THIS IS GEORGE ORWELL SCARY—DYSTOPIA IN REAL TIME

 

Much of the corporate-dominated mainstream media conveniently “misses” news items that are all about your constitutional rights being violated daily under the Trump regime without your even being aware of it. But independent journalists are attuned to every nuance and are letting nothing slide.

There’s a reason that investigative journalist-bloggers, independent pro-democracy YouTube channels and citizen whistleblowers who would normally have only a handful of subscribers are suddenly becoming major players in the world of objective journalism. And it is that mass mainstream media is increasingly being usurped in often hostile takeovers by right-wing corporate conglomerates that are either watering down or completely denaturing their original philosophy.

The saddest and most blatant case of late is that of CBS, which has gone from having the most honest, objective and respected mass media news organization in history to being a corporate-censored mockery of its former self, with its bottom-line-oriented management playing on the losing side of Donald Trump’s game of intimidation and subjugation.

I make this prelude to the topic of this essay simply because, for those not tuning in to independent sources, it would have been easy to miss Defense Secretary (he calls himself “secretary of war”) Pete Hegseth’s attempt to bully a major AI firm into letting the Orwellian Trump regime use its advanced technology for the most nefarious of dystopian purposes. And, in the name of the Trump regime, he gave this private contractor until midnight tonight (February 27) to accept the government’s pretensions or to suffer the consequences.

Here's what I’m talking about. It seems this AI company,  Anthropic, which was founded in 2021, by former AI executives Dario and Daniela Amodei, created some spectacular software whose original purpose was specifically to make AI safer and less apt to go rogue. Dubbed Claude, this AI assistant was designed to research, develop and deploy safer, more reliable artificial intelligence systems. In other words, not just an AI system but an AI creation tool. What’s important is that Claude introduced a series of guardrails, the purpose of which was to focus on AI safety, and what Anthropic calls “Constitutional AI”.

It is a trait of the Trump regime—and among others, of former Fox far-right propaganda talk-show host cum Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—that if there is a choice between what is morally and legally right and what is categorically wrong, they will pick the latter. So what Hegseth, obviously with a nod from his boss, has done is to called on Anthropic to remove those guardrails for the use being given to the software by the State (Trump’s deep state, in this case).

Specifically, the allegation is that Hegseth has two particularly nefarious uses in mind for Anthropic’s AI. One would be to use it basically as a sort of hunter-killer software, which could be programmed to carry out military strikes and extrajudicial executions anywhere in the world without human intervention. In other words, it appears the AI would make decisions according to its Trump Defense Department programming as to what or who constituted a “threat”, and launch its own strikes with no person being involved. Kind of, “Look Mom, no hands!”  That means, plausible deniability for the Executive and no need to go to the pesky Congress for approval in carrying out what are basically acts of war.

But it doesn’t end there. Hegseth (Trump) also wants to use Anthropic AI to create mass domestic surveillance software to monitor the activities of everyone in the United States. This would mean the regime could completely ignore constitutional guardrails that require probable cause, court orders and other checks and balances designed to protect your rights, my rights, and the rights of every other person in America.

It would also very likely provide the most paranoid government in US history with the potential ability to learn what individual Americans in every walk of life are thinking and saying by perusing in detail their social media accounts, emails and any other data it wished to hack, and to retaliate against “disloyalty” to the regime.

When Hegseth pitched his idea of removing the guardrails to Dario and Daniela Amodei, the couple gave him a flat “no”. Obviously and logically, because the sort of unconstitutional abuse that removing checks would potentially allow was precisely what their software was invented to block.

But we need to recall that Trump’s is not a normal administration. It is, instead a regime and a criminal enterprise. So Hegseth is using blackmail to get what he and his boss want. First, he has threatened to cancel the 200 million dollars in defense contracts that Anthropic now holds. But he has also doubled down and suggested that the firm could also be declared an enemy of the United States. And just in case that didn’t make the Amodeis quake in their boots, he has also suggested that the US might well just declare Claude essential to US intelligence operations and  invoke the Cold War-era Defense Production Act.

That outdated law would permit the Trump regime to essentially take over Anthropic and do as it pleased with the original software.

If any of this sounds familiar to average Americans, it may be because they recall a 2016 action thriller based on the character created by bestseller Robert Ludlum for his now world famous Bourne Trilogy. This was a continuation of the story—without the participation of Ludlum, who had been dead a decade and a half by this time—called simply Jason Bourne.  

We were already intimately familiar with Bourne—played brilliantly by Matt Damon—as an unlikely hero and patriot, a man whose mind was purposely broken by government trainers, a highly trained government assassin, one of a brainwashed killer elite under the control of the black ops group known as Treadstone. It is after Bourne becomes the victim of amnesia that his search for his former identity leads him to become a whistleblower and avenger.

Anyway, in Jason Bourne, it is already 12 years after his search began, and Bourne has become a major headache for the CIA, one who refuses to go away. He has already been responsible for the resignations of several directors and has flipped other top CIA operatives, while killing off most of his former assassin colleagues, who are now being used to hunt him.

The sinister CIA director is now Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones). We learned that Dewey is pressuring a social media software genius, Aaron Kalloor, who has created the ultimate social media experience with his platform known as DeepDream. Kalloor—like Dario and Daniela Amodei—is the public face of corporate social responsibility in the Internet Age. His dirty little secret, however, is that Director Dewey’s office provided funding for Kalloor’s startup (much as the Amodeis’ young company depends on its 200 million dollars in government contracts).

Dewey (like Hegseth) has told Kalloor in no uncertain terms that he wants the guardrails removed from his platform so that US intelligence can surreptitiously employ it as a tool to spy on Americans nationwide. And he also wants the program to run parallel to the CIA Blackbriar black ops platform for targeted assassinations. Kalloor refuses, and Dewey orders Kalloor assassinated, while trying to kill two birds with one stone by also flushing out Bourne and having him killed as well.

In the fictional account, of course, Bourne saves the day, Kalloor lives, Dewey dies, and Bourne slips away into anonymity again, to fight another day for truth, justice and “the American way”.

When this fiction is compared to the facts about Hegseth and Anthropic, the common phrase, “You can’t make this shit up,” springs to mind. And it’s true, you can’t and I can’t. It takes a creator like Robert Ludlum and those who followed him in the Bourne franchise to come up with something this twisted.

But in the “real life” of the Trump era, there isn’t even some sinister leader of secret black ops pulling the strings behind the scenes. This is all right out there. And that is even scarier than any spy thriller ever written. If this is what faux Attorney General Pamela Bondi meant when she said Trump was “the most transparent president in history,” she’s not wrong. This is the Trump regime openly extorting a company to get it to violate the Constitution, the law and the rights of all Americans, while also trying to get that firm to help it commit remote crimes against humanity, and against international law.

We can only hope that Anthropic stands firm and sues the government to the full extent of the law, instead of knuckling under as so many much more major companies have in the face of Donald Trump’s threats and mafia boss tactics.