Perhaps we need First Amendment rights for software

Paul Ford, What the Government’s Fight With Anthropic Reveals About Free Speech in America, NYTimes, July 12, 2026.

Ford begins by reviewing the history of Anthropic's relationship with the federal government concerning Mythos and then Fable 5, concluding:

Whether you take Anthropic’s side here or the White House’s, the events of the last several weeks are clearly a poor, disorganized way to approach governance of these models. I think they point to a troubling future. And that brings me back to the idea of free speech and code.

Moving on:

It’s easy to see large language models and chatbots as exhibiting pseudo-consciousness. [...]

But these things are not conscious. They gathered vast troves of public and private information — sometimes without permission — and organized it into huge blobs of interconnected numbers.

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.

Notice, BTW, how these statements are consistent with the view that LLMs and their encompassing chatbots are cultural technology, collective entities comparable to markets, libraries, and corporations. See also my article at 3QD, Of Grammar and Truth: Language Models and Norms, Truth and the World. Now back to Ford, in progress: 

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. You see this with lawyers who submit A.I.-generated briefs — judges have no empathy for “the bot wrote it” arguments.

Prudence and slow-rolling releases might benefit the public in the same way that crash-testing cars is of benefit. Standards are good. But if the government can yank access at its whim, we’re starting down a slippery slope — the same slope we go down when we monitor library patrons and track what they read.

Now there are rumblings of ID-verification programs for A.I. users, to assure nationality. Do I need to be permitted to be an A.I. user, like I need to be to drive a car or own a gun? Do we want a future where Officer Claude pulls you over on the information superhighway and demands your license and registration?

Further along:

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.

If A.I. is the new interface for creating code, and code is a form of communication and expression, then it’s incumbent to ensure only the most critical restrictions are applied to these models. And this is a new kind of technology, an industrial-strength symbol generator that often works in unpredictable ways. The balance is incredibly hard to strike, and it requires enlightened governance. Then again, there are established exceptions to free speech in America. We are capable of discernment.

There's more at the link.