"Secretary Hegseth has implied this designation would restrict anyone who does business with the military from doing business with Anthropic. The Secretary does not have the statutory authority to back up this statement. Legally, a supply chain risk designation under 10 USC 3252 can only extend to the use of Claude as part of Department of War contracts—it cannot affect how contractors use Claude to serve other customers.
In practice, this means:
If you are an individual customer or hold a commercial contract with Anthropic, your access to Claude—through our API, claude.ai, or any of our products—is completely unaffected.
If you are a Department of War contractor, this designation—if formally adopted—would only affect your use of Claude on Department of War contract work. Your use for any other purpose is unaffected."
Title is off: "Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth"
This is another statement, to their customers about Hegseth's social post, but perhaps resulting in further escalation because you know the other side doesn't like having their weaknesses pointed out.
Anthropic's stance here is admirable. If nothing else, their acknowledgement of not being able to predict how these powerful technologies can be abused is a bold and intelligent position to take.
Doesn't NSA have a backdoor to all these companies by default? I could have sworn I read somewhere years ago that the government demands a backdoor to all US companies if they can't get in on their own.
This an extremely polite “fuck you, make me”. It’s good to see that they have principles, and I suspect strongly that Anthropic will come out on top here if they stand firm.
Could this escalate to the point that Anthropic exits the US and sets up shop elsewhere? Or would the company cease to exist before it got to that point?
This is what real leadership looks like. Not the silence and complicity that you see from big tech, who regularly bend the knee and bestow bribes and gifts onto the Trump administration.
> Sam Altman told OpenAI employees at an all-hands meeting on Friday afternoon that a potential agreement is emerging with the U.S. Department of War to use the startup’s AI models and tools, according to a source present at the meeting and a summary of the meeting seen by Fortune. The contract has not yet been signed.
The people that need to see this are the VPs and execs at Apple, Meta, Google, OAI so they can perhaps reflect on what it looks like to be a good & principled person as opposed to just a successful person.
> If you are a Department of War contractor, this designation—if formally adopted—would only affect your use of Claude on Department of War contract work. Your use for any other purpose is unaffected.
/In theory./
In practice, if your biggest customer tells you to drop Anthropic, you listen to them.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 87.9 ms ] thread"Secretary Hegseth has implied this designation would restrict anyone who does business with the military from doing business with Anthropic. The Secretary does not have the statutory authority to back up this statement. Legally, a supply chain risk designation under 10 USC 3252 can only extend to the use of Claude as part of Department of War contracts—it cannot affect how contractors use Claude to serve other customers.
In practice, this means:
If you are an individual customer or hold a commercial contract with Anthropic, your access to Claude—through our API, claude.ai, or any of our products—is completely unaffected. If you are a Department of War contractor, this designation—if formally adopted—would only affect your use of Claude on Department of War contract work. Your use for any other purpose is unaffected."
This is another statement, to their customers about Hegseth's social post, but perhaps resulting in further escalation because you know the other side doesn't like having their weaknesses pointed out.
That’s okay! The use of autonomous weapons is only risky for the civilians of the country you’re destabilizing this week!
Perhaps it’s time or even past time to think of ways of screwing up their training sets.
I've been seeing it a lot lately, but don't remember ever really seeing it before. Do members of the military prefer this title?
> Sam Altman told OpenAI employees at an all-hands meeting on Friday afternoon that a potential agreement is emerging with the U.S. Department of War to use the startup’s AI models and tools, according to a source present at the meeting and a summary of the meeting seen by Fortune. The contract has not yet been signed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188698
Fuck this authoritarian bullshit.
“To the best of our knowledge, these exceptions have not affected a single government mission to date.”
I had assumed these exceptions (on domestic surveillance and autonomous drones) were more than presuppositions.
/In theory./
In practice, if your biggest customer tells you to drop Anthropic, you listen to them.