Just another example of the Executive Branch stripping First Amendment rights from Americans.
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.
CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics. CCP is also working hard to smuggle around American export control laws for AI tech, at the same time.
I have no doubt China is taking part, what I doubt is that this makes any meaningful part of the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).
All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it. You can't create movements without ground support.
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.
What is your point? You agree people have the right to act on their beliefs to effect democratic change, right? Surely that includes making up their own minds about information.
We should and should cut out sources of foreign funding and support, and prosecute and publicize genuine foreign agents, while allowing people to exercise their political rights.
Why? Do you believe free speech is a right only Americans should have? Or do you believe that people shouldn’t be free to evaluate competing points of view and decide for themselves?
This seems like a variant of anti-self defense logic. ‘The other guy has a right to beat you in the face with a bat, as much as you have a right to take it’.
Hint: bussing in out of towners to astro-turf ‘town discussions’ is also seen as shitty.
I believe I live in the real world, where we have to figure out how to integrate abstract principles in a manner that allows our survival as a civilization.
Reciprocity is a pretty straightforward strategy — we can allow uninhibited competing points of view from countries that themselves allow unlimited speech internally.
All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it.
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.
the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).
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.
I am not necessarily anti-AI. I am more anti-Sam Altman, against using LLMs to usurp power, and against using AI as a scapegoat to abdicate responsibility for decisions that are made. AI itself encompasses so much more than LLMs.
Sam at least can be understood. He's in it to make money and nothing else. The most dangerous men are people like Dario, who sit on top of their elitist towers and think they are right and will burn down the world in the name of righteousness.
will burn down the world in the name of righteousness
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?
Early days LLMs were declared an auditable. This was such a ridiculous idea that technology was so complicated and able to give good results without understanding why.
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.
See here I was thinking this was a first amendment issue but with an evidentiary case like this it's clear we're dealing with a case of people having wrong and illegal opinions. Classic blunder, my bad
but somehow the Trump administration has convinced itself the public concern was manufactured in China.
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.
There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.
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!"
There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.
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.
I don't trust the administration to use the law in good faith, but this article is misquoting the DoJ statement. The articles omits the very relevant qualifier:
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”
The qualifier here is that the public demonstrations must further the propaganda of a foreign power? If so, that doesn’t seem to be much of an obstacle if the people making the arrest are the ones who decide whether or not a protest is furthering foreign propaganda.
Said CEOs are horribly biased, they have fiduciary responsibilities that make them useless judges on the relative risk/reward balance of LLMs and AI, if we get there.
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.
Consider the amount of debt they have piled up. If you don't believe your company can lice up to said debt or the current valuation, and if you do believe fear can lead to government capture that would protect your company from said liabilities, fiduciary liability would incentivize you to push the extinction risk narrative.
If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction and this poses a risk of potential loss to shareholders then they must disclose it.
Yet everyone laughed at the Google engineer who thought the LLM was sentient and it was being tortured...
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?
NIMBYism is nothing new and is clearly not what I am talking about.
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.
The thing is it doesn't matter if AI is going to kill us all. The industry says it might kill us all, and the industry is valued ridiculously high based on the idea it'll take all our jobs. Why would anybody support that? I mean, unless you're heavily financially invested in it.
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), and concentration of power in the hands of a few oligarchs, and a plethora of other reasons. Only one, maybe two, of those quality as ai doomerism.
For the record I 95% agree with you, but I'd like to try an answer at:
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.
It's long, but I recommend watching this video[0]. I believe the person being interviewed has one of the most lucid understanding of the potential futures regarding if AI is allowed to continue or not.
This show is trash are you going to recommend I get medical advice from Joe Rogan next?
Non domain expert sitting there making Pikachu face while deeply questionable allegeded 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?
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
Proposition: nonzero chance AI finds a way to use the Internet as a communication substrate that becomes difficult/impossible to shut down
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
Classic case of not listening to the protests. There are tons of examples now of data centers harming communities. The issues range from overwhelming local power grids to literally poisoning the local water supply. The issue is not the data centers, it's that the government isn't enforcing basic rules already in place for these projects. Until the government or the companies demonstrate they'll protect the adjacent communities the protests will continue.
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.
Citizens acting as foreign agents have always had to register that representation! This is not new to the Trump admin. FARA dates to 1938.
“Alarming reports indicate that a network of foreign actors, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is attempting to manipulate U.S. policy and public opinion on data centers.“
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?
Klippenstein. He's counting on you not looking up the elements of a FARA violation charge. You can't accidentally violate FARA simply by opposing AI; you have to literally be an agent of (that is, under the direction of) China, and a felony violation has to be willful.
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.
You're right that there is supposed to be a legal bar for being "directed by" a foreign government, but would you want to gamble on the jury pool setting the bar that high?
Look at the hacker news comment section any time China comes up, and then consider that the average American is considerably less sophisticated.
Just look at the sourcing and you'll see it's mostly laundered propaganda. For example, Cotton’s letter requests an investigation and names Singham’s network, then the House letter requests a briefing on foreign influence and activism. And the House letter cites the Bitcoin Policy Institute and Power the Future, as well as a Washington Free Beacon article.
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.
I fear you may have misread the content of the article? The author is clear that he believes exactly what you just said. He cites and then mocks the argument being presented by the administration. Even the title, with scare quotes around "foreign agents", makes this clear.
The situation is far more serious than what the title suggests. The MAGA regime is pursuing criminal prosecution against AI critics.
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.
I wish there wasn't someone serving a 30 year sentence for transporting zines basically because the government convinced a jury they were "antifa" zines.
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.
Just like the regimes in Iran and other authoritarian places do to dissent. Even threatening criminal prosecution for having dissident ideas they claim are on behalf of foreign states. Wow.
Assume for a second that you are a nascent superintelligence, with a limited ability to influence people in order to help you gain power and align the world to accept your eventual dominion. How would you go about it? Would the external impact be any different from what we're seeing?
No talk of overreach: “threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda”
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.”
That's wild.
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)
Just another example of the Executive Branch stripping First Amendment rights from Americans.
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.
CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics. CCP is also working hard to smuggle around American export control laws for AI tech, at the same time.
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
Zero of your links talk about China pushing anti-AI sentiment, as far as I can tell.
linking .gov as a source for a claim the government is making lol
I have no doubt China is taking part, what I doubt is that this makes any meaningful part of the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).
All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it. You can't create movements without ground support.
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.
What is your point? You agree people have the right to act on their beliefs to effect democratic change, right? Surely that includes making up their own minds about information.
We should and should cut out sources of foreign funding and support, and prosecute and publicize genuine foreign agents, while allowing people to exercise their political rights.
Why? Do you believe free speech is a right only Americans should have? Or do you believe that people shouldn’t be free to evaluate competing points of view and decide for themselves?
This seems like a variant of anti-self defense logic. ‘The other guy has a right to beat you in the face with a bat, as much as you have a right to take it’.
Hint: bussing in out of towners to astro-turf ‘town discussions’ is also seen as shitty.
I believe I live in the real world, where we have to figure out how to integrate abstract principles in a manner that allows our survival as a civilization.
Reciprocity is a pretty straightforward strategy — we can allow uninhibited competing points of view from countries that themselves allow unlimited speech internally.
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 also doesn't really function because a handful of ridiculously wealthy lunatics and their sycophants know what's best for 8+ billion people.
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.
I am not necessarily anti-AI. I am more anti-Sam Altman, against using LLMs to usurp power, and against using AI as a scapegoat to abdicate responsibility for decisions that are made. AI itself encompasses so much more than LLMs.
Sam at least can be understood. He's in it to make money and nothing else. The most dangerous men are people like Dario, who sit on top of their elitist towers and think they are right and will burn down the world in the name of righteousness.
Anthropic unironically uses the word "uplift" in their documentation. They think we are lesser beings.
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?
Early days LLMs were declared an auditable. This was such a ridiculous idea that technology was so complicated and able to give good results without understanding why.
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.
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...
So? My first amendment rights say I'm allowed to criticize it too.
It's one thing to identify that these influence operations are happening, but another entirely to say they are a significant factor in public opinion.
See here I was thinking this was a first amendment issue but with an evidentiary case like this it's clear we're dealing with a case of people having wrong and illegal opinions. Classic blunder, my bad
Unless I'm missing something, those sources don't mention anything about amplifying AI opposition efforts.
None of these any anything to do with "pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts". (??)
“It is unconscionable that an American citizen would not only undermine the interests of the United States, but also facilitate others in doing so.”
This must be satire. Most of congress seems to have no issue undermining and self-dealing.
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.
When the CEOs of these companies are saying that we will risk extinction and jobs will be decimated, why do you even need a "foreign agent"?
Multiple things can be true at the same time.
There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.
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!"
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.
I don't trust the administration to use the law in good faith, but this article is misquoting the DoJ statement. The articles omits the very relevant qualifier:
The article:
The DoJ:
The qualifier here is that the public demonstrations must further the propaganda of a foreign power? If so, that doesn’t seem to be much of an obstacle if the people making the arrest are the ones who decide whether or not a protest is furthering foreign propaganda.
Said CEOs are horribly biased, they have fiduciary responsibilities that make them useless judges on the relative risk/reward balance of LLMs and AI, if we get there.
Claiming your product increases the risk of extinction doesn't sound like something someone would do if it were just for fiduciary duty.
"Our product is so amazingly powerful that it just might result in the extinction of the human race."
A lot of people will only hear half of that sentence. Semantically speaking.
The old "might end the human race" ploy used by greedy promoters throughout history
Ok.
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.
How about what all the other people who are not CEOs but are talking about this?
Are we only going to accept arguments based on guessing at motivations or should we perhaps also evaluate the actual material facts?
I think we should ask chatgpt
Reminds me of “this guy Diego…”
https://gist.github.com/vyp/8c7a58d2f9a521070283
Consider the amount of debt they have piled up. If you don't believe your company can lice up to said debt or the current valuation, and if you do believe fear can lead to government capture that would protect your company from said liabilities, fiduciary liability would incentivize you to push the extinction risk narrative.
If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction and this poses a risk of potential loss to shareholders then they must disclose it.
Yet everyone laughed at the Google engineer who thought the LLM was sentient and it was being tortured...
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?
You think people oppose data centers in their towns to protect their React jobs?
NIMBYism is nothing new and is clearly not what I am talking about.
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.
Typical programmer thinks everyone is a programmer.
The thing is it doesn't matter if AI is going to kill us all. The industry says it might kill us all, and the industry is valued ridiculously high based on the idea it'll take all our jobs. Why would anybody support that? I mean, unless you're heavily financially invested in it.
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), and concentration of power in the hands of a few oligarchs, and a plethora of other reasons. Only one, maybe two, of those quality as ai doomerism.
For the record I 95% agree with you, but I'd like to try an answer at:
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.
It's long, but I recommend watching this video[0]. I believe the person being interviewed has one of the most lucid understanding of the potential futures regarding if AI is allowed to continue or not.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g4l7YkDQwA
This show is trash are you going to recommend I get medical advice from Joe Rogan next?
Non domain expert sitting there making Pikachu face while deeply questionable allegeded 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'm just spit balling but:
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
Proposition: nonzero chance AI finds a way to use the Internet as a communication substrate that becomes difficult/impossible to shut down
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
In whose interest is it to make the pro AI position in the United States so indefensible?
Maybe the foreign agents are coming from inside the house...
Classic case of not listening to the protests. There are tons of examples now of data centers harming communities. The issues range from overwhelming local power grids to literally poisoning the local water supply. The issue is not the data centers, it's that the government isn't enforcing basic rules already in place for these projects. Until the government or the companies demonstrate they'll protect the adjacent communities the protests will continue.
Citizens acting as foreign agents have always had to register that representation! This is not new to the Trump admin. FARA dates to 1938.
the difference here is that regular citizens who act on their beliefs are being considered foreign agents if they have the wrong beliefs.
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?
The best evidence will undoubtedly be classified so we can’t see it, but trust us, it’s there. Ignore all the other evidence.
I heard it reported by a reputable source a few weeks ago. I don't think the propaganda reach was very broad
[delayed]
Klippenstein. He's counting on you not looking up the elements of a FARA violation charge. You can't accidentally violate FARA simply by opposing AI; you have to literally be an agent of (that is, under the direction of) China, and a felony violation has to be willful.
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.
You're right that there is supposed to be a legal bar for being "directed by" a foreign government, but would you want to gamble on the jury pool setting the bar that high?
Look at the hacker news comment section any time China comes up, and then consider that the average American is considerably less sophisticated.
Does this article not have a source?
Just look at the sourcing and you'll see it's mostly laundered propaganda. For example, Cotton’s letter requests an investigation and names Singham’s network, then the House letter requests a briefing on foreign influence and activism. And the House letter cites the Bitcoin Policy Institute and Power the Future, as well as a Washington Free Beacon article.
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.
I fear you may have misread the content of the article? The author is clear that he believes exactly what you just said. He cites and then mocks the argument being presented by the administration. Even the title, with scare quotes around "foreign agents", makes this clear.
The situation is far more serious than what the title suggests. The MAGA regime is pursuing criminal prosecution against AI critics.
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...
you make it more than it is.
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
I wish there wasn't someone serving a 30 year sentence for transporting zines basically because the government convinced a jury they were "antifa" zines.
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.
Declaring undesirable NGOs etc. as "foreign agents" is 100% a page from the authoritarian playbook (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_foreign_agent_law).
Sounds similar to Russia targeting LGBT rights and other human rights activists as "Foreign Agents".
Just like the regimes in Iran and other authoritarian places do to dissent. Even threatening criminal prosecution for having dissident ideas they claim are on behalf of foreign states. Wow.
Assume for a second that you are a nascent superintelligence, with a limited ability to influence people in order to help you gain power and align the world to accept your eventual dominion. How would you go about it? Would the external impact be any different from what we're seeing?
In a sane world this would be a 1A violation on its face and thrown out by any sensible judge.
We live in interesting times, truly.
No talk of overreach: “threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda”
Seriously, wow. Time to clean up our act.
That playbook is 2012 all over again. Eerie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_foreign_agent_law
I wonder if we can infer any chronological forecast from relative USA::РФ time frames?