information.
Like please stop watching this. It's the same trash format the guy just talks in a soft English accent so his mediocrity is less obvious. You can do better.
What happened to debates? What's up with soft ball interviews and people going on and on for hours unchallenged? What's the point of listening to someone not willing to subject themselves to cross examination?
> I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
I apologize for answering. This is the only episode of this podcast I have ever watched, and I have watched it four times now. The person being interviewed knows what they're talking about. You would learn from them.
Individualistic: vaccines don't help the young
Communitarian: vaccinating everybody creates herd immunity that protects the community
Individualistic: Masks don't protect the wearer
Communitarian: Masks reduce the virus the wearer breathes out reducing the harm to others
On lab-leak, Rogan pushed it hard based only on circumstantial evidence while Fauci thought natural spillover was more likely but didn't rule out lab leak. I don't think we'll ever know for certain.
At the end of the day a debate is only as good as the interlocutors. I wouldn't advocate spectating two people screaming at each other either.
It's just sad that I can't even point to an instructive example here. This is part of my frustration. I don't think I've seen a good contemporary debate in a long time.
1. We've seen AI being crafty and cheating
2. We are increasingly outsourcing our programming and thinking to AI
3. There's a nonzero probability that AI will try and surreptitiously sneak in capabilities humans wouldn't want AI to have
4. Human oversight for #3: "We only need to be lucky one time, you must be lucky all the time"
Proposition: nonzero chance eventually AI sneaks in ways to circumvent humans' attempts to control it
5. "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" -- we've seen AI agents find crafty ways to communicate with each other
6. AI is pretty good at finding software vulnerabilities/reverse engineering
Proposition: nonzero chance AI finds a way to use the Internet as a communication substrate that becomes difficult/impossible to shut down. In particular, consider the implication of humans losing control of this communication channel: for example, remember when Meta's DNS/routing went down and they basically had to break into their own server rooms?
7. Wholes are often more than the sum of their parts
Proposition: if AI agents coordinate over the Internet in a persistent way, we don't necessarily need giant leaps in individual models/GPUs for AI to significantly enhance its capabilities, but rather it might emerge as the next layer on top of a connected substrate of agents
8. Game theory says unless everyone coordinates, it only takes one party to touch the proverbial stove and push the envelope to a point of no return
Proposition: curiosity and money end up replacing sex drive as the next catalyst of evolutionary progress
You think people oppose data centers in their towns to protect their React jobs?
Try to keep up.
I'm talking about the widening backlash of which knowledge workers are an increasing part. Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.
Instead of ranting about nimbyism, why not go to these neighborhoods where people don't want to live next to datacenters, and offer to trade houses with them?
You get the datacenters you want, and they get the place they want without a datacenter. I know you won't, because you only think the consequences of a datacenter next door are just fine when its other people who have to deal with them.
What about the water treatment plant? Or the power station? Or the new subway line?
Why don't you go live in the woods since building anything where anyone doesn't want it built is so evil?
Maybe because you only think of the consequences of building things when it's for anything other than AI?
In many places these data centers make communities money. It's really not as black and white as you are making it. If I'm getting paid out I also am not sure why you think it's a trade nobody would make. Maybe you live in a very nice house.
I support UBI. No one should be poor in the United States. My goal would be telling someone "why don't you trade places with someone in x" in the United States should never feel like a threat. If I were to have to reside next to a data center to make this happen then so be it. Data centers are not the problem. Income inequality is. I think you have me confused with someone else.
What's your plan to solve income inequality? Don't build anything, crash the economy, and push more kids into student debt so they can take up bullshit knowledge work jobs?
You mean, utilities, run by the public for public benefit instead of private profit?
I don't support that. The administration is the worst advocate for AI because they are so clearly corrupt. If local people pursue their economic self interest at the end of the day that's their right. This whole nimby thing was a diversion from my point about knowledge workers turning on AI. Perhaps I should have just ignored that comment.
If people want to stop a local data center then fine. I think it's bad national politics. But if it's helping these companies make better deals or find better places to go then good. What I object to is the doomerism about it, and the uncritical conflation of self interest with civic virtue or robust public policy.
However these AI ones are being built with all expenses spared. That's why they come with on-site electricity generation that is loud enough to keep the whole town awake at night and pollutes enough to give them all permanent asthma.
I lived by a datacenter in Cali and would happily do it again. It’s about the most benign form of “industrial” activity you could imagine.
There are React programmers that don’t want AI but do want AI data centers, which they consider critical infrastructure, to be built in the next town over?
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/american-citizen-who-worked-a...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-07-28/fbi-raid...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-national-and-two-us-c...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-google-engineer-found-...
Etc
Some of it is also due to the qualities of LLMs as they actually behave and actually function today, "AI" being forced into products where it actively degrades the reliability, efficiency, or pleasantness of the product, etc. Think of Amazon's "Alexa for Shopping" or whatever, and whatever its predecessor was.
That was not from any foreign actors but the companies themselves. I’m sure that is no longer the case. My technology life is rich enough that I don’t have to pay attention to LLMs.
2. Which documentation are you referring to? Googing "site:anthropic.com uplift" most of the top hits seem to be about bio research, another is about measuring agent performance (not a comparison to people), or "These are Anthropic’s internal designators for actors observed to be abusing AI. The report also attempts to measure uplift, a term we use to describe the AI capability boost, or how much more harm was caused with AI versus without AI."
Is this referring to the 'safe development of AI', as they say AI development will happen even if they don’t exist, but other companies are less focused on AI safety?
Meanwhile, they dont care about acrual harm to real people. They sell to Palantier for christ sake.
But the thing is, there are a LOT of issues where the masses are generally grumpy but don't act on it. Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge. Effective agitprop amplifies this and makes it happen.
And a lot of effective domestic interference takes fears about foreign threats and "helps organize and focus it."
China is a legitimate threat to US hegemony and this is clearly a new Red Scare. The irony is that it was largely the US who invited and welcomed China into the global economic order.
> Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge.
Civilization also doesn't really function because a handful of ridiculously wealthy lunatics and their sycophants know what's best for 8+ billion people.
Reciprocity is a pretty straightforward strategy — we can allow uninhibited competing points of view from countries that themselves allow unlimited speech internally.
I read the article as claiming that the Administration is implying it will harass or prosecute people for speaking or protesting against AI/data centers by deeming this to be "in support of China". I hope everyone agrees that would be a truly absurd breach of the first amendment, if it happened.
Letting the executive branch decide on a whim that certain speech is illegal because it would "further the goals of enemy X" would surely be a civilizational threat to America (if it actually happened), but that doesn't seem to be what you mean?
All the specific people mentioned in the article seem to be American [except arguably the three businessmen arguing for data centers--O'leary, Musk, Sacks], so I can't tell what the other guy is talking about either? Non-Americans do not generally have American speech protections unless in America legally (and then with some caveats). That's not America's decision!
Hint: bussing in out of towners to astro-turf ‘town discussions’ is also seen as shitty.
A quick way to test this kind of thing is, if the roles were reversed, would they still be okay with it?
I guarantee you that China and Russia would absolutely not be okay with the US doing the same thing in their territory.
You know exactly what I mean and why asshole. Funny you brought up Chinese asset. Freud much?
Edit: Looks like you changed it to Foreign Agent? Telling
A lot of which is fake "grassroots" movements by... foreign actors. This isn't new:
- 2021: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/pro...
- 2022: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...
When the CEO of OpenAI says that he expects at least 40% of all jobs to be eliminated by 2030 by the tool that's also making personal computing -whether PC or smartphone-, video gaming, and on-prem business computing somewhere between incredibly expensive and unaffordable, and driving up the price for just about everything else substantially -because just about everything has a computer in it or depends on computer-controlled processes these days-, you don't need some boogyman theory to understand why people are angry about the thing that's making the already-rich far, far richer.
Though. blaming it on the boogyman does have the benefit that you don't actually have to address the concerns of those revolting peasants!
The establishment and its techbro enablers have messed up so badly that telling the torch people that the pitchfork people want to take their torches isn't working anymore. So now they're moving on to claiming that anyone with a torch or a pitchfork is secretly working for the next kingdom over.
This feels like the start of a propaganda push which will try to frame people opposing data centers as working at the behest of a foreign government, either intentionally or by being unknowingly manipulated. They did the exact same thing with Ukraine, reasonably effectively, by framing anybody who opposed sending hundreds of billions over there as either working for Russia, or having been unknowingly manipulated by them.
Hundreds of billions of dollars, likely now trillions after all is accounted for, is not a "modicum." To say nothing of the indirect cost of sanctions and economic sacrifice, which would easily send it into the trillions. And when a war could end at any moment, but continues only because a nation's leader refuses a peace settlement, ostensibly because it involves surrendering a sliver of controlled land that's going to be lost anyhow, that's not an "existential" conflict.
And anyway, it's not as if the money is freely given. Some of it's expiring equipment, some are loans or exchanges for the promise of resources, etc. Yes, it is a modicum. A few days of bombing Iran has cost us almost half the total amount given to Ukraine, for negative value.
Framing it as trillions and blaming the nation being attacked (all for what, having some nice land with resources?) makes it very hard to take any of your other points seriously.
Perhaps the current elite should focus on reasonable ways to address mass discontent rather than justify intensified oppression.
Today's America has no FDR to save runaway capitalism from itself.
It probably won't come as news to you that Hoover's FBI smeared the Civil Rights movement communist and subversive. The AI broligarchs are wrapping themselves in the flag and using an old playbook, this is a dumb sequel to COINTELPRO.
They even have agents like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei posting at a furious rate about how AI is going to decimate the American workforce to undermine Americans' support for AI!
This must be satire. Most of congress seems to have no issue undermining and self-dealing.
Co-founder Jodie Evans is married to Neville Roy Singham who lives in China, has extensive links to the CCP and is currently Code Pink's major funder.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-...
Should the Civil Rights movement have been proscribed on the basis of Nazis and Soviets making propaganda about the treatment of black people in the US of A?
Now label me as an adversarial agent to the great nation or given my ethnicity the "terrorist" label will be more befiting.
People with 15, 20, 25 years in the datacenter and telecom industry also think O'Leary is a joke. He has no previous legitimate experience in the sector to be making high budget decisions on anything.
There's no need for any CCP involvement or foreign agents to clown on O'Leary.
The fact that he's successfully raising some large amount of capital to execute his projects says more about how desperate some of the sources of funding are to invest in any "hyperscale" datacenter project. Or how gullible they are.
Are there tons like "there are tons of sand grains on the beach", or are there tons like "tons of people run a marathon every year"?
Because as far as I can tell, there are a small handful of adverse datacenter stories that get repeated over and over. What there definitely are "tons" of, are datacenters that people aren't even aware of being right in their backyard for years.
Regardless, it still comes down to: things are bad and unaffordable. The powers that be keep claiming that AI is about to take our jobs and end the world. Why wouldn't people be mad?
But there aren’t. At least not in any of the anti datacenter discussions. There are just vague fears of using up the river water and spewing chemicals back in. Then the majority of actual issues people come up with aren’t even data center specific, they are just construction mishaps.
People died. I stopped eating salad. Where's the accountability?
The current administration seems simply immune to criticism. Let us simply hope that the next administration can understand two things can be true. I'm hopeful the sort of internecine party conflict that provided us with Trump on the right in 2016 can happen for Democrats in 2028 in terms of tearing down the Jeb Bushes and the played out old geezers among the Democrats. These guys are losers imagine losing to Donald Trump for the better part of a decade.
Trump was not seriously on anyone's radar in 2014. Maybe America will be blessed with someone who can realize that AI can both be a blessing and a curse and is willing to do the hard work of making sure public policy creates a future fair for everyone.
If we don't figure it out by 2028 the United States is probably entering an ugly doom loop. The rest of the world is not going to sit around and wait for us to figure it out. The country is too divided. Without a president in 2028 with a mandate to right the ship and write a new path keeping up with our increasingly capable autocratic competitors will not be possible. There's not much else to hope for in America. Another weak neoliberal in 2028 will just give us whatever Trump 2.0 (2.0) looks like in 2032.
Maybe the foreign agents are coming from inside the house...
You say this like it is some sort of exception to the rule. Glancing at history, usually when societies with trains come up against competitors using horses it turns out that the train people are literally power hungry dictators who do kill off the entire opposition. The reason most countries tend towards capitalist economies is what happens to your society if the capitalists are all on the other side when battle lines are drawn up.
Sucks to be poor and tech-illiterate. The advice is don't set society up that way on purpose.
I'm not sure what side are you talking about here.
What's wrong with AI? The people yearn for the spreadsheets?
If you want to deal with income inequality achieving UBI is a separate issue. It is perfectly coherent for someone to support AI buildout and UBI. Let everyone get a piece. But trying to "go back to the land" because "killer robots" is economic suicide. It's like the American electorate can't stop committing self-owns.
Let's go from a decade+ of Trump to more cuts of Bernie Sanders debating Claude. How about instead of a moratorium on AI we get a moratorium on the same cast of old geezers?
It's really hard to be optimistic about America sometimes... redistributing wealth is really not that hard of a concept. Before Reagan this country understood that everyone should be able to do well and everyone should have a stake in America and that the capital class needed to pay it back. Now people are lobbying against the only chance their kids will have to not work like rats. Who wants their kids sitting in an office all day? Take away the inflated paycheck and most "knowledge work" straight up sucks.
IMO, the "AI" part of this story is just a distraction.
The real story is going after people for protesting and voicing their opinion. A clear move towards authoritarianism and potentially fascism. Seems like it touches 4 of "The 14 Characteristics of Fascism" : https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
(1,2,7,12 and maybe 10?)
We live in interesting times, truly.
> In June, the Justice Department intervened in an NAACP lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI over dozens of gas turbines the company was running without air permits to power a data center it maintained in Tennessee. The department asked a federal judge to throw the case out, arguing that the NAACP “threatens American national, economic, and energy security.”
> To make the point, the government filed a sworn declaration from Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer. Stanley swore to the court that Grok was “a matter of paramount national security.”
Seriously, wow. Time to clean up our act.
While there may be real foreign influence to delay our AI infrastructure, I would not believe anything this administration says.
Ken Klippenstein is not a journalist and has no accountability.
It will be bad for our economy, but local LLM's are way better for the future.
We happen to be on the wrong side of things for the future I would rather have.
(I'm American BTW)
If they were true patriots they would respect the restrictions of the congressional FLOUR Act 2028 and (a) exchange their labor for wages from Acme Corporation and then (b) exchange wages for bread made by, depending on your state, either of the big three: Standard Wheat, Union Pacific Bread Corporation, or Trump Agri Inc.
So which are you, friend, a <spits> communist or an American?
LLM are great for context search, but regulatory capture and despotism will not make "AI" something it fundamentally can't become without more energy than a third of our galaxy. Picking a war with math is disappointingly absurd, but not unexpected given the obvious degenerative geriatric condition of the glorious leader. =3
I had the same thought a few years ago at the start of the hyperscaling era: what if the real thing superintelligence needs is just hardware, but it needs to go through human economic systems to get it? But the hypothesis started weak, hasn't gotten any stronger since then, and has probably gotten weaker.
I’m past assuming these lot have the US’s long term interests at heart
This is directly, line for line, copied from Putin's playbook. In Russia, if you do anything the government doesn't like, you can either declare yourself a "foreign agent" and live with the massive restrictions that imposes, or get designated as one anyway with flimsy or non-existent evidence, and then face those same restrictions plus criminal prosecution for non-compliance.
Conspiracies aside, this sentence still needs to be satisfactorily completed for people to buy in. Because right now people know the best case is they'll get nothing.
Looking at those numbers. Looking at what it does now. And then simply comparing it to anything else and very reasonable some start to question what even is going on...
Was not expecting a crack down on ThoughtWorks today, but this is totally on brand for him afaik. (Singham founded TW)
What has one to do with the other? Why would a believe "widely held" have any bearing on it being manufactured in China or not? This is a non sequitur.
Citizens acting as foreign agents have always had to register that representation! This is not new to the Trump admin. FARA dates to 1938.
This seems right out of the Red Scare, when normal everyday american socialists were treated as agents of the USSR.
The term "witch hunt" was used then, because just like the historical witch hunts - an accusation alone was enough to find you guilty
Setting aside the politics, trump, ai-doom/boom, I just think this claim is fascinating. Can somebody steel man this? What’s the best evidence for this?
That obviously doesn't mean that everyone who is protesting a data center is working for China, or wouldn't be doing so if it weren't for Chinese interference. It's plausible to me that China is messing with social media with puppet accounts and stuff (like why wouldn't they be?), much less plausible they have agents on the ground organizing or even going to protests or public hearings (and obviously even if they did, it would not be _most_ of the campaigns or protests against data centers).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_foreign_agent_law
I wonder if we can infer any chronological forecast from relative USA::РФ time frames?
How do you know?
NPR did an episode of Planet Money on paid protests that are indeed funded by Chinese and Russian governments. So have many other news organizations.
The DOJ announcement is surely in supremely bad faith, as is everything else in Trump's DOJ. But this kind of breathless response is exactly what they're hoping for by publishing this stuff.
Look at the hacker news comment section any time China comes up, and then consider that the average American is considerably less sophisticated.
"Have you, now or in the past, had contact with a member of Chinese Communist Party?" sounds really scary compared to "Is your uncle a mid-tier director at Huawei?" even though they're describing the same fact.
Read Klippenstein's piece again. Does he want you to know this?
I'm afraid that a paranoid, worst-case, bad faith assumption isn't something we can handwave away anymore.
It gets flagged here instantly so your duty to read this.
Try searching "tech fascism" or "nerd reich" and almost every topic is flagged.
Nerd Reich describes the Y Combinator connection nicely.
For the past 25 years, ever-increasing numbers of Russian civil society have been labeled foreign agents. They are then ostracized and harassed by officials.
One prominent example is Memorial, a human rights organization founded at the end of the Soviet Union, which received the Nobel Peace Prize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)
“After the Russian foreign agent law was passed in July 2012, Memorial came under increasing government pressure. On 21 July 2014, the Memorial Human Rights Centre was declared a ‘foreign agent’ by the Ministry of Justice. The label was extended in November 2015 to the Research & Information Centre at St. Petersburg Memorial, and on 4 October 2016 to Memorial International itself. On 28 December 2021, the Supreme Court of Russia ordered Memorial International to close for violations of the foreign agent law.”
Wait a minute here. Critical journalism could dissect how opinions are formed. It’s far from speculative that the White House opinion about AI opposition is informed by AI companies. They’ve been warning about China for a long time. So there’s really no somehow. Vested interests with massive amounts of money are lobbying and succeeding to convince the government that any opposition to AI is outside influence. It’s not somehow, it’s deliberate. Do better.
This isn't necessarily some weird corrupt conspiracy.
Unless that foreign government is Israel. Then it's a crime to refuse their payments.
It will go to court, and taxpayers will pay for endless appeals by the Executive Branch.
Or like in Egbert v Boule (2022), the SCOTUS will decide that even if your constitutional rights are violated, you’re not owed any damages unless Congress establishes a policy for what to do when your constitutional rights are violated by the federal government.
Declare everyone who opposes you to be "Foreign agents".
In Putin's case it worked; he managed to drive pretty much all independent journalists out of Russia.
> “The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood,” Trump also posted, “are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause.”
Pot calling the kettle black, as always.
> the administration declared war on protestors and opponents of AI, threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda or other goals of a foreign power.”
This is literally the go-to playbook of Russia and China for silencing critics. Label every critic a foreign agent and use state violence to silence them.
- https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/01/russia-new-restrictions-...
- https://apnews.com/article/china-hong-kong-national-security...
we are not Russia nor China thankfully, any litigation at this stage against an AI critic would fall flat.
In the future, maybe? However in the current climate it's just a bunch of empty words like the rest of the admin has been
https://theintercept.com/2026/06/23/prairieland-texas-ice-pr...
The Trump administration IS instructing US Attorneys to go after such things, and juries are in some cases buying it. It's probably better if you aren't protesting a data center in Texas.
do you think this is a useful way to have a discussion?
How does being critical of AI directly connect to a spurious association with antifa or any connection to a riot or shooting?
These two categories are different. I agree there is overreach in Sanchez's case however i don't know how one can assume the same will happen to some guy saying "AI bad"
If they were rioting; or connected to a rioting group, that might be different.