I started typing a large response to this but I ended up realizing it was pointless.
Rest assured: AI is your “reward” for your loyalty to the USA’s propaganda line. You get replaced and discarded, because to them, you are expendable.
Don’t worry, the strait will remain closed for months, so you won’t have to worry about production.
More will come of this and if developers like this keep volunteering themselves to help the fascists, we will all be fucked. Here’s an alternative approach: just don’t add this. You can fight back by not fucking implementing this. Easy.
Only thing you get out of this compared to the alternative of malicious compliance is opening yourself up to attack. You can still fight this without painting a big target on your back.
I don’t see how engaging in malicious compliance is being a useful idiot. Implementing the entire surveillance mechanism free of charge, that I would call being a useful idiot.
Purposefully implementing a broken feature to satisfy the letter of the law, while preserving the user’s ability to avoid the surveillance mechanism is certainly not that.
Pretty sure that making the AI profits fall will be very good for hardware.