I’m a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a longtime member of the Wisconsin AI Safety Initiative, a software engineer, and an aspiring AI safety researcher.
Go Badgers!
sbaumohl
Karma: 46
Yesterday, a federal judge presiding over California’s Northern District granted a preliminary injunction, preventing the enforcement of the US government’s supply chain risk designation for Anthropic for now. While its analysis of the facts are not final, the judge found that because Anthropic’s case is strong and because the government’s actions have the potential to immediately damage them, the court should protect the status quo until the arguments of the case have been settled.
I predicted that Anthropic would likely prevail on its first amendment claims and it appears that the judge also found the argument convincing:
Here, Anthropic has shown a likelihood of success on its First Amendment claim. The
record shows that Defendants’ conduct appears to be driven not by a desire to maintain operational control when using AI in the military but by a desire to make an example of Anthropic for its public stance on the weighty issues at stake in the contracting dispute. Although Anthropic had always applied the usage policies in question to Claude Gov, it had been repeatedly lauded as a partner and passed lengthy national security vetting processes. Only when Anthropic went public with its concerns about DoW’s contracting position did Defendants set out to publicly punish Anthropic for its “ideology” and “rhetoric,” as well as its “arrogance” for being unwilling to compromise those beliefs. At that point, Defendants announced a plan to cripple Anthropic: to blacklist it from doing business with any company that services the U.S. military, to permanently cut off its ability to work with the federal government, and to brand it an adversary that could sabotage DoW and that posed a supply chain risk. Those actions go far beyond what would be necessary to address DoW’s ostensible concern about having complete operational control when using AI. This appears to be classic First Amendment retaliation.In first amendment retaliation cases, one has to prove that the government’s primary motivation for action is their exercise of protected speech. The legal term is but-for causation or demonstrating a “nexus.” Others may know this as counterfactual analysis: if Anthropic had not engaged in this protected speech, would the government had acted similarly? Anthropic argued, and the judge agreed, that the government acted due to its public statements and advocacy.
In this case, the public outcry from AI Safety communities and developers appeared to, in part, convince the judge. Third parties may file amici curiae or “friend of the court” filings, if they have a strong interest in the outcome of the case. For a laugh, read the Onion’s Supreme Court amicus filing on an unrelated first amendment case. The court received numerous amicus briefs warning the court about the chilling effects of the government’s actions will have on public discourse:
Several amicus briefs support this conclusion. A group of 37
individuals working on AI technology assert that the Challenged Actions “chill professional debate on the benefits and risks of frontier AI systems and various ways that risks can be addressed to optimize the technology’s deployment.” (Dkt. No. 24-1 at 8.) An industry group of “values-led investors” warns that the Challenged Actions chill speech necessary to allow them to direct their investments to support the “principles and values” they care about.Anthropic’s case falls pretty squarely into textbook first amendment retaliation. Despite the government’s broad powers over national security and administrative policy, courts generally frown upon the employment of government offices to punish individuals purely for engaging in protected speech.
The court also analyzed Anthropic’s Administrative Procedure Act (APA) claims. As I noted, Anthropic both claimed the designation was both beyond the powers of the government and “arbitrary and capricious,” or lacking a rational basis required for agency decisions. While the federal government has broad powers to enact change, federal agencies are required to follow many procedures before making a policy determination, as required by law. In Anthropic’s case, a supply chain risk designation required that no other reasonable and less intrusive measures to protect national security were available. The judge held that its likely no other courses of action were considered at all. The judge was particularly sharp:
The timing of the administrative record raises an inference that it was generated after the fact to justify the foreordained conclusion ordered in Secretary Hegseth’s mandate to “designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security” on February 27.
While I was surprised at the cultural backlash against the DoW and in support of Anthropic, I am not surprised by the court’s unwillingness to support the government’s naked attempt at corporate crucifixion. Executive fiat is not capable of overruling legislatively imposed due process nor first amendment rights.
As expected, Anthropic cites the recent precedent of NRA v. Vullo (for #1). #5 is also a strong case because while the executive branch has pretty broad discretion on a number of policy decisions, the law requires a lot of due process and deliberation, and Anthropic argues that even if the designation is within the powers granted under the APA, the process was also “arbitrary and capricious” (see pages 7⁄8 in the complaint).
In my non-expert opinion, the first amendment retaliation case here is pretty strong, especially considering existing precedent.
I agree with your title, but cannot agree with your solution. Some of the issues you pointed out are not intentional decisions universities could remove without major restructuring:
So after removing the international students from the calculations...
Having a sizable portion of International students necessarily subsidizes the cost of higher education for domestic students. Studies found that at public research universities, a fall in state funding led to an increase in foreign student enrollment, and I think similar trends affect most private LACs and even the top elite schools, although the latter to a much smaller degree. I believe universities also likely need a portion of international students to maintain their global reputation and ranking. Simply removing international students would require a huge funding and incentive shift from the status quo.
Additionally, college standardized test scores are biased towards the highest income earners. If we only admitted students with 99th percentile (1500-1600 SAT) scores, it would produce freshmen classes full with almost only children from the richest families, arguably less meritocratic than the system we currently have. This distribution might be less skewed if we purely used test scores, but that trend is likely to remain.
I agree with some points very strongly:
Top students are left competing for an artificially small number of slots.
This is true. The supply of spots at America’s top institutions is artificially constrained. Here, I’m focusing my criticism on just T15/T10 schools. Given their large endowments and access to top instructors, I strongly believe that these universities should all expand their freshmen class sizes by 10-20%. Despite the US and the world population increasing over the past 50 years, their class sizes have not kept pace. This helps increase the “prestige” of these universities in the rat race towards a lower admissions rate while increasing their rankings, but it has the socially irresponsible effect of making a social good, elite education, increasingly scarce. It also has the ripple effect of overwhelming the next best options for students, flagship state schools, which unduly burdens the public university system to maintain private schools’ elite status.
If we built the infrastructure (mainly to make space) and mandated a reasonable increase in freshmen class size over time, we could make elite admissions less competitive, reduce the feeling of “randomness,” and allow universities to continue some of their selective practices.
Cheese