Anthropic, as a private vendor, has every right to set and enforce its own terms of service with the Pentagon — including refusing certain uses — just as any vendor (like a lawn-care company) can decline a customer, since Claude is not a monopoly utility and competitors exist.

49:33with the Department of Defense. I think that's very important personally, but I'm not offended in a free market. If a company says like, you know, the government market is just not one I want to be a part of. I think there's enough competition that it's no longer a utility. It's not the government shutting you out, you know, turning off your electricity. It's like a private sector company, a vendor. You know, if

49:53my lawn guy says, "I don't want to be your lawn guy anymore, right? Because I don't like what you do or you believe or you're working in something. I just don't want to be your vendor anymore. I shouldn't be able to compel him to be my lawn guy. I go find another lawn guy." >> Oh, sure. >> That's I think I mean that's the analogy to where Anthropic is the Department of

50:10War in my mind. It's a vendor and they have the right to dictate their terms if they want to. Like that's why I made the the analogy or to utility services because you know here in in in Connecticut Con Edison's not allowed to cut off my power because I post stuff on Twitter, right? Like that's just not something they can do. So So there are certain services that grow to a scale

50:32where they become these utility or essential services and you're just not allowed to deny people those services, you know, based on like ideological disagreements, right? But I agree with you that that's not not happening here because it's not private individuals being denied the service and it's also there are other competitors. And I think maybe part of what's happening here is back to what we talked about earlier

50:54which is the lack of transparency in the terms. It's kind of like here I have this product you know government you know you can pay us X to use it and then and then maybe new guard rails get introduced right and it's like hey we used to use it for this and now it's not letting us you know do some facial recognition thing you know what the heck

51:12well yeah we introduced these guardrails like well that wasn't part of the four corners of the contract because there just wasn't transparent you know terms even between behind the models so I think your work to make that more robust and and standardized and transparent current, you know, will probably help with this too, right? >> Yeah. And I think, you know, my ultimate criticism is for Congress. You know, the

51:32the operative controversy are the lawful uses of it. You know, my objection and I think anthropic's objection too and the Google employees is what's lawful use is. And that's not for anyone to decide, but Congress, they should be able to say, you know, a lawful, that's the open question. using AI for domestic surveillance and to assimilate records where they can make personal dossas on you which LLMs um can