YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Masnick

lines on the record: 43
first: 2026-03-12
most recent: 2026-03-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“In terms of, you know, it did come up in the back door issue as well, in terms of trying to build backdoors into encrypted systems. Companies definitely raised First Amendment claims and saying you can't, that is compelled speech to force us to write that kind of code. And so I think it is a valid argument. It might be, again, one that courts are probably less willing to tackle initially if they can deal with these issues some other way. But I'm glad that Fire made that post. And I think it is an interesting and compelling argument.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I actually think it is fairly compelling. Compelling, compelled speech. But no, I do think it is an interesting argument. It's one that had been a little bit further down the list of the issues that I was thinking about. obviously mostly more focused on the Fourth Amendment issues and that but this I think the fire argument is not”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Writing code for a computer is a form of speech, and the government can't force you to do it. And a whole bunch of stuff flows from that. Do you buy this argument that forcing anthropic to build tools that doesn't want to build this compelled speech?”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's one piece of this that I want to end on, and it's kind of the galaxy brain version of all this fire, which is a free speech advocacy group. They put out a blog post just before I started recording, making the argument that forcing anthropic to build tools it doesn't want to build is a free speech violation, that it's something called compelled speech. And there's a lot of history here. This is some deep verge in tech dirt in the weeds existential crisis history here. But it basically comes on an idea that code is speech.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, for having an ethics policy feels like a real misuse of that tool and even that tool, I think, was questionable in some ways, but you could understand the impetus behind it for when you're talking about like a Chinese networking firm or something along those lines. Here, it makes no sense. And so the reaction to this goes so far beyond what would normally be seen in this case. You could see traditionally there would be some sort of court case and either side could start it. And it would just be a battle about, you know, how the contract could be applied. But that's not what is happening here. This administration is effectively saying if you don't give us absolutely everything that we want, if you don't set up your tools to work the way we want them to work, then we will effectively try to destroy your entire business.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To stop potential foreign malicious actors from supplying technology that could then put in hidden surveillance tools into the larger technology stack, that those could be banned to apply that to a US-based company.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we'll see. In the past, when that's happened, and it's happened plenty of times with most of the large tech companies, at some point they've said something is a bridge too far. And where that normally goes is to court. And that, you know, the companies will go to court or the administration will go to court and there'll be some sort of court paddle. I mean, you know, backdooring the iPhone is a perfect example of that sort of went to court and they sort of fought it out, though they never quite got to a conclusion because the FBI eventually did just manually break into the iPhone and then didn't want the court ruling to ruin the future. But in this case, where the escalation is and where this is different than those past situations is that rather than just going to court, they did this supply chain risk designation, which is just insane, you know, this idea that this tool which was designed.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A piece of that just feels like Apple famously stands up to the FBI, put a backdoor in the iPhone. Apple says no. And they stand up to Trump. And there's just a part of however our system works in which big private companies get to say no to the government on behalf of their customers. And this felt the same in the same way that Apple, again, won't put it back door on the iPhone or the big cloud providers say there's a little bit of a process you have to jump through before you get the individual data. Here it seems like Anthropic is saying we're not just going to do bulk analysis of data that you have acquired from other parties because that leads to 24-7 mass surveillance of Americans and we don't want to do that. And that seemed like a bridge too far for this administration. Is there any coming back from that?”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An Amazon, or more likely, the sort of sneaky hidden data brokers that serve ads on your phones and know all your location and your interests and things like that. And then feeding that into a system that Claude would then work on. That's what Anthropic really didn't want to be a part of. wherever or however the government would collect that data from a third party, Claude said we don't want our tool to be used on that data.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, though I think there are a few clarifications that are important here that make this a little bit different. And in fact, it was reported, I think the New York Times had this reporting first, that the main clause that was most important to anthropic was specifically about data collected from commercial services and not being able to use Claude on that data, which is exactly this issue in terms of third-party data. But I do want to clarify the main difference where what we were just talking about before this with Amazon or other third parties hosting your data, that was cases where they were, because of where they sit in the ecosystem, they were hosting your data directly with Claude. It's not that anyone is worried about the NSA looking through your Claude usage, right? It's about them going out and getting third-party data from.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a private company saying, okay, like we understand your position. We understand that you've reinterpreted the law to mean this thing and we're going to put some process in between you, our tool, and the data of Americans flowing through our service. And I'm just wondering if you see that parallel there between Anthropic and Amazon and Azure and whatever other cloud services that exist that hold so much order.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm asking this because it's obvious to everybody listening to this. The amount of data you have on someone else's cloud server is massive. Every single thing that you do generally in the internet now is backed up in some way or recorded in some way on someone else's servers. And the government has found this way to get around the Fourth Amendment and say, well, that's not actually yours. It belongs to Amazon or whatever. And we can go talk to Amazon. And Amazon has to stand in the middle of that process and say, we've invented another process to somewhat protect the people. And I look at that and when I was covering the first third party doctrine cases that covered the cloud services and the government kept winning, that's basically when I turned in the Joker. And I was like, all of this stuff that we're pretending about textualism and the plain, like none of this means anything because we just horsepower to backdoor using this ancient law into everyone's data. And then I look at this and I look at anthropic and I say, well, this.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it's not a search of your data, it's this third party and they can agree as a third party to just hand over that data. But that was like, you know, cases from the 60s and 70s where that was determined that the government can get access to that without a warrant. When there wasn't that much third-party data out there, the rise of computers and the internet changed that. Now everything is third party data. Everything that we do is collected by some company somewhere and has a record of it. And so basically every bit of data about you, where you are, who you speak to, who you interact with, what you say, what you're doing, all of that is pretty much held by third parties these days. And so the third party doctrine has sort of swallowed the entire Fourth Amendment to some extent where anything that is about you that somebody”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and here I have to introduce another concept that probably should have mentioned earlier, but it is important, which is called the third party doctrine. And so the idea with the Fourth Amendment is that the government can't search you or your things without a warrant and it can't get a warrant without probable cause that you've committed some sort of crime. But there's this concept which came about decades ago called the Third Party Doctrine, which says that doesn't necessarily apply or doesn't apply at all to things that aren't yours even if it is your data. And so the earliest and most obvious version of this was phone records that the phone company had of who you called. The phone companies weren't recording your calls, but they were recording, you know, if I called you, there would be a record at the phone company that says Mike calls Nile. What had been determined by multiple courts was that the government can go and request and they don't need a warrant for that.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But even before AI showed up, right, the idea that the government could search everything that belonged to you was out there. The idea that the government didn't need a warrant to search all your stuff was out there. The idea that if any of your data ever went outside the country for a brief second, the government intercepted there was out there. When I was in college around the time of the Patriot Act, the debate was they're not going to search your actual data, but they can get the metadata and the metadata alone, the data about your data will be enough to precisely locate you at all times. And that even that is too far. And we've been doing this dance of what can the government collect, what is permissible, what do they need to keep us all safe, and what's too far. Those lines have moved. So just briefly describe the sort of”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to briefly ask you about surveillance in general, and in particular Anthropics Fourth Amendment concern that Fourth Amendment says the government can't unreasonably search you. The best way to understand the Fourth Amendment is by listening to 99 problems by Jay-Z. So if you need to take a break and go listen to 99 Problems, that's great. It's all in there. I listened to it when I was in law school and made perfect sense. But the government generally needs a warrant to search you. And as more and more of your life goes online, there's lots and lots of exceptions to this. But the idea is they should still need a warrant online. Anthropics argument is, well, the AI will never get tired. It can search everything all the time. That means we're just going to do mass surveillance.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have an anthropic that it's self description and its public persona is always like we're thoughtful and we respect humanity and rights and all of these kinds of things. I think that's probably where the clash came in because anthropic, you know, as has been made clear, has worked with the defense department for a while and has many other contracts with the government that it has used. It hasn't been a problem. It was only in these specific areas where as the government was seeking to expand expand the contract that it had that you know the senior leadership of Anthropic began to say well we have to make sure that we're not crossing these red lines that would potentially harm our reputation as the sort of thoughtful safe AI provider.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in ways that all previous administrations wouldn't do. But they haven't really said that directly about surveillance, especially surveillance of Americans. There's been hints of it, but they haven't come out as strongly on that. So I'm not entirely sure that it's that. The other half of it is, I think maybe it has to do more with anthropics positioning and the general view of AI is this possibly existential technology where anthropic has always presented itself as were the sort of thoughtful good guys and whether or not you believe that is kind of besides the point but they have this reputation out there we're trying to do this in a way that is safe that that respects humanity and is paying attention to all of these things and so when you have that clash i think that's where the the struggle comes in you have a trump administration that just wants to be able to do whatever it wants to be able to do and they're not subtle about that and you”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few different things there. And it's not entirely true that we haven't backed off this stuff at all. I mean, the revelations did lead to some changes within how these things happen and there are now, I forget what they're called, but they're like these civil amicus people within the FISA court that will act as a presenting the other side on certain issues. We've seen some of the authorities limited in certain ways and they come up for reauthorization every so often and people activists have been very aggressive in pushing back and trying to put some more guardrails on. But to the larger question, I think there's two different things. I think you're half right in that this administration is not subtle and just says out loud the things it should. And that we're at war with Iran.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They just announced their intentions in a way that maybe all administration should just announce their intentions and see where the chips fall. But I'm looking at, okay, there was Ed Snowden here in New York City. There's AT&T runs a building that everyone knows is an NSA building. Like it's just a giant building and we're supposed to pretend it's not an NSA surveillance center, but like it's right there. It's huge. None of that seems to have come to anything. Right, like all of these revelations, these leaks we haven't backed it off. In fact, it's only increased as so much of our lives. That might actually be the thing that causes the reckoning. Do you see that playing out anyway?”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other thing that comes to mind again AI is new and it's so tempting to come at new technologies is that these are problems of first impression. No one's ever had to think about this before, but the reality is everyone's been thinking about this stuff for a long time. Maybe the thing that's new here is not AI, but the second Trump administration, instead of doing a bunch of lawyering that maybe no one will ever read to justify their actions to a secret court that no one's paying attention to, they're just not that subtle. They're not that sophisticated. And they're just saying they're going to spy on everybody all the time.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it has to be either that Sam and whoever was surrounding him didn't understand how these work in practice, or they did, and they just assume that the public wouldn't know and therefore they could get away with it.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think there's two possibilities, and that's one of them one is that he got played the same way that the public got played for many years. The alternative theory, and I have no idea which one of these is true, is that he or some of the lawyers at OpenAI, who I think are very competent and very knowledgeable, knew this but thought that they could play the same game that the NSA played for a few decades. And that as long as they say these things and then they say the words, but they don't reveal the actual interpretations that they could get away with it too. So Sam comes out with the statement that makes it look like, you know, we had the exact same red lines as anthropic did and the government was great with that. In fact, I think Sam put it that they had a third red line, that anthropic had two red lines and open AI had three and the government was perfectly fine with it. And that left a lot of people sort of scratching their heads. But I think.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They actually now, after all this time, they mean something completely different, and we just don't want to be part of that. That's the fight. I just want to compare that to Sam Altman, who swoops in to say, we'll do all awful uses and then post this long message being like, here are all the laws we're going to comply with. And it seems like he didn't know how the NSA had reinterpreted these things and kind of got taken for a ride. And he's since walking it back, like I'm saying, even as we are recording, I'm confident there are more tweets in everyone's positions have changed. Sam has been walking it back slowly, but it does seem like open AI, Sam Altman, got roped into reading the statutes on their face and believing what they said. Is that your interpretation of events as well?”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This brings me to Anthropic. Anthropic is primarily an enterprise company. They're good at the government. They've built those muscles. They're staffed by people who are really well versed in some of this stuff. They obviously looked at Pete Hegseth saying, we want all lawful uses. And they went two levels of interpretation down and said, well, your literal belief is that these words do not mean what they say they mean on their face. And so all lawful uses is too big. And we want to put some guardrails, particularly on mass surveillance. Again, I'm going to bracket out autonomous weapons. That was the other red line, but particularly on mass surveillance, Dario Mode is out there saying we can do too much. This is too dangerous. This is a Fourth Amendment violation. And the tension there is you're saying you're going to comply with these laws that say one thing.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But one, that might not be true. Getting too much information is probably just as bad as too little information because it can often hide the information that is actually useful in the information that you actually need to determine something, but also like we have a constitution in the first place and we have reasons why in theory we're not supposed to allow for mass surveillance without probable cause. And as a country that believes in the rule of law, we should be able to live up to that. And when all this stuff happens in darkness, you will tend to lose sight of that.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, obviously, you had like Ed Snowden who leaked a bunch of documents. You had John Napier Ty, who wrote a piece for the Washington Post in 2014, I believe, which sort of revealed the interpretation of Executive Order 1233 and said, that's the real issue to pay attention to. You have other people who have sort of spoken up about these things, but for the most part, the people who are involved and working within the administration on intelligence community stuff are sort of bought in to the view of the intelligence community, which is the overriding goal is to protect the country from something bad. And the best way to do that is to have as much information as possible. And it's easy to be sympathetic to the argument that, yes, having more information may allow them to catch something earlier or find something important.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somewhat famous for effectively being a rubber stamp for many years. I forget the exact numbers, but it was something like over 99% of applications that went to the FISA court for to allow for surveillance of certain situations were granted. And it's easy to just say, well, if 99%, that's obviously too much, obviously those bringing claims to the court, they're picking and choosing. They're not for the most part bringing totally crazy claims. But without that adversarial aspect and with a very strongly motivated group of people who don't, you know, who think we need to do this or are being told by an administration, we need to do this, they'll find ways to do it. And, you know, and that's where you end up over time.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wish I knew the exact answer, but what I think it is it's motivated reasoning, right? I mean, as a lawyer, you are there to sort of defend your client. And the success, if you can call it success of our legal system tends to be based on having an adversarial situation where you have different sides arguing over these things where you kind of, you know, the role of the adjudicator is to narrow in and figure out which side is actually correct. One of the problems with the intelligence community and the setup of it is that you don't have that adversarial situation. And so that makes it easier for one side to justify the argument that they're making because nobody is really pushing back on it. And so you combine that with the overarching fear of another terrorist attack, anything related to national security. So even when you have situations where you have like the FISA court, I mean, the FISA court was...”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's two things that really jump out of me. One, you know, you and I both read a lot of court decisions and appellate court decisions and Supreme Court decisions. And there's a fight in our Supreme Court about how to literally interpret the words in our statutes and our laws. And I won't get too far into it, but I would say generally the idea that you should just read the words on the page and do what they say is the dominant strain of statutory interpretation in the United States, right? Like left or right, that they both say it. They argue about some very esoteric fine points of what that actually means. But you should just be able to read these words and do what they say. That's not up for.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were very clever and who would look through well, you know, if we sort of position this this way or we state this this way or we interpret this that way we can get what we want and not technically break the law or not technically violate the fourth amendment the assumption was always like well we can sort of bend the law or bend our interpretation of the law and nobody's really ever going to see this or nobody who cares you know is really ever going to see this and therefore we'll get away with it”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the simplest form of it is just that nobody and certainly no president wants to be president during the time when there's a big terrorist attack because that makes them look bad, right? I mean, obviously they also want to protect Americans, right? That's part of their job, I guess. And so, you know, if you have an intelligence community that is basically operating in darkness because that's what intelligence communities do and they keep coming to you and saying, you know, hey, you know, if we could just get access to this information, it'd be really helpful in preventing a terrorist attack. And there may be cases where that's true, that the intelligence community is able to use this information in a way that works well. But we also are, in theory, a society of laws and a constitution that we're supposed to obey, but that allowed for the fact that administration after administration, again, Republican and Democrat, had lawyers.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How did we get to this point? This is a lot of incremental baby steps. You mentioned James Clapper in 2012. That's the Obama administration. You mentioned Ronald Reagan. That's the 80s. We're going through Democrats and Republicans here, right? The war on terror happens in the George W. Bush administration, 9-11 and the Patriot Act happens in the George W. Bush administration. This is a lot of incremental bad things. Yes. Under presidents of both parties, under congresses of both parties, how did this happen?”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then what they could do is keep that information, even if it was on U.S. persons, and they could do specific searches on that later, sometimes referred to as backdoor searches. So they collected this information that we believe they weren't supposed to collect in the first place, but they could keep it, and they promised the sort of pinky swore that they would keep it private. But if they did a search and found that you or I mentioned a foreign person, then suddenly it was fair game for them to do whatever they want with. Total, that has turned into a world in which they can basically collect any information that happens to touch outside the US. And even if it is entirely between two US persons, if they mention or even hint at someone who is not a US person, suddenly it is fair game to be collected. And from that, we've gotten what appears to be a form of mass surveillance of U.S. persons by an NSA that claims.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to store. There's a second part of this I mentioned first the executive order 1233 from Ronald Reagan, which effectively allowed the NSA as the technology changed over time and the internet grew, it allowed the NSA to tap into foreign communications, but that included any communications that may be left the US en route somewhere. You know, if I'm texting you and a message went from me in California through a fiber optic cable that happened to leave the US, the NSA could put a tap in the part once it's outside the US, collect that information, even if it was just going to you within the US.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different than the dictionary that you and I use, such that they can interpret words in ways that are different than the plain English meaning of them, including words like target, which feels like kind of a key word. So, you know, a sort of broad understanding of what this is, in theory, they're only supposed to target people who are not US persons, I think is the phrase. But the way it had been interpreted over time was that anything that mentions that person, anything that is about a foreign person is now fair game, even if that is the communications of a U.S. person. So if you and I were to text each other and mention a foreign person, that is now fair game for the NSA to collect and to”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And saying, you know, something is not right here, and I can't quite tell you what, or in hearings, he would ask intelligence officials, are you or are you not collecting mass data on Americans? And they would either deflect or in some cases outright lie. And I believe it was one hearing in like 2012 with James Clapper, who was the director of National Intelligence at the time. He was asked directly on this point and he basically said, no, we don't collect data on Americans. And that was a big part of what inspired Ed Snowden to leak the data, the reports that he leaked to Glenn Greenwald and Bart Gelman and Laura Poitris as well. So from all that, what we began to discover was that the NSA has its own dictionary that is somewhat”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is supposedly about setting out the rules of the road for intelligence collection. And so you have these three sets of laws, well, you know, a few sets of laws and an executive order To the public, the parts that you can read seem to say certain things about what our government and the NSA in particular can do in terms of surveillance, which when read with a plain English dictionary, the nature of which you and I probably have and understand, we would come away with a belief that the NSA's ability to surveil Americans was very limited. In fact, you know, to the point that they're supposed to, you know, if they realize that they are surveilling a U.S. person, that they are supposed to immediately stop and cry foul and, you know, erase the data and all this other stuff. And there were rumors for a while that that was not really happening. And there were hints. And in particular, Senator Ron Wyden was very vocal about going on the floor of the Senate.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And yeah, it sort of depends on how deep you want to go. But the sort of short version is obviously in the post-9-11 world, the US passed the Patriot Act. Which had some ability for the government to engage in surveillance, which was supposed to be for protecting us against future terrorist threats Over time that got interpreted in interesting ways, and there were some limits on that. We also had the FISA court, which is a special court that is supposed to review the intelligence community and their activities. Been traditionally a one sided court. Only one side gets to plead their case to that court and it's all done in secret. And so there's a lot of stuff that was not known. And then there was one other piece in all of this, which goes all the way back to Ronald Reagan, which is Executive Order 1233.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't have here in America. We don't have to do anything, but the National Security Agency has basically Redefined what a lot of words mean out of like colloquial English to mean, oh, we can just do surveillance. And then every so often there's a scandal when people discover that they're just doing surveillance. So just set the stage there. And I don't want to rewind you all the way, but it's been quite a lot of time. Where this pattern has repeated itself”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because of controversies around mass surveillance, and it all comes down to, I think you are the one who posted this, the National Security Agency, which is part of the Department of Defense, which we have to call the Department of War now for some reason. We don't have to do anything.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what I want to focus on with you is not the details of whether anthropic is going to sign a contract with the government or whether OpenAI is going to get that contract instead. I'm confident between the time we record this and the time people listen to it, there will have been more tweets and more things will be different than they were before. What I want to focus on is just one of the two red lines that Anthropic has really laid out. One of them is autonomous weapons. The law there is a little bit more nascent whether or not the weapons even exist or have already been deployed by Russia and the Ukraine war. I just want to set that aside because I think that is going to come into more focus all on its own schedule. The other red line that I do want to spend a lot of time on is mass surveillance. Yeah. And there's quite a lot of law here about mass surveillance. There's a lot of history, a lot of controversial history. The entire character of Edward Snowden exists.”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Dakoda. I'm Neil Patel, editor in chief of the Verge. In Dakota is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today we're going to talk about the messy, fast-moving situation at Anthropic, the maker of Claude that now finds itself in a very ugly legal battle with the Pentagon. The back and forth is complicated. But as of a few days ago, the Pentagon had deemed anthropic a supply chain risk, anthropic that filed a lawsuit challenging that designation, saying that the government was violating its first and fifth amendment rights, end quote, seeking to destroy the economic value created by one of the world's fastest growing private companies. I can tell you right now, we're going to be talking about the twists and turns of that case here on Dakota and on the Verge many, many times in the months to come. But today I want to take a step back and really dig in on one very important part of this situation that hasn't gotten nearly enough attention as things have spiraled out of control. How the United States government does surveillance. The legal authority that allows that surveillance to occur”
2026-03-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic doesn't trust the Pentagon, and neither should you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT