Code Is Free Speech. Seriously.

What I’ve realized is that responsible A.I. governance may really come down to something resembling a First Amendment approach. Large language models, to me, are simply artifacts: objects made from the language expressed by tens of millions of people. And Anthropic, to me, is a software publisher. I do not see Claude as a living thing; I see it as a reference work prone to glitching, a surreal encyclopedia with wild side effects. I pay for the privilege of using it to generate new things — code mostly, and industry research reports. But, critically, the things it generates are then mine, and I use them as I see fit. And, also critically, if I share them with the world, I bear responsibility for them. It is, I admit, appealing to imagine the government — well, maybe not this government — hitting the brakes on A.I. We could all use a rest. But ask yourself: Are you willing to compromise your free speech rights in order to keep people from finding bugs in your word processor? That’s what’s increasingly being asked of us when the government restricts the use of these models by certain groups, with little transparency and poorly articulated reasoning.