Is the ArXiv safe from the current US Government attacks?

Perceived risks to arXiv and related archives

• Several commenters note arXiv is primarily supported by Cornell, foundations, and member institutions, with a sizable but time-limited NSF grant; they see Cornell’s stability as a buffer against direct political shutdown.
• Others emphasize a broader “funding purge,” especially targeting NSF projects framed as DEI-related, creating uncertainty for research infrastructure in general.
• Multiple people argue that US government–run open-access repositories (e.g., PubMed, NASA, DoE/DoD archives) are more vulnerable than arXiv because they are directly under federal control and could be altered, defunded, or removed.

US politics, “weaponization,” and fear vs. skepticism

• One side claims the current administration is willing to punish disfavored speech and actors, cite examples involving the press, political corruption cases, social-media pressure, and recent mass firings at nuclear agencies, and extrapolate to potential pressure on private hosts (Apple, Microsoft, GitHub).
• Opponents dispute these examples (or attribute similar behavior to prior administrations), argue there is little concrete evidence arXiv is a target, and characterize the thread as partisan or “unsubstantiated fearmongering.”

Data control, safety, and decentralization

• Several participants argue “nothing is safe”: self-hosting improves protection against quiet legal seizure but not against coercion; cloud services lower the bar for state access.
• LOCKSS-style redundancy is raised: personal control best protects confidentiality, but distributed mirroring best protects against destruction.
• There are calls for organized efforts to decentralize important scientific repositories with open protocols and many independent mirrors; arXiv’s older mirror network is mentioned as having been cut.

Shadow libraries and legitimacy

• Suggestions that Sci‑Hub or Anna’s Archive could “take arXiv under their wing” draw criticism: integrating a legal, mainstream preprint server with large illegal collections is seen as likely to destroy arXiv’s institutional credibility, even though Sci‑Hub is acknowledged as widely used for convenience.

Broader geopolitical and technical fallout

• Some predict that political instability and perceived unreliability of the US will push Europe off US clouds, onto Linux, and away from US weapons systems; others call this unrealistic, pointing to massive Windows/Active Directory lock-in and the cost of migration.

Governance, disputes, and moderation

• A detailed anecdote about a plagiarism dispute on arXiv highlights that repositories are poor venues for adjudicating copyright and authorship conflicts.
• Meta-discussion centers on HN moderation: whether flagging this topic illustrates the very vulnerability to non-technical pressures being discussed, or simply reflects HN’s long-standing policy to de-emphasize political threads.