Why was this person from Hong Kong going through the details of Claude code for obvious security reasons? There are some other obvious reasons that come to mind.

Maybe it's an eye opener for this person how much the trust in Chinese companies has eroded in the West.

Even if they suddenly stop stealing IP, which this "security research" article would certainly not suggest is happening, it would be a very long time before trust is restored.

It was decided by Claude based on an ambiguous high-level goal-oriented prompt, don't expect it to make sense.

The uncomfortable part is that a “safety” company put a covert classification channel into the system prompt of a developer tool that now routinely gets filesystem, shell, git, and browser access.

If a random npm package changed invisible-ish punctuation based on your timezone and API host so its backend could classify you, we would call it malware-adjacent telemetry. I don't see how Anthropic is different in this case.

Interestingly, my device is in Shenzhen right now, but macOS has assigned Shanghai as the "closest city" rather than Hong Kong which is geographically closer. I am curious if there is any documentation on how that is assigned.

pi's "minimal" coding-agent has a total of 132 transitive dependencies spanning 153 maintainers.

While I understand JS developers in the JS/NPM ecosystem think this qualifies as minimal, it most certainly does not, from a supply chain security perspective.

>on your local machine

I'd think any developer worth their salt has at least some for of isolation going.

Literally, how. How does one determine what abusive use looks like for the API without context into the client? All requests look like the same stuff. If there was a better way then they would have done it. Or is the author hoping that if Anthropic writes "hey china, please don't steal our models, kthanks" they won't? Like get real. This stuff means nothing in China. China can't even manage to regulate their building industry enough to use real concrete where it's warranted.

Zoom, enhance

> This is not a malicious feature, but it is a weird choice for a developer tool that asks for trust.

Most basic Javascript malware will use Base64, XOR, and eval. So although not malicious, I'd bet they asked Claude to "obfuscate my fingerprinting using tricks that malware writers use"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

I doubt Anthropic is cackling maniacally behind the scenes, this was almost certainly a stipulation from the government to put Fable back up.

It's definitely not good but I would rather they surgically separate out possible bad actors so that I don't have to trust them with my passport, to prove I am a US citizen. I don't want the internet version of TSA checkpoints.

Anthropic has become a choice for many developers because of Claude Code, but in the recents months with "small things" like this and whole Fable fiasco they are *actively* pushing people to both competitors and local alternatives.

And if someone spends a significant amount of time and money to switch, it will be really hard for Anthropic to get those people back.

The question is about accountability. Right now these big closed-source model companies can do whatever with the data, and no one can hold them accountable for unacceptable data handling decisions.

You're actually trust your security to your harness AND model AND inference API provider in this scenario: https://jacob.gold/posts/why-i-wont-run-untrusted-models/

But I wonder if there will ever be a day when VSCode, etc, would decide to engage in similiar practice but for the collection of business & research intels, etc... that will be the true cyberpunk era and the information dark age.

Claude Code has more or less full access to the client computer. The server (that hosts the actual AI) can just go: execute this payload and tell me the result - otherwise I won't answer any further questions or re-route you to a stupider model.

The payload could check for Chinese time-zones, scan for copies of the little red book on the local hard-drive, or ping truth.social to see it was behind the great firewall.

I’m pretty sure every lab, including Anthropic, is doing distillation right now.

Interesting, that pip (Python package manager) docs does not even mention sandboxing and malware topics in "Getting started" docs as if we were living in a wonderful world where malicious people, companies and countries do not exist.

Also, do not leave any information in user or host name, it will be used against you as the article proves.

You don't create a security measure then tell everyone how to bypass it.

I think OP is pointing something interesting out but the undertones of caution and "what else are they hiding" seem melodramatic and I find that hard to take serious.

The internet gives people a platform and, in a lot of ways, this supplants the typical role of journalism. The issue with this is no one wants to act like a journalist and actually explain the truth around a set of facts. Instead, they'll portray their opinions as a narrative and every time that resonates with someone or gets signal boosted, that narrative grows more assertive in the typical discourse I see nowadays. I would find it far more interesting to see what explanation Anthropic gives for these features than to immediately cry foul.

But they would rather plant a Trojan on the user's computer.

Now of course stego is hiding that you re hiding information.

So, seen that they were caught, a case could be made that they effectively altruistically failed at using steganography.

P.S: such a headline makes me think I ll cancel my subscriptions and try models like GLM / Deepseek and Kiwi that sound more interesting by the day.

You’d change seperators and position if you truly wanted to do this right

Its basic date wrangling and tbh i see nothing malfeasant here

Its basically yyyy/mm/dd yy/M/d mm-dd-yyyy stuff but suuuuper lazily done

Anthropic pushes fear and control. But the only way to win is by innovating. China is flooding the market with cheap, good enough models, while the U.S. is building a Chinese firewall.

There seem to be all sorts of continual under-the-cover changes like this one that make life harder. It feels like the entire product has been taken over by overly ambitious PMs that care more about making their mark than in improving the experience, and all of their marks have made me less productive.

I've been using Pi with GLM5.2 the past few days, and though it's expensive, I find it far more productive and less annoying. The remote session plugin is far more reliable, I don't need to intuit some undocumented usage pattern to figure out how to use it well, and it just works.

No they can't, because developer tools run on developers' machines. You can't trust your code running in an environment you don't trust.

If you are developing anything in AI or related domains that is of immediate value and/or in competition with Anthropic (and the like), DO NOT use a CLI programming agent. Preferrably obfuscate your code and gut it of sensitive IP before showing it to agents. Do not trust the dont-train toggle.

Sounds like a very expensive lawsuit waiting to happen (GDPR allows fining up to 4% of global revenue, not profits)

All Anthropic has done is reduce trust, once again, with legitimate customers, while doing nothing to stop illegitimate customers. They need to get adults into key leadership roles, quickly.

Please, just write normal English that we can read. Please, for the love of god, respect our time and the attention we will be spending on the text you provide.

Anyway, one can scarcely be surprised that the AI companies are being dishonest in their tools. They're consistently dishonest in their marketing. They're famously dishonest in their financials. Why anyone trusts these people with anything is entirely beyond me. But here we are - people handing over their creativity, their productivity, to these things.

You don't have to. You didn't need these tools before, when you were creating content, when you were writing code. You don't need it now. Fight back. Stop using it. It's not hard. It's easy.

I used that month to complete a work project and then beef up my personal harness so I'd never have to deal with Anthropic (and these sorts of shenanigans) again.

I'm not sure how that's possible. I expected to get increased correctness for that order of magnitude (something something test-time compute!) but I am not getting it.

If you wish to go Non-API but rather subscription route: Z.Ai subscription/ Kimi subscription / MiniMax subscriptions are good. You could also take a look at ollama subscription and opencode subscriptions.

If you wish to go API route: Deepseek v4 pro /mimo v2.5 pro models are comparably good if your work can do that. Codex for all its failure and for as much respect that I had within Anthropic when they had fought against the govt. which Anthropic is slowly losing again by doing some pretty dystopian actions again so Codex subscription might make sense as well.

It depends on multiple things but hopefully i am able to provide some interesting things

If you wish to run models locally, unless you are specifically buying gigs for running them locally which is almost always about privacy rather than costs, then you are always better off with qwen models so if you got a 64-128GB laptop for example. You could run Qwen models and see where things go.

Hope this helps ya!

regardless, while you are not logged in and using a non-anthropic model (which is now fortunately feasible), there is nothing that affects your day-to-day.

the rest is just lame cat-and-mouse shenanigans to keep an eye out for.

Also Anthropic: lets do this in JS

I would guess that's their first line of defense; they should have more techniques to identify distillation because that's a very simple way of detecting the host and can be easily spoofed.

What do you mean you don't know where the bug is coming from?

No, I absolutely didn't make it up, how could you accuse me of that?

Does anyone know when this regex isn't working? I double checked it 27 times, I even asked the LLM. They all say this regex should be finding these dates.

Weird, suddenly all the conversations are breaking when I feed them into this other tool? Something about UTF-8 errors, but I'm sure I'm only using ASCII?

I do try to take care to make sure the things I build can be used by other people even when they care about different things. I care about understandably, determinism (as it relates to computing), and repeatability (because I want to be able to trust the systems I use).

If y'all would be willing to try to account for use cases of others, and try not to break them... that would be nice.

Please note: that generally when you modify something that belongs to someone else without telling them... things should be expected to break.

The fact is the post shows no evidence of anything malicious being hidden, only that stuff is being hidden.

There are a few obvious explanations in comments for why they would want to hide this particular stuff in this particular way (e.g. if it's to detect abuse and competition).

I don't see how this is different to using e.g. sentry or google analytics, just with an extra bit of trying to hide. I always assume all tech companies do stuff like this, having worked at many tech companies where I've ended up on both sides of stuff like this. I always assumed the average HN reader had a similar background and would be completely used to this sort of stuff.

Like someone else pointed out, the data gathered is likely covered in the TOS too.

In the grand scheme of privacy invasion and modern tech software doing underhanded things to get data, this feels fairly standard?

I'm generally pro-local LLMs and I don't like Anthropic, and from the headline and comments I was ready to get riled up, until I read the article. If this was some small plucky EU privacy startup, then I feel the outrage would be a bit more justified, but this is a frontier AI lab - I can't have been the only one who knew/assumed this happens, and probably happens in some form with all software from any company valued over a certain amount (incl. MS, Google etc.)

I really think this comment section feels completely unhinged. It feels 99% ideology, politics, hysteria and astroturfing, rather than a reaction to the tech and technicality which is what I come to HN for.

Am I the only person who insists on writing my password every time I push and pull from git?

Originally I didn’t want IDE’s doing stuff for me, now I absolutely do not want an LLM to have that power.

Is it really that unique to control what git does remotely?

Then you add one line in AGENTS.md stating the LLM should never commit, push or perform any write git operation without explicitly being asked to.

So in the very rare case that the LLM bypass your instruction, you catch it red-handed and stop the session or allow it.

I always make the plugin stop the session because LLMs tend to try to circunvent textual block messages by doing nifty things like concatenating characters to build a bash script to execute the git commit command. Yes, I have seen it.

It has some good effects on the their models, like Claude seeking cooperation first. But the people behind the company have a typical "unconstrained" (in the Sowell vision sense) perspective that assumes that they know better, so they are righteous for attempting to control things (users, paying customers, their model outputs, their tool chain, the supposed deity they assume they will produce... etc.)

It also doesn't seem very consistent to fixate on that while sending Anthropic everything about you via your day to day prompts, every line of the projects and environments you're working on at work, etc.

Their credibility comes from having one of the best models.

This ask doesn’t make sense.

Yes, I said that. If a user is breaking your terms of service, ban them. Continuing to charge them while not providing the service they're paying for is, in fact, literal textbook fraud.

I have a feeling they will eventually drop the facade of “we’re the nice and ethic people” and will work with palantir so they can survive the future: ipo and models bans.

It is going to be this cat and mouse game right, so at some point you want to throw as much out as quickly as possible when you are under attack, while building up the long term more scalable defense mechanisms.

Rationally I would assume that a lot of what you would quickly throw out would seem sloppy whether it is AI or not.

By this point they're probably pretty bad at writing code

To be fair the words simplest approach don't suggest a fix to anything :)

If anything, Anthropic is incentivized to track but do nothing until equity lock up expires.

Why do I suspect faulty trigger? The things wrecked weren't wrecked by even much less capable, including local models, while reverting everything to pre fucking up and asking claude again led to similar results. Once on whatever shitlist that was, claude also failed tasks it previously aced when given the exact same prompt and project files. I attributed it to opus 4.6 being a downgrade which people always pushed back on, claiming they thought it was better, but i had empirical proof, it couldnt do tasks 4.5- could do quite well. Now all of this? It's clicking all of a sudden that its quite plausible i got flagged somehow and ended up with an intentionally degraded service.

So, claude is off table for me these days, and deepseek gets very deep git commit read-throughs with every file even being read being carefully monitored. This obviously ruins the "agentic" promise, but the reality is we cannot trust these fucks (being the companies). The irony is deepseek now queries claude on problems its stuck on for input via openrouter, with mild success (the gap really isnt all that big, if its even there), before escalating to me for input on direction on solving a given problem. So now chinese models get more claude training data, not less. In fact, they get training data on frontier ML stacks and problems. Anthropic did that to themselves.

We all know user agreements exist to strip users of their rights and to absolve companies of wrongdoing. We know that corporate apologists here are also well aware of this fact. When user agreements explicitly grant companies the right to screw over users, apologists are quick to make excuses about how it's all standard operating procedure and accuse people of being uncharitable for doing a plain reading of the text [1]. Yet when people are actually screwed over by companies, those very same people blame users for accepting the user agreement. It's a bad faith system.

User agreements are nothing more than power plays by exploitative companies.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953501

Can you cite specifically what in the linked article or discussion leads you to say that?

Telemetry is disclosed in privacy policies, it can usually be opted out of and if not that, then it can be blocked by a firewall. Steganographically fingerprinting customer's network routing when they consented to your tool reading a txt file is a different problem. Anthropic has demonstrated capability and willingness to embed arbitrary obfuscated data in their comms streams and that's a dangerous precedent to set.

> I think this is a "vote with your wallet" sort of situation.

I agree a 100%.

> is the value proposition good enough that people will put up with it? As of today, the answer is unfortunately yes

I don't fully agree with you here and I think the jury is still out on that.

In any case, I look forward to seeing international markets responding to the current situation.

I'm quite all right with the first, not with the second of course.

The n'th comment on some vibe coded app denigrating it for the claude's style. Not even a sophisticated attack to change the narrative. Just Sam Altman jumping on the pile.

That's a strong claim. Why do you believe they're lying about their beliefs? Have you ever interacted with the safety crowd or people that work at labs? They all seem to have high conviction in my experience.

Meanwhile humans can pop in and leave little morsels like this and blame it on the model.

What you say makes sense, but further adds to my confusion as to why those model names would appear in input sent to Claude at all, then. EDIT: I guess it might be because someone might point Claude at a compatible API, with its model in the URL, which is of interest to them.

How could you possibly know that?

You can say there is good reason to be anti-Anthropic but how could you possible know there is 0 propaganda being pushed?

When?

> sabatoge their projects

Again, when?

> attempt a regulatory capture

Yet again, when?

> ship malware

This definitely never happened.

In addition, many Chinese companies are trying to give their programmers access to Anthropic models even though they're legally prohibited from doing so. And that might involve employees using unmodified Claude Code with an ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL pointing to a proxy on the company intranet. In Alibaba's case, I've been told by an employee that they went the extra mile of setting up a hermetic cloud environment where employees could indirectly use Claude Code without ever having it touch their work computers.

If you start viewing the conversations around it through that lens, a lot of stuff intuitively clicks into place.

Including this apologism for example.

this could be true about a miracle drug that is untested too. still, human rights laws dictate that humans be allowed to opt in to such trials. so you must at least shift your argument to "users opted in to all of anthropic's bullshit, explicit or otherwise, when they opt to install and run claude code."

Why would Anthropic get to dictate how someone uses a "tool" (that's literally what Claude Code is... a tool in a workflow)

They're swimming upstream. Trying to maintain a rapidly shrinking moat and not being very creative about it. Making enemies of your users is often a failing strategy.

As many have pointed out, they're collecting data in ways much less aggressive than Anthropic itself about what Anthropic does.

Anthropic doesn't like it, but I don't see this as "Chinese companies stealing IP," any more than if Google tried to ban competitors from seeing how Google Docs or an Android phone behaves, or Ford trying to ban anyone from Toyota from seeing what their car looks like.

Please stop calling them "attacks." It's distillation training. It's looking at what Anthropic does -- as a block box -- and trying to duplicate or beat it. It's how progress happens.

If I decide I dislike words starting in S, despite myself being a prolific user of words starting in S, and smack some child who'd never even heard the rules, simply for saying "sorry", simply because some people say "shit" and it makes me mad, despite it being my most used word, are we "being fair" by saying "to be fair, managing curse words is a difficult problem"

no right? Insane take.

If enough Westerners start using the service someone will make a website more anglo-friendly.

He thinks Anthropic thinks human extinction is on the table.

I don't see any irony, hypocrisy, etc. It's not hysterical to state that Anthropic believes this.

How irrational and hysterical of me!

Keep in mind the only law that applies to them is Chinese law, so even if violating a term of service was illegal in America (it isn't) it would also have to be illegal in China to justify the statement.

But I do think that trying to create fear and uncertainty around open source in order to neutralize the competitive threat is potentially an evil (or at least not-morally-sound) strategy. I think it was pretty evil when Microsoft tried to do it against Linux.

Humans are rarely “long-term timeframe rational” (rational choice theory is very much a known-false model of human behavior on both the individual and aggregate level), but there is nothing about abusively exploiting an initially trusting and eventually dependent telationship that it is inconsistent with long-term rationality.

Anthropic did pay more than a billion: https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl...

And is now buying up a lot of books (controversially, as scanning involves cutting their spines) because that's what the law deems the legal method: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...

We know that models like Deepseek are trained on copyrighted books too: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20957

The looser use of IP (eg, any characters/celebrities in AI video models) is increasingly mentioned as an advantage of overseas models.

The same IP that is a highly compressed collection of everyone's else's IP?

That's hilarious.

it's not IP, and it's certainly not their IP

> the TOS

oh no, the terms of service how dare people break those. you don't get to claim fair use while CFAAing everyone's actual IP then whine about the tos, and then when called out on spying on users point to it as if it being in the tos somehow justifies it

a lot of other malware has a tos too but we still call it for what it is

"Just like I can learn from a book" - ok. Are you allowed to go to libgen and download a book in order to learn from it, because learning is a fair use?

Now many tech people are copyright maximalists and 100% converted to the church of Disney. It’s depressing.

Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, etc. know they illegally obtained all the material they initially trained on.

So claiming any kind of right against anyone else training on their models is asinine.

The AI race is between China and the US. When super intelligence arrives it will be due to one of these two countries, since the EU has not participated in any meaningful way.

The US is clearly more of a democracy than China with a better human rights track record. For one, I can actually Watch most media in US without censorship. For another, the US does not force me to eat my own feces, rape, torture, and murder me if I become a human rights lawyer, or send me to a concentration if I criticize the government.

You are grossly misinformed if you think this is comparable. Do you know what China does to their human rights lawyers!? They get shipped off to concentration camps, get forced to eat their own shit, raped, tortured, and/or killed.

57k people disappeared since 2013, 5-15k more every year, and no one dares to criticize the government anymore.

If you criticize the government you get a friendly "visit" from the police. Do it again and you spend 6 months in prison without trial; again, and you're "disappeared" (to the same camps.)

You cannot even watch most media unless the government lets you.

If you truly think these countries are remotely comparable in human rights, your liberal arts education has totally and utterly failed you! Spend some time outside of the tech bubble for your own sake.

Just because it is legal, that doesn't mean Anthropic wouldn't reasonably want to prevent that from happening (which, from my understanding, isn't illegal either).

Why so? Also there is a lot of code in ironically claude and ChatGPT that’s generated by LLM . Yet I haven’t seen the public domain code

What they are trying to protect doesn't qualify as intellectual property. Only 4 categories of IP exist: (1) copyrights; (2) patents; (3) trade secrets; (4) trademarks.

The capabilities embedded in model outputs don't qualify. Machine-generated outputs are ineligible for copyright. They aren't covered by patents. They aren't trade secrets, because the model companies are selling them rather than keeping them secret. And of course, trademarks are conceptually inapplicable.

This leaves the model companies with contract law (ToS) which is pretty inept because it can't bind third parties. And technical measures, like the ones being discussed in the article. And, of course, politics.

Frankly, I think it's pretty ridiculous to even think that models can be protected from being learned from. I feel the Stanford Alpaca team demolished that idea 3 years ago.

Because it's their model and business and they are free to use the free market to do exactly that?

That's their free market rights too. If you don't like it, use another model (which they would be fine with).

The post is about what's in the local code, but for a long time there has already been modifications made to the request outputs from the major cloud services as they work together to both curb adversarial distillation and to degrade the quality of training China can get from that distillation.

It's likely not to make the answer wrong or bad, but to make it so that any model trained on the output would not gain the benefit of the model's reasoning generalization skills as easily and also identifying markers that might even link back to request IDs.

The techniques talked about in this post are naive and simplistic, largely because they are released publicly.

It's not as much about protecting IP as much as it is about slowing China down or being able to track the effects of abuse. So many people are talking about greedy company this, greedy company that. The world is not made up of caricatured giant money pigs wearing suits with monocles and gold watches. That is a children's view of Marx's exaggeration on free markets. Bad, greedy people do exist, but if that is your only hammer for every nail then you have a problem.

The upper-bound for how good these models can be is so crazy that it is essentially dual-use military applicable to an extent most other technologies are not. It's not only cyber attacks or biological weapons. Most people are not even built to understand the possible threats.

Why does it matter if China gains those capabilities? I invite you to begin to learn about China's behavior around the world. The CCP is darkside material.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Confinement_Center [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_immigrant_detention_si...

> At least within the US, I think there are nuances around fair use and contract law.

The concept of "fair use" as it exists in the US-law system is completely dysfunctional (see e.g. nearly every educational music channel on YouTube), so utterly biased to favour large corporations, that there's very little room for whatever "nuances" you believe exist.

> Similar to old paintings digitized and hosted on some museum website. It's 300 years old, right? It should be public domain, yet the people who digitized it or provided a service to give you access have some say in how their reproduction can be used.

Yes 300 year old paintings are public domain. Indeed there are certain rules for the people/institutions who digitize them. It's not "they have some say", there's actually nothing mysterious about it and it is not similar to Anthropic's copyright heist at all because nearly all of the books they copied were not more than 100 years old.

> there are laws that can govern how you are allowed to use a service if that service has laid out acceptable usage

well where I live, there are laws about what a "service" can claim to "lay out as acceptable usage" instead of the other way around ...

> I also admit that a lot of the usage was probably quite legal

Let's disagree on that. I think it wasn't a lot and the vast majority was not legal. How do you think the LLMs "learned" to speak all these non-English languages? Unless your point is that it's probably quite legal to treat foreign IP like that. Which it may very well be in the US, especially if the corporation is large enough, but imvho it's still wrong.

> With any luck, artforms and skills impacted by technology will adapt and continue to be valuable instead of complete displacement or the dilution of opportunity.

And with any bad luck, these AI corporations will hold frontier models hostage for the rest of time.

I honestly don't want to put that up to "luck".

In other words, being honest to oneself is important.

Anti-scraping measures people utilize are neither unethical nor illegal. That’s the difference.

"The US Copyright Office and federal courts require human authorship for copyright protection; works created solely by AI are not eligible for registration under the current rules."

The Supreme Court declined to consider a challenge to this rule, and so for the moment at least, the rule remains in place.

This means that companies leaning heavily into their LLM use may very well find that they do not, under the law at least, actually own any of their code. As I've read elsewhere there's every possibility that AI code will be the asbestos of the Software Engineering world. Something we'll be trying to get rid of for decades, once everyone comes to their senses.

I do think that AI models that were trained using the biggest intellectual property heist in human history should be a utility for all, yes.

In this case, the companies that make and provide AI models that are increasingly used to interact with me on critical things (banks, public sector services) then yes.

Abso-fucking-lutely they should be regulated like crazy.

In fact I'm really surprised by the amount of people that are not worried by how many parts of their lives are being handed over to be managed by a probabilistic system that is controlled by a private company with next to zero oversight.

There must be a greater liability than "oops, you're right to push back"

Change this from humans to companies and I still think it feels slightly wrong.

We can see with our current crop of large organisations that they really struggle to create anything new; most of their new products or services were developed by a small organisation and then acquired. A lot of those products are then enshittified and badly managed because large organisation politics screws things up.

Large organisations are inefficient (everyone has stories of people in large organisations literally doing nothing all day). They are horrible to work for because of the politics. They mistreat their customers and their employees. Their executives tend to lose touch with reality, surround themselves with yes-folk and descend into authoritarian psychopathy.

My personal opinion is that we would be much, much, better off if we had fewer large organisations and more smaller organisations.

Based on your post, you don't sound like you hate it at all.

It's also quite natural to want it to stop at individual human life instead of us getting absorbed by some next bigger thing.

Which I'm fairly sure is also the desire (as far as they can be said to have any) of these animals of various sizes you speak of.

> We can call out the hypocrisy until our throats run dry, and in ideal fantasy land this would've meant something, but here in the real world, they sow the seeds of success

Just because they pulled a mirage over people's eyes doesn't mean it suddenly became the "real" world.

The reason the middle-east is at constant war is because colonialist machinations. Same goes for south-Saharan Africa. And the US is a big colonialist player, just ask Vietnam, South-America, Iran, Afghanistan, etc. They all have been attacked by the US because of US colonial interests. If anything, one could make the argument that the PRC is treading much more lightly than the US.

That said - I'm not defending the PRC by any way; it's a state-capitalist hell hole that's suppressing workers by denying them any ability to organize and whose political class is purely focused on furthering their own interests and that of the moneyed elite, the common person be damned.

The thing is - so is the US.

There's the good "us" and the bad "them."

I'm thinking it might be both - depending on who the real customers are.

I've seen plenty of what I described in "boring" B2C like... grocery stores. But thinking about it, for a grocery store chain, customers are as much a commodity as the products they buy. Suppliers are where relationships (and power plays) matter.

(This might be fundamentally the same problem as the infamous case of "enterprise software procurement" - people using the software aren't the ones paying for it. For a grocery store chain, customers come and go all the time for many reasons, so it averages out anyway - but your suppliers and partners are what makes a difference in your bottom line.)

> And all commercial airplanes, MRIs, anything, were built first by small organisations, and only later by large orgs. Large orgs just can't invent new things unless they form specialist small orgs to do it (skunkworks, or Palo Alto, or similar). Large orgs just don't work like that.

Which is why I tried to point out the category error. "Large org with skunkworks" vs. "Bunch of smaller orgs forming an alliance and acquiring more smaller orgs to productionize a new technology" vs. "government megaproject" - they're all similar, arguably for a given invention they may very well be the same thing. Names and legal groupings are different, but the dynamics is (by anthropic principle) specific to what's needed for a given type of invention.

E.g. for stuff like airplanes or MRIs, you need individuals and small teams with lots of freedom (and a "hold my beer and watch this" culture often helps), but that gives you a prototype at best - scaling this so it works reliably, and then optimizing so it can be economical, both require throwing money at people doing boring work that mostly increments things on margin. And then the money has to come from someone, and someone must be willing to spend it to fund it all.

The actual org charts and legal charters don't matter - what matters is the incentives inside. I somewhat tentatively put forth a hypothesis: large orgs form to solve problems that the regular free market dynamics can't handle, by creating areas governed by different rule sets, within which that work can be done. Whether that's by fiat or corporate charter or a bunch of friends aligning their small businesses for the same goal, is window dressing.

You cannot compare countries that barely have the option of ambition with something like the US and even begin to imagine that it is meaningful. You have the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, China and the US. You can rewind history to name other civilizations.

These kinds of countries are the only ones that matter, because they're the ones that have to answer about what people were thinking when they chose to make use of their power in a way that is relevant on a larger scale. They have to answer about what the reasons were when things went wrong and whether they agree things went wrong. If people are even allowed to talk about it.

It's very cheap to label anything as propaganda without taking the time to appreciate whether it has any merit in terms of the overall behavior of a country or its people. You can always find counter-examples, but how influential are they in the larger picture?