I wonder if this is going start being abused soon.
If I was Palantir or any other GOP aligned company, I would be completely against this. What's to stop a Democratic president from doing the same thing and destroying them?
Because the modern Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party. They haven't really had any hard hitting legislation nor legal regulation/rulings on corporations in easily the last 30 years.
I doubt that is going to change anytime soon. They are a private entity, so they can manage and change their primary system any way they want.
> Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party. They haven't really had any hard hitting legislation nor legal regulation/rulings on corporations in easily the last 30 years.
Sarbanes-Oxley? Dodd-Frank? ACA? Now I'm sure you (like, every other living human) has a ton of nitpicks and criticism of bills like that. But they're real and they passed and they're largely-to-wholely partisan creations of the Democratic policy apparatus (SOX looked very bipartisan and was passed under Bush, but the actual bill was written mostly by democratic staffers).
I mean, fine, you'd like different regulation. But they're responsible for basically all the corporate regulation active in the US regime.
Bothsidesism is a very poor tool for this particular argument. Work with your allies, please.
Seeing Dodd-frank in the list is pretty hilarious, because it was put in place for the issues that arose from repealing Glass-Steagall by Clinton. Which arguably was one of the biggest causes of allowing the activities that lead to the Great financial crisis in 08.
Please point to the hard-hitting ones, almost all the big co's at the time thought they got off too easy and were expecting a lot worse. At the end of the day, Sarbox and Dodd-frank basically just required those businesses to increase headcount 10%.
The comparison should be compared to the Republican party, the Democrats have done more and that's all that matters when you are making a choice between the two.
I would argue the democrats are more a process oriented party. They wouldn’t pull this shit because they care about process - so much so that they wouldn’t even consider half the stuff that’s going on now as it circumvents process.
What a load of bullshit. There are better candidates and parties and worse ones, they are not all the same. This sort of attitude just feeds voter apathy and resignation.
Democracy is an imperfect system, but its much better than the alternatives. If more people paid attention and participated, we would have much better outcomes.
And all the shenanigans around 2016 when Bernie Sanders was shut out by the DNC. Even Elizabeth Warren said outright that the DNC rigged the 2016 nomination. I think the outcome would have been very, very different if the DNC didn't fuck with the timeline and forced Hillary as the Dem nominee.
The DSA branch has almost zero political power. Yes, Mamdani was elected. No, it was not because of DSA.
DSA has very limited understanding of the politics of power. Agree or disagree with their policy and advocacy, but they lack a unified, coherent policy platform. They take stances from (imo) good places and suggest proposals that are politically untenable (to say the least) and realistically ridiculous.
Mamdani is a unique politician. He is generationally charismatic, articulates the pragmatism behind solutions, and taps into the everyday struggles of citizens. When he talks about ideologically, it's soaring rhetoric about who we can be. His critiques, however, are often strongly tethered to tangible concerns (rent, food, education) vs. the DSA-type far left.
Source: worked in democratic politics, on a presidential campaign, with a wide range of people on the left (and "left") including DSA die hards.
Can't there be more politicians that talk about the pragmatic aspects too? Didn't El-Sayed win the Michigan nomination? I don't understand how this is hard for politicians to grasp, it happened with the Roosevelts and the New Deal, not sure why it can't happen now, even despite money in politics, as Mamdani and El-Sayed winning shows, who both had much fewer dollars spent on them than the competition.
You got that exactly backward. Modern republicans are the ones that get the most in corporate PAC money, at the high end it's like 60/40% split... the majority to the GOP. Also, the fact that modern republicans brought Citizens United and just earlier this year NRSC v. FEC.
You really can't make a valid case to say the dems are the corporate dominated party. ffs, they are the only ones even attempting to put common sense regulations on the financial industry, something Trump called "bad for business" when he undid antitrust legislature that got passed under Biden.
He didn’t say they were _the_ corporate party, just that they’re dominated by corporations. It’s notable because it’s an accusation that they pitch at Republicans often (not that R is doing any better there, but it’s part of their platform more or less).
The dems haven’t done anything notably anti-corporate in ages. There are rumbles about doing it (anti trust, supporting unions, climate change), but it never _quite_ seems to actually materialize into anything.
Cynically, that’s why both sides lean so hard into the culture wars. The men in suits would rather we argue about how to interpret history than whether a wealth tax makes sense.
He actually did say dems were the corporate party. He contrasted the democrats not do something that the Republicans did because Dems were dominated by corporations.
The contrast implies that Republicans are in your words "anti-corporate"
A few things I can remember them doing are net neutrality, banning non-compete agreements for employees, a DMCA exception for allowing 3rd party repairs to McDonald's ice cream machines, and blocking the Albertsons/Kroger merger.
What's to stop indeed? Some of us in the tech industry want the dems to slice and dice every tech company into irrelevance. They've betrayed society and they should be rightfully punished in fun + creative ways.
the cold political war turned hot with the prosecution of Trump (he made it easy by being an idiot). there will be no considerations for retaliation now, both sides will be using whatever means they have available to damage each other.
also if you look at how the two factions separate from each other decade by decade (there used to be overlap, almost none now) it's obvious that there will be no reconciliation.
it's a musical chairs game at this point, whoever is in power when the democratic facade cracks will be able to seize power and transition into whatever single party state follows.
are you seriously equating empty rhetoric to legal action?
Trump was an idiot who made himself an easy target for nobodies with no strategic bones in their body to go after him. note that his guilt or lack thereof is irrelevant, what matters is that legal action was initiated against a past president. this one action doomed the republic just like it did the previous Roman one.
I think the blue team has been in a cold civil war since 2016. They can't come to terms with their progressive hegemony ending, but also can't pivot to a new politics because elections are too close to risk a mass preference cascade needed to revitalize the party.
I think the red team is only now starting to come to similar terms.
Around 2030, the US will need to spend 100% of it's tax revenue to service the debt, and California will need to a federal bailout or risk either default or wiping out their state pensions. I can assure the 'nothing ever happens' crowd we will see things happen in 2030, which is only a few years away.
The cold political war turned hot when Trump tried to overthrow the US government. I understand that this bizarre both sides framing is comforting to you for now, but it's just going to leave you even more alarmed when he tries again.
I don't think Palantir is concerned? Palantir is LLM agnostic and holds IL5, IL6, compliance with ICD 503, etc. Their entire platform is built around eliminating risk.
I believe the comment you are replying to is suggesting that a Democratic President could label Palantir a supply chain risk.
If:
1. The designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk is politically motivated
2. We collectively accept that is okay for the US President to bar all defense vendors and contractors from working with an American company for political reasons.
What defense related company(ies) would a Democratic President have political reasons to ban?
It has been reported that Palantir and its founder have a history of political contributions to the Republican party.
I still don't fully understand what this was about. It sounds like the DoD said they wanted unrestricted access to Anthropic's models, Anthropic refused, so the Pentagon declared that they wouldn't use them at all.
Nerds at Anthropic thought it was a good idea to tell the US Government "we're the shot callers," to which the USG replied "lol, no" and dropped them like 3rd period French.
It boils down to inexperience with a healthy dose of delusion on Anthropic's part.
Especially since Anthropic themselves have been literally saying that AI might destroy humanity. Why is it a surprise when people take them at their word and designate them a risk to critical infrastructure?
Side note, the Anthropic bots are astroturfing the comments.
The Anthropic guys aren't really nerds. They are more cultists with a "we are the prophets of the machine god" vibe. They refused because it goes against their religious beliefs, not some arrogance like those sovereign citizens.
You mention inexperience. Historically how many US companies can you name that have been historically named supply chain risks?
Dario wanted to sell a $200 million chat bot to the US military and also dictate how it could be used. The government said no. And because of that Claude also cannot be deployed to the GenAI.mil AI infrastructure. This means that any sensitive work for the DoD that uses Claude will go through Anthropic's infrastructure, not the US military-hosted backend.
So yes obviously defense contractors are forbidden to use it.
Anthropic did not host the model that the Department of War used. It had, and still has no control over the models it has deployed in classified environments.
> This also means that no companies that work with th DoD can use anthropic models for any purpose.
No, it does not mean that. I don't know why people have been making this claim. If you work for a company, let's call it X, and your work is not DOD related, let's say you work on a social media service, then X has no reason (from this designation) to prevent you from using Anthropic, it will not impact their defense contracts at all.
People have been making this claim because the Secretary of Defense personally issued a statement demanding that "no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic". We're not going to play this absurd game where government officials issue fascist instructions and we all pretend they said something more reasonable instead.
Evidentially not - Anthropic want to do business with the US military, but on their own terms, telling the military what they can and cannot use it for.
It’s not a problem. But it’s also not a problem for the DOD to decide that it doesn’t want to use anthropic or have its suppliers use anthropic for DOD matters. The DOD didn’t ban private citizens from using Anthropic. You can sell in your own terms but the DOD can also buy in its own terms.
That is the funny thing to me. I hate diving into politics here on HN, but this has such a rank smell to it. Trump's comments about Dario. His insane propaganda video about how we will never be communist / Marxist. In the same breath our government is bribing people with offers of $$ (the $5,000 checks) and essentially bullying to outright moving towards saying this technology is so powerful we will just have to seize it for our own use.
It is impossible to miss the absolute hypocrisy of this moment and how people and corporations are supposedly free, but if you happen to be of interest to the government they will try to casually ruin you. It has always been this way, people just haven't noticed because it flies under the radar most of the time when the govern crushes some smaller enterprise or another because it got in their way or didn't play by their rules.
It seems simple to me. Anthropic is a private company. If you don't like it fix the laws or don't buy from them.
You're overlooking the critical difference between the government-as-government and the government-as-purchaser. You have to play on Walmart's terms--which are draconian and exacting--to sell to Walmart. Why should the DOD be any different when it comes to stuff the DOD is buying or indirectly paying its contractors to buy?
Yeah, the DOD is such a huge purchaser that it can "ruin you" by blacklisting you if you don't play by its terms. The same is true about Walmart if you're a grocery supplier, Apple if you make electronics components, etc. Private companies absolutely exercise their power like that.
I'm intensely skeptical that Walmart has clauses in its contracts saying that no supplier may use FooCorp software in the process of delivering its goods. If they do I would definitely call that an abuse of corporate power.
They're not allowed to use it for military work, precisely so that the military supply chain cannot be broken by an unaffiliated private contractor acting at its own behest.
The Federal government often imposes terms on its contractors that specify what sub-contractors are allowed to do, including "flow down" requirements that ensure these terms are themselves enforced recursively all the way down to leaf suppliers.
Yes. Paragraph #1, sentence #1 of the US Constitution: "provide for the common defence[sic]". This is further elaborated upon in other original Constitution articles and subsequent amendments.
From that, we derive a long, storied history of things, among the more recent of which, and the operative matter here, is the Defense Production Act circa 1950.
The US is fundamentally based on the obligation of mutual military defense, and delegates the authority to call military balls and strikes, such as who will and will not be permitted to contract with the US military, exclusively to POTUS. Anthropic et al. are way out of their depth when they imagine they are imbued with some sort of military veto power in the US.
Every private citizen or corporation gets to do business (or not) with the military on their own terms. This is the difference between totalitarianism and a free country.
Anthropic’s position is also known as “having terms of service”.
To be clear the existing, signed ToS terms that Trump balked at were:
1. No mass surveillance of US civilians - illegal but we have all read the Snowden papers.
2. Fully unmanned kill chains on autonomous weapons - Anthropic have even stated they will support this eventually, they just didn’t think their models were ready and didn’t want the obvious, inevitable blowback.
The DoD is within its rights to cancel the contract if it doesn’t like the terms that it previously signed.
The concern, I think, in its most generous terms, is that they can't buy Anthropic's service the way the could, say, a wrench, because Anthropic can decide at any point to disable the military's ability (even transitively, through other vendors) to use their models if they determined that they do not like what the military is doing with that or if it violates their interpretation of the terms of service.
By that expansive definition, any cloud software provider can do the same thing and so should also be a supply chain risk.
This whole fiasco is happening because the defense dept wanted to use anthropic models in a way not allowed in the existing contract. Anthropic stuck to the contract, and the def dept tried to be punitive about it.
If they can’t get what they want from the seller, fine go to a different seller, but the supply chain risk is just government overreach.
I think I mostly agree here -- any cloud provider or frankly SaaS system carries a similar risk. The question is whether they want to explicitly make that part of their terms of service, and in addition have made public statements about their willingness to apply those terms of service.
AWS GovCloud I believe promises the opposite. They could still do it, in terms of the capability itself, but then they'd be subject to both civil, criminal, and possibly even military consequences. Whereas Anthropic would be shielded from those consequences by the terms of their agreement (presumably; I'm not up to speed on the specifics of their contractual demands. This is just based on the context from this article and the previous appeals case that ruled against the government).
That is not the definition of a supply chain risk, this is:
> FASCSA definition (41 U.S.C. § 4713(k)(6)): "Supply chain risk" means the risk that any person may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, extract data, or otherwise manipulate the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, maintenance, disposition, or retirement of covered articles so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise manipulate the function, use, or operation of the covered articles or information stored or transmitted on the covered articles.
This topic is a mind-killer, lots of uninformed opinion swamping the news, and it's hard to get actual signal on the technical questions at hand. (And, I think it's naive to believe that the government is actually concerned about the precise legal definitions; remember Hegseth decreed that no government sub-contractors would be allowed to transact with Anthropic, despite there being no legal basis for this?)
> Anthropic can decide at any point to disable the military's ability
If you're referring to the claims of a killswitch, Anthropic testified under oath that they don't have one. This has been thoroughly covered, e.g. https://www.axios.com/2026/04/22/anthropic-no-kill-switch-ai.... Anthropic provides the weights, they get run in DoD's secure enclave. There's no "phone home".
If you mean more generally, that DoD might breach a contract and then have that contract cancelled going forwards, then yes - this is literally how all SaaS contracts work. And it's very clearly not what the quoted text above refers to.
The way this works in a non-totalitarian country is, the government says "I want new terms and you won't give them to me; instead I will take my business elsewhere". And indeed this is what happened, DoD now has contracts with Google and OpenAI for equivalent capabilities.
Just to engage on your terms, with the actual concern you're raising; I would say rather than "FASCSA supply chain risk" a better way of thinking about it is "vendor lock-in". DoD absolutely should not rely on a single vendor for these kinds of capabilities. And most defense spending explicitly contemplates this already. This should be and has been solved through basic procurement practices.
This is great context and I feel that this is bringing in a lot of information that I wasn't aware of.
If what you're saying is true, then there is truly no supply chain risk other than the risk of civil action against the government for violation of terms of service. That seems like a rather weak point on which to balance a "supply chain" risk though.
The TL;DR is that this was actually decided on the principle that Anthropic can “manipulate” the defense systems by training Claude to refuse to take certain actions.
This feels like a parallel construction to me, it wasn’t reported AFAICT at the time of the original drama.
But yeah, the decision in OP has nothing to do with the contractual terms that everyone has been debating upthread.
Anthropic did not have access to the servers where their models were deployed. They were under the control of AWS and Palantir, and they could neither disable, nor modify the model's behavior.
Anthropic isn’t aligned with MAGA political ideology so they found an excuse to abuse power against them, more or less. The excuse was because Anthropic prohibits the use of their models for autonomous killing without a human in the loop they were declared a threat to national security on par with Iran or North Korea from a supply chain perspective in the military. OpenAI then rushed in and volunteered to build the slaughterbots ASAP, likely specially tuned to whomever Trump has taken a disliking to in his ambien stupors. Welcome to the future!
As I understand it cane down to one point: Anthropic wanted the ability to review actions that would have an effect on human life.
Which sounds sensible on the surface, until you realize that all military organizations have extensive experience with that exact question, and have spent centuries refining their practices. Deferring that to a private company is actually a major regression and a concerning role to pass on to the public regardless.
FWIW I am not pro military, but it's a prominent part of human culture and not going away anytime soon. I do understand the nature of professions, however, and only one of these groups has made the interpretation of this question their specialization.
> [Anthropic] would not permit its technology to power fully autonomous weapons without human oversight over targeting and firing decisions. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth argued that the Pentagon should have unrestricted access to AI systems for “any lawful purpose” and that a private contractor should not be permitted to dictate how the military can use its technology.
It's about them maintaining an interpretation of law at all.
Simpletons read that as: "The DOW wants to kill people with AI."
well if you were Anthropic and you didn't want the government using your technology in these ways, how would you phrase it? What else would you have done?
You seem to be misunderstanding the facts. Claude was already used by the US Military, under an existing contract between Anthropic and the US Department of War.
The core dispute was the US Military deciding it needed to renegotiate this contract, but without Anthropic's two red lines: No fully autonomous weapons (i.e., zero humans in the loop), and no mass domestic surveillance.
Militaries have a lot of experience, and an exceptionally poor track record.
I don’t remember the last war that didn’t have credible evidence of war crimes occurring. Were bombing civilian infrastructure in Iran, Iraq had Abu Ghraib among all the Collateral Damage stuff, the Highway of Death in the Gulf was probably a war crime, Vietnam had My Lai, WWII was the advent of carpet bombing civilian infrastructure. I can’t think of any for Korea, but I also know very little so that doesn’t say much.
We still haven’t charged anyone for the second strike on that fishing boat in South America, and I haven’t heard a single rationale for why that’s not a war crime other than “fog of war”.
The US doesn’t even really have a meaningful system for finding and prosecuting these, because we aren’t signatories for the ICC and have a bill saying we’ll invade if they charge one of our service members with a war crime. We aren’t basically the furthest thing from having any experience prosecuting war crimes. I can probably count on my fingers the number of cases we’ve tried. We rarely charge our own service members, and we usually kill foreign combatants rather than capture and charge them.
The US could carpet bomb their enemies like they did in WW2, instead they pursue one of the lowest civilian casualty methods of in the history of the world, and nobody even cares because somehow that’s not good enough
What makes you think these targeted strikes are any better? Did the school girls say, "o, but at least our entire city wasn't carpet bombed like an obvious war crime, instead we were drone striked in such a morally ambiguous way. O well"
No.
And why did America have so many enemies???
Maybe because we keep finding excuses to invent them, and then does hundreds of "morally grey" bombings. But at least it wasn't another Vietnam, right?
>As I understand it cane down to one point: Anthropic wanted the ability to review actions that would have an effect on human life.
This is not at all what happened. The existing contract that Anthropic had with the government had two red lines: No autonomous weapons (i.e., do not build Skynet with Claude), and no mass domestic surveillance.
Anthropic did not, and does not want, any case-by-case veto power over the US Military's use of their AI models. The red lines were negotiated ahead of time.
Downvoted for misinformation, likely out of ignorance, despite the reasonable argument made on top of it. Anthropic was not asking for the ability to review and block particular uses. Those are classified and wouldn’t even be running on Anthropic’s servers. They just wanted the government to promise not to use it for killing people without a human in the loop.
No it's not. Anthropic didn't want an AI to make battlefield decision on who gets killed because it's too unreliable. That doesn't mean they don't want AI used in the military supply chain.
And it also doesn't mean that Anthropic is supply chain risk merely for not wanting AI to be the active decision maker in live or death situations in war.
And Anthropic's objection was recently confirmed: the US military blew up a school in Iran due to an AI error, an killed more than a hundred kids.
And crucially, the DoD, through the normal procurement process, agreed to Anthropic’s terms and made the purchase. Much later, the Secretary of Defense threw a political fit and tried to change the terms.
You're skipping the supply chain risk designation, which is an extraordinary and punitive measure. Without that part, you'd be correct that this is a nothingburger. "Government decides to not renew contract with corporation X and goes with Y instead" is not headline news.
They also effectively said that military contractors and their subcontractors cannot use Anthropic - that's a significant part of the economy. I mean technically, they can use Anthropic for non-military work. But in practice, they will choose not use it at all, since it's a better approach to show compliance.
I agree with its designation. The security scans from Claude Mythos have been highly suspicious, wrong, and with a significant false positive rate. Claude also directly causes conflict within teams through excessive utility of "git blame" which weaponizes everyone against each other until only Claude has control. I've had very bad experiences with Claude and only Claude.
> Claude also directly causes conflict within teams through excessive utility of "git blame"
Lol wtf, do you think nobody here knows how to use git? this is like a Fox News comment, you are not a developer and are trying to spread fear because a word was used jokingly. "git blame" is just a diff tool.
Supply chain risk seems a massive over-reaction, but understandable that the government doesn't want to commit to Anthropic controlled software for any critical military application if they can't 100% rely on Anthropic support in being able to use it as they see fit.
> understandable that the government doesn't want to commit to Anthropic controlled software
But that's not at issue here. Obviously everyone agrees that the Pentagon can issue RFQ's to whatever specifications it wants. They can buy whatever they want, for the same reason that you or I are free to sell whatever we want.
The subject at hand is an attempt to use national security regulatory power to coerce Anthropic into selling a product it doesn't want to sell.
> The subject at hand is an attempt to use national security regulatory power to coerce Anthropic into selling a product it doesn't want to sell.
It would be naive to think that a private company could deny the government access to any tech if they want it for military or surveillance etc usage. In this case the government isn't forcing Anthropic to do it, they have alternatives and are perhaps making an example of Anthropic for refusing.
You could even make a case that the "supply chain risk" designation DOES make sense. If Anthropic are opposed to certain uses of their software, then doesn't that potentially impact companies that are part of the supply chain as well?
There are plenty of companies that are opposed to certain operations of the US military and refuse to sell to the US military on those grounds. None of them are considered a supply chain risk because that's not what a supply chain risk is.
A supply chain risk is specifically an entity that is likely to maliciously sabotage the US military's operations, such as Chinese companies that are controlled by the CCP. It is not simply a decision to "not buy from this company", but rather a wide-ranging decision that this particular company is a national security threat.
That's not what happened. DOD bought a product, with terms precluding specific applications of the product. DOD decided to change the terms, vendor said no. DOD threw a hissyfit (well, Hegseth did) and said, "No one can use it if they do business with us!"
If they had just terminated their contracts with Anthropic, then there would likely be no issue beyond having to pay out any penalties for terminating a contract early. They could then go to Grok (as they did) and OpenAI and used them instead. Or even kept the contract with Anthropic and its limitations, and just used the others for the cases where Anthropic was not permitted.
This is not an abstract disagreement at all. The red lines that the Department of War wanted to cross were made extremely clear: They want to build Skynet with Claude, and build a mass domestic surveillance system. Now they will have to make do with building those two systems with Gemini and ChatGPT.
> The red lines that the Department of War wanted to cross were made extremely clear: They want to build Skynet with Claude, and build a mass domestic surveillance system.
They claim they want to use AI for "any lawful purpose". They didn't go further to say that they want to build either Skynet or engage in mass surveillance.
Anthropic wanted the DoW to specifically disclaim those things, and the DoW position is that it will not disclaim any specific mission set that it's legally allowed to engage in, whether that's Skynet, targeting, surveillance, or anything else. Not for Anthropic, not for any contractor.
But refusing to disclaim a mission isn't the same as saying you want to do, just like refusing to answer "when did you stop beating your wife?" doesn't mean you're beating your wife.
Is the DoW response to this tiff over the top? Sure, but it's also not 100% political either, I've run into many government bureaucrats who love bureaucratic knife fights like this.
OpenAI has hacked several prominent entities and is allowed to do business as usual but Anthropic putting guardrails on the military's usage of AI is the national security threat while Pentagon itself said that over reliance on AI lead to that attack on school in Minab.
I have also learned that OpenAI's president is a big maga donor and now I am thinking of cancelling my OpenAI membership todau and signing up with Anthropic again.
Personally I am enjoying Muse the most and so far havent hit any limits. I also (i know it's not a popular thing) have enjoyed wearing my Meta Ray Ban's since 2023 even if they break as MANY months later they come back to life.
you are so honourable and ethical about this issue .. I really respect your courage in cancelling (or planning to) OAI, especially since you must be so used to the harnesses .. workflows .. and muscle memory youve developed around their agents .. and now you'll have to switch to Anthropic and relearn its patterns .. I really think there's a lot of dignity and courage in that .. and others could learn from you ..
I can 100% assume you showed that same courage and moral fortitude by quitting X after Elon acquired it. Respect!
Thanks for the encouragement. It's hard to come by these days on the internet. I never really used twitter even before elon bought it. I don't use any social media, maybe except hanging out on HN often.
So you claim: If a similar thing would be filed against OpenAI, it would stand up in court.
That is still not corruption, yet. Also in Germany it is the executive branch which controls who is sued or policed by the stately organs.
So favorism can be passed down this way, but not we are not at corruption yet. If reciprocity is expected, then you could call it that. Or could perhaps even file for negligence in treating all other company actors the same, especially if you are Anthropic yourself.
Still, I blame the US voters as much as the current administration if the later is just clowns and thieves.
Also, IANAL and HN discussing US things is always foreign to me.
These are just very different things. OAI "hacking" anything isn't OAI telling the US Gov what they can and cannot do with their product. Maybe along all kinds of axes, one is more alarming than the other, but it's a canard in this topic.
Then the Pentagon shouldn't sign a contract with them. (Or in this case, they shouldn't try and fail to renegotiate the terms of an already signed contract, and then retaliate in order to get their way.)
>OpenAI has hacked several prominent entities and is allowed to do business as usual but Anthropic putting guardrails on the military's usage of AI is the national security threat while Pentagon itself said that over reliance on AI lead to that attack on school in Minab.
Right, because "supply chain risk" designation is as it pertains to them being a supplier to the military, not a overall assessment of their standing as a corporate citizen. Not to mention that the administration wants to go full steam ahead when it comes to AI development, so there's no internal contradiction here.
I do feel like "this company hacked the Australian government" is perhaps relevant when considering how much the military should trust them. Like, that seems very relevant when assessing the risks to the government military.
Anthropic was designated long before the July OAI hacks. Also the appeals court isn’t re-assessing the DoD in light of new evidence, they are deciding whether it was constitutional for the DoD to blacklist Anthropic in the first place.
> Anthropic was designated long before the July OAI hacks.
I think the point is that, if the DOD was working off a coherent philosophy, the company that has a rap sheet for hacking multiple targets, including the Australian government, is probably also a risk.
And if "hacking the Australian government" isn't enough to qualify as a threat to national security, then it's probably mudslinging to suggest that Anthropic is a threat.
1) The designation has nothing to do with hacking, either from Anthropic or otherwise. The dispute is about Anthropic barring the DoD from using Claude to develop autonomous weapons and conduct domestic surveillance.
2) The DoD does not care about any of the hacking OpenAI does as long as the DoD can do what they want with ChatGPT.
3) Historically, the US government has been interested in hacking other nation states, friendly and not. So OpenAI being able to hack Australian systems is a selling point.
For all the downsides of losing the business of government contractors, it really would hold Anthropic to their stated values: they’ll never develop AI controlled weapons on this blacklist.
Admittedly I still need to do some reading on the current ruling, but how this isn't seen as an open and shut case of vindictive prosecution (if that's even a thing for this branch of law?) is astounding. The administration couldn't have made it more obvious there was no merit to their designation of Anthropic.
Opinion by Katsas and Rao. For those that don’t follow this regularly, those are two of the biggest Trump hacks on the bench.
I suspect this will be reversed en banc.
Anthropic’s argument is really clear and easy to understand: we can’t simultaneously be a supply chain risk and also be a company the DoD demands we change our policies so they can use our models without restrictions.
Anthropic's policies are literally the supply chain risk.
The DoD could have used the same authority to seize the technology if it wanted to. Especially in a time of war. DoD has instead chosen to respect Antrhopic's boundaries and has simply barred anyone in the agency from buying a product that comes with strings attached.
This is 100% on Anthropic for product:market fit failure.
Am I misunderstanding this entire ordeal, or are Anthropic's policies not precisely what the DOD agreed to in its initial contract with Anthropic? Did the DOD not then seek to change the contract terms, to which Anthropic refused?
If I sell the DOD a service with contracted terms X/Y/Z, the DOD agrees, then later asks me to drop Z, and I refuse, how would that warrant the legal definition of a supply chain risk? How is the appropriate response for the DOD not to simply find another service provider?
The DoW tried to change a contract they had signed. Anthropic refused. That doesn't make them a supply chain risk (the wording of which implies "likely to sabotage" the government).
I know everyone says this is political but it actually seems like a textbook designation. Anthropic wanted to have rules on how the military used AI, the military said no and therefore doesn't want anthropic used anywhere in their supply line.
This is like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike orders, now the military needs to have a special box of pens that don't have stipulations attached. With AI usage it would be the same thing except applied to entire product chains. It seems like it would just add more complexity to operations.
You can agree with the rules anthropic wanted, but having rules set by a private company at all that apply to the military does seem fair for the military to object to.
>The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized and necessary
Though they'd probably put the DoD on the cybersecurity whitelist today, the very idea of the claude whitelists for certain functionality already exists and is being used by them today.
Anthropic's red lines were 'no fully autonomous AI kill chains' and 'no domestic mass surveillance'. Those are clearly not national-security or DoD functions in the first place, so why would they be in any way objectionable?
There are already several private companies that have this, eg. Apple has specific exemptions from tariffs on smartphones, computers, and semiconductors that they got by paying off Trump and promising to make their iPhone glass in Kentucky:
The correct mental model for the U.S. federal government right now is not an omnipotent democratic overseer for economic activity, but rather as just one firm that negotiates directly with other major firms for legitimization and legal protection. Their power is likely to decline further, as is the value of "legitimization", as technological developments erode the military's monopoly on physical force. Interesting times ahead - historically tech transitions like this lead to a splintering of state legitimacy and then a reorganization under new forms of governance.
I think a private company of any size should be able to offer its products on whatever terms they choose. If the military doesn't like those terms, they're free to do business elsewhere.
You are obviously being disingenuous, because you are on a thread where the DoD is not just electing not to buy Anthropic's service, but also trying to bully them into submission with the unrealistic threat of the DPA, punitively and disproportionately trying to label them a national security risk, and invoking supply chain issues normally applied to our worst adversaries, for the first time putting an obviously patriotic American country on the same footing as North Korea, Iran, China and Russia.
Remember, the Anthropic red line was "no war crimes and no mass surveillance of the US population." You may think that war crimes are cool, and that mass surveillance of the US population by the department of defense would be fine, but consider the natural consequences, both for democracy and for any adversary's conduct in future wars.
It's really rich to say this after calling me disingenuous.
I don't think it's cool that Anthropic gets to set military policy. I don't care how much I agree or disagree with the policy. Wario is not the president. And Anthropic does not strike me as "obviously patriotic," not that I think it's better if the private company bossing the military around is patriotic. It has no relevance.
"Warcrimes" is the new "racist," too. It gets thrown around willy nilly about every military action.
So your saying they are 100% correct and Anthropic is a supply chain risk? All you're doing is trying to justify why they shouldn't be labeled truthfully rather then saying it wasn't the truth (probably because you know it was).
The reason it appears corrupt is that OpenAI has the exact same restrictions (https://openai.com/index/our-agreement-with-the-department-o...) but was not declared a supply chain risk. If two vendors have the same restrictions and they only designate one, then the designation must be arbitrary and/or capricious.
Do you think OpenAI's terms for the DoD are published on a website? Pretty sure when Anthropic got zapped, OpenAI sent DoD a memo 500ms later saying they wouldn't restrict use.
Look at it pragmatically. What does the DoD use every single procurement for? Hint: military use.
I thought the difference is that clearly written rules or SLAs are acceptable and can even be negotiated before signing a contract, but having a person, in this case Amodei himself, manually approve DOJ's usage case by case with his own moral judgement after a contract is signed is not okay.
No one wanted case-by-case veto ability at Anthropic. The red lines were made clear ahead of time: No use of Anthropic models for autonomous weapons (Skynet) or mass-domestic surveillance, negotiated in the agreement.
OpenAI, xAI, and Google happily agreed to DoW contracts which allow both of those use cases.
No it doesn't. Specifically OpenAI had a "all lawful purposes" clause (which plausibly includes the existing mass surveillance apparatus), but Anthropic did not.
Non-sense. Pentagon has many many uses of AI besides autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, which Anthropic doesn't restrict. ie: intelligence analysis, target selection, payroll, inventory, research, supply chain and logistics, medical, bureaucracy, ...
We cannot subordinate our military’s decision making power — in any arena — to a private company.
Our military must also not be dependent on private company that believes it has the moral prerogative to control our military’s decisions, and would have the technical capability to do so.
The military is bound by contract, just like any other government agency. They entered into a contract, with these clauses well-known. This was OK because they have all the same problems every other organization uses AI for.
They could’ve just negotiate a new contract with OpenAI, without banning it from every government agency. But I’m sure that would’ve triggered some kind of extra clause and cost money…
This is ridiculous. Anthropic should be free to say the terms for using their service. It doesn't "subordinate" the military, and the military is far from some infallible, unquestionable force here.
If the military wants to use AI to autonomously kill people, they can - Anthropic is not stopping them - thy just can't with Anthropic's services.
The government retaliating by then claiming that any use of Anthropic is risk is an obvious farce. How would Anthropic be any less of a risk if they let Claude autonomously kill people?
Maybe the military should just seize the technology and nationalize the company then? Because clearly, paying a private party voluntarily entering into a contract on mutually-agreed upon terms is now a polite fiction that can be done away with.
The complete failure of any of these Anthropic cheerleaders (to the extent that they are not AI generate comments posted by bots) to understand basic Constitutional principles of Rule of Law and Separation of Powers is mind blowing.
Their argument, in effect, is that we should throw out the entire Constitutional order and make Dario Amodei dictator of the world. The psychopathic hubris is laughable.
Right but the military wants to be able to use a tool they are paying for in all cases, not just ones the manufacturer thinks they should.
If I sold steel to the Pentagon but then tried to say they they couldn't use it for ships and tanks but they are free to use for warehouses they would react the same way as they are doing now.
> If I sold steel to the Pentagon but then tried to say they they couldn't use it for ships and tanks but they are free to use for warehouses they would react the same way as they are doing now.
They sure as hell shouldn't! Selling steel for any use except ships and tanks is a little odd but it's not a risk.
(I'm ignoring the "but then" because this was about future sales not previous ones.)
Your "but then" is off-base. This is selling steel for the express purpose of nuclear reactors, with a contractual clause against its use in tanks, and the US government deciding that it doesn't feel like abiding by the rules in the contract.
I think you're confused. When the White House decided to stop having federal agencies buy paper straws [1], they didn't designate paper straws a supply chain risk, they just stopped buying them. The term has a very specific meaning which would not apply in the pen scenario.
It's not a great analagy; it's more like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike orders, who then only ships pens with cameras and solenoids so that the point stays retracted until the camera verifies that the paper doesn't include a drone strike orders.
And that would be absolutely fine for a pen manufacturer to do. It would make them unsuitable for meeting the requirements for a government contract as a pen supplier for signing orders, but would not make them a supply-chain risk.
Same goes for Anthropic: they would only consider offering a version of their product for military use that had certain restrictions. The government is free to accept that version or reject it. Rejecting it and designating Anthropic a supply-chain risk is just political intimidation and retribution for not playing ball.
> This is like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike order
I am pretty receptive to the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument, but we are taking a big leap from pen to llms/artificial intelligence. I am sympathetic to some of your other points, but I simply must reject this analogy.
"the government wants to use our tool to murder people", and declaring that company that says "no" into a "supply chain risk" is absolutely retaliatory and an attempt by the government to influence the behavior of the company.
The moral and ethical scale of the issue makes this far different than someone buying a pen.
> "the government wants to use our tool to murder people", and declaring that company that says "no" into a "supply chain risk" is absolutely retaliatory and an attempt by the government to influence the behavior of the company.
If Lockheed could brick its planes if the US planned to use them for military action it disagreed with (and showed some indication they couldn't be trusted not to do it), would they be a supply chain risk?
It is not the role of a defense contractors to have oversight and control power over the military they're supplying.
Ridiculous hypothetical for analogy purposes, but, imagine if Anthropic had developed a new type of rifle that the military was considering using, which had a black-box AI system that could prevent the trigger being pulled when aimed at certain targets. The military says, ok that's cool, as long as we can be in control of that decision-making process. Anthropic says, no, we know better than you and better than the law what kind of targets should and should not be shot with our rifles. The military would then respond “lol, lmao even” and then deem them to be a supply chain risk and adopt another rifle instead.
No, it's not. If Anthropic is a supply chain risk, that means that if you are working on a project that will be used for the DoD, you can't use Claude or any other Anthropic product for any purpose whatsoever in that project. Asked Claude to change the color of a PPTX for a sprint demo you're doing? Oops, you've know introduced a supply chain risk and your company is liable for damages or at least losing its entire contract with the DoD.
Supply chain risk ensures nobody in the chain is buying it and thus becoming subject to Antropic's demand of usage control. They are still free to use it for non-DOD purposes, but if Antropic wants control over DOD, DOD has the right to say "no, we won't have anything to do with you, and thus you're not getting any control over us". I agree it may be unpleasant for Antropic but DOD has the right - I'd say even responsibility - to not submit to control by any private party.
Yes, in fact the military has a system in place to make sure that they only that they only use alternate suppliers and on Anthropic AI, They do this by placing a designation on Anthropic AI that it is a risk to the supply chain, which forces purchasers to use other suppliers.
I don't think this is how preferred suppliers have typically worked through the supply chain risk considering the US has definitely had preferred suppliers before and has not historically used this against a US company that was not on the list and the power of such a designation extends far past the military into all parts of the government. I'm pretty sure this has more traditionally been relegated to simple requirements or specifications.
> I know everyone says this is political but it actually seems like a textbook designation
It literally is a textbook definition, signed into US law:
“Supply chain risk,” means the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of a covered system so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise degrade the function, use, or operation of such system (see 10 U.S.C. 3252).
> The U.S. military has disabled advertising tracking tools in government-issued phones, computers and other devices, officials recently told Congress.
> The different military branches confirmed they had done so, some only this summer, following reporting that commercially available data taken from these devices and sold freely by data brokers, was being used by Iran and other adversaries to track and in some cases target American bases and personnel.
Why is this downvoted? Seeing a bunch of downvotes right now that feel disingenuous (or just knee jerk on keyword matching). Ideally we downvote low quality content not things we don't like.
Of course they don't but the post was responding to "what adversaries" in the definition of supply chain risk posted above, and those are some of the real answers to that. I did not read that comment as implying anthropic was controlled by those countries at all, just responding to the actual question. My take away from the post was that those are actual adversaries and, unless the administration is claiming anthropic products ARE controlled by those adversaries, the claim of "supply chain risk" is not in good faith.
Ah, I upvoted specifically because those countries do not control Anthropic's products, and thus reasoned that the comment implied that an adversary, for the purpose of the law, was some external not-quite-enemy type entity, and that application of the law to Anthropic was thus unreasonable, as it obviously is.
The pen example makes sense if the intermediary were to ship the pen as part of the final product but not if the pen is simply used to draft designs of the final product. It seems that this designation would prohibit using the pen anywhere in the process which doesn't really make sense.
It is not the textbook definition, because what Anthropic is doing is not sabotage, malicious, or subversive. They are just refusing to add a feature to the military's specification. So their bid falls short of requirements.
The department feared Anthropic would refuse if it was used to mass surveil on Americans or kill people without human oversight. Facts already laid out in the terms. Instead of simply canceling or negotiating, they used overwhelming government force against it to apply a designation never before applied to an American company. When its an interaction between trump/trump's government and any other party, it is a good first approximation to assume Trumps side are wrong.
Yes certainly, I can sell highly corrosive concentrated hydrochloric acid to the government as part of some contract for the synthesis of certain chemicals but I am fully within my rights to write that the acid should not be sprayed on people from a pump.
That isn't sabotage, that is simply product design. Anthropic is free to create their products that refuse to kill people, and the DoD is free not to buy those products if they don't fit their needs.
However, that's not what a supply chain risk is. It's not an order to "don't buy these products if they don't work the way we want them to", its designating Anthropic as a national security threat because they might intentionally sabotage US military operations.
As I said elsewhere, it's utterly preposterous that the DOD actually considers this a reasonable threat, because it's simply not a reasonable possibility. There's no way Anthropic would do that, precisely because of the consequences that would follow if they did, and got found out. Moreover, they already clearly stated their terms and preferences. It's all out of the open. There's no supply chain risk, that designation is purely political.
I work in the space industry and regularly use parts in our designs that are unapproved from space flight. Sometimes it's because it's a commercial part that we seem acceptable for flight, other times it's an unscreened or engineering model that doesn't go through the proper testing that space-qualified parts do. One vendor even dents the lid of a part to invalidate the hermetic seal guarantee that they claim for the space-qualified version (it still works fine). Many will have fine print in the data sheets saying the part is not to be used for critical applications like aerospace or medical devices. Sometimes we tell a little fib to our vendor that we are just developing non-flight devices so that they don't get upset and refuse to sell the lower-grade part to us. These vendors are scared of having something fail in an unapproved environment and are unaware of how much risk the customer is tolerating by the use of these unscreened parts.
It would have been incredibly simple for Anthropic to say "we cannot guarantee performance in a kill-chain application due to an unknown level of safeguards implemented in the baseline product and cannot estimate a cost for developing a new product capable of such application." and leave it at that.
Anthropic, in the original negotiations, said the can't answer every hypothetical use case. And the DOD should just come and ask as they come up (during an operation).
Which means the exact use limitations WOULD NOT BE DELINEATED IN WRITING in advance.
But that is not at all a reasonable fear. Is it really reasonable to believe that Anthropic, after receiving a government contract, would then proceed to sabotage their own product to not function as contracted? That seems like an utterly ridiculous claim to me, nothing close to "reasonable". There is no charitable way to view this designation except as political punishment and/or as a favor to Altman and Musk.
That fails only if you believe and agree with the government's argument, which I don't.
I don't think it's reasonable to fear that Anthropic would change the deal after contractually agreeing to terms of use. The government is using that as an excuse because they know that Anthropic hasn't actually met the definition of a supply-chain risk.
> Whatever paradigmatic examples individual members of Congress may have had in mind, the statutory definition is not limited to “adversar[ies],” 10 U.S.C. § 3252(d)(4), and instead covers “any person,”
I tried to hint in my comment that the argument is completely different. the supply chain risk is just what the media runs with. (yes, it's in the opinion, but that is the weaker part. and the court agrees, that it basically does not apply to Anthropic.)
there's section 4713 which is roughly "Secretary of War can pull the nat.sec. card, bye"
Selling a pen labeled "this pen will refuse to sign certain orders" is not sabotage or malicious and is thus not a supply chain risk. The DoD is free to not buy from Anthropic, but designating them as a supply chain risk is incorrect, as well as arguably arbitrary and capricious given their public criticism of Anthropic's beliefs.
Have you considered calling the Department of War and telling them how to run their business?
The purpose of the designation is because Anthropic's product was deemed risky enough they had to ensure it doesn't get incorporated in any other products they might buy from anyone else. The label is means to an end. This isn't difficult to understand.
I don't think anyone doubts that subcontracts exist. They doubt that Anthropic's insistence that Claude isn't capable of being the operating system for an automated killbot and associated terms the DoD previously agreed to means that there's any danger to the US military from Lockheed Martin using Claude as a code assistant to build GUIs.
Supply chain risks are usually when someone does a attack over the supply chain. Like when the mossad planted literally explosives in radio devices for Hezbollah.
Antrophic merely said they don't allow their tools to be used for autonomous killing.
A very specific case.
So where is the danger making it necessary preventing all suppliers from using Claude at all? That only concerns those who work directly on autonomous killing and only they will have to go to Altman or Musk.
So none of that is any threat to the military - so it was just black mailing to make them do the governments will - which is something usually dictatorships do, not democratic systems.
In a democratic society, the default should be, the military just buy somewhere else, then force companies to build them the terminator. So no private company controls what the military does, they just control their product. You want the military to control private companies? There is a name for that kind of system, where this is conmon.
Eh this just we wont buy from you because you are putting limitations on the use. Anthropic will be fine if they don’t like it they can accept the terms of the contract or walk away.
Why has this never previously been done to an American company from which the DoD decided not to purchase something?
Perhaps people who are noticing politics here - including in the decision of two Trump-appointed judges, against the he vote of another Republican-appointed judge- are not the ones who are choosing not to see reality?
I don't know, I am just guessing because not a single American company has publicly stated they are against its product use up to a certain degree by DoD? If they have not publicly declared it then yes, DoD simply don't sign the contract.
"Supply chain risk" specifically refers to risk of malicious attack or sabotage through the supply chain, not all risks associated with supply chains.
A vendor with particularly poor QA might be a risk in your supply chain but isn't a "supply chain risk" according to this designation and neither would Anthropic be.
So we have a pen that may refuse to sign certain orders, and is clearly labeled as such.
If the DoD needs to sign such orders, they won't buy this pen.
If a supplier needs to sign such orders, the supplier also won't buy the pen.
If a supplier needs to sign other orders, and this pen is the best one available, the supplier may decide to buy this pen. Since the orders are within what the pen will sign, they get signed, and the supplier fulfills its contract with the DoD.
The DoD needed a signed order from its supplier, and they got it. The ink is on the paper. Who cares what pen was used? The ink isn't going to erase itself post-hoc.
Where is the supply chain risk?
---
Now, if the DoD suspects that Anthropic will train its models to try to actively sabotage military operations, that's a very different story. Does anyone actually believe that?
If you outsource your thinking to a server that can detect your IP address, and decide to render decision “b” instead of decision “a” to your query, that’s a risk. (Or detect by the type of query, past history of your use, etc.). Panopticlick should be having a field day with all this.
??? What are you talking about. Anthropic isn't an adversary and they're not required to sell for purposes they don't want to. It's not sabotage and it's not malicious.
This is a designation reserved for terrorists and the link.
Actively handicapping a product that's otherwise capable qualifies. If you discover that the military is using your capacitors to make rocket launchers, so you introduce a manufacturing defect that will cause them to fail at high heat, you're a supply chain risk and can be rightfully designated as such.
The converse does not qualify. If I advertise a chemical with an admixture that prevents it from being used to make explosives, the military has absolutely no right to demand that I produce a version of that chemical without the admixture. Selling a product which can't do what the DoD wants does not make me a supply chain risk, no matter how easy it would be for me to make a different product that's fit for their purpose.
So... don't buy from Anthropic? How many of the US population is an adversary, according to your definition?
Say everyone had something to sell and DOD wanted to buy it. But some people wouldn't make the product changes DOD demanded. Now, they are the adversary of the DOD?
> If you're preventing the military from doing some action because you disagree with it, that makes you an adversary.
No, it doesn't. The military doesn't have a right to force product requirements and terms of use on companies they contract with.
If they don't like the contract terms, they can simply not sign a contract and not do business with a company. Trying to get them designated a supply-chain risk is just political retribution.
Did you even read what you copied and pasted? That's not at all what this is. Anthropic was very clear up-front what they would and wouldn't allow. They were not going to "subvert" anything. "Degrade function" in this context means that there is a risk that ongoing changes to the covered system will cause problems for the government. That wouldn't have been the case here; it would have been clear from the start what the military would and wouldn't be allowed to do with it, and that wouldn't change.
All of those verbs basically mean "degrade an existing system, after the fact". If anthropic states beforehand that certain use cases are not possible, it should be fine, no?
To give another (bad) analogy: The Pens aren't made to be weapons themselves, they are not intended for that. If the DoD now tries to shoot pens as projectiles and they just melt, that's no reason to classify the pen manufacturer as a supply chain risk, the product was not altered after the fact.
Of course, there _is_ a difference in "It could do that, but it shouldn't" and "It cannot do that". But it is not that large. That's why I don't see it as that clear cut.
No, of course not, because life isn't black and white. Just those with licensing agreements that conflict with the militaries mission, where the product could be manipulated to hinder the mission. Most manufacturers would jump at the chance to rewrite their licensing agreements specifically for the military just to get a government contract.
I mean typically the outcome of civil suits is black and white (at least on a per-claim basis).
So Amazon and Microsoft don't enforce cloud licensing agreements with the USG? If the government wants to add 3,000 Windows users to support their mission Microsoft is shit out of luck in getting paid for them?
This was not manipulated to hinder the mission. Every account of this indicates it was clearly spelled out. They could not use it for mass surveillance or for targeting. The lawyers at the DOD did not miss this. They agreed to the terms, because they had no intent to use it for such purpose purposes.
This is like the change order from hell.
Nothing was stopping the DOD from just entering into a new contract with OpenAI…
except it's also stipulating that the paper supplier upon which the orders are signed also cant use anthropic. or the table maker. even though the AI helping make sleeker paper and tables has nothing to do with deciding what to bomb (analogy breaking down lol)
and trump admin originally went WAY further.
they originally said the pen, paper, table etc suppliers cant use anthropic even for products and subsidiaries that have nothing to do with their govt work; far beyond the supply chain of the pen (bomb). Mega Corp Pepsi Co Taco Bell Inc. LLC -> Staples > Pen Co. Sure pen co might be reasonabale. But telling taco bell they cant have claude help expand the baja-blast-radius is way too far. that would be just like secondary sanctions.
iirc there are 2 court cases. one ruled the original order was too broad and i think that still stands? so at least it's narrowed slightly to just the immediate supply chain?
Hardly. I invite you to [read the opinion][1], particularly the great pains the majority spends on wrangling the definition of the word "manipulate."
Basically, [FASCSA][2] says to denote a company is a "supply chain risk," the govt has to meet the law's rigorous definition of what a "significant" risk actually is. That definition contains a catch-all "or otherwise manipulate the function" of the thing at hand (in this case, Claude) at the very end.
The govt's whole argument is "Well Anthropic has admitted that it can technically "manipulate" the response, therefore its a significant risk, therefore we designate it as such."
The dissent gives an analogy:
> A library might post a sign saying, “Do not shout, loudly talk on the phone, play music, or otherwise disturb others.” The common understanding would be that the rule bans bringing a boom-box into the reading room with the volume turned on high but not listening to music with headphones set at a modest sound level—even though both constitute “playing music.”
It is as if the govt argued "ah ah, Anthropic played music on their headphones, they broke the rules! We therefore have the authority to ban them" and the majority insanely agrees. It is clear to anyone with basic reading comprehension that the "manipulate" clause is supposed to continue the idea of malicious or subversive manipulation that the whole section entails. The hand-waving the majority uses gives the whole game away.
“the military said no and therefore doesn't want anthropic used anywhere in their supply line”
It’s clearly a punitive measure and has nothing to do with national security.
If a supplier uses Anthropic to develop a product, how does that pose a risk to the DoD or national security? The DoD can specify that a third party system can’t rely on Anthropic for DoD use without designating the company a supply risk. It was very clear that the administration was punishing the company for saying “no”.
Anthropic took the position that our military’s decision making power should be subordinate to Anthropic’s constraints.
Any dependency on a company that thinks they have that moral authority and has the technical means to enforce it is absolutely a risk to the supply chain.
If you want to blame someone or something for this, we should start with Dario and “effective altruism”.
But why can’t the military just not use Anthropic? Why can’t the DoD say “ok we’re going with a different vendor”? Even if you find Anthropic’s stance distasteful, why support taking punitive action on Anthropic?
> Why can’t the DoD say “ok we’re going with a different vendor”?
That's exactly what they're doing. It turns out the DoD is a really big bureaucracy and has process to make sure they thoroughly exclude a vendor and transitive dependencies on that same vendor.
They do, but this is not it. This is designating Anthropic as an adversary of the USA, and it is forbidding anyone who wants to sell to the DoD from using Anthropic products for anything. This is a massive attack on free speech, free enterprise, and the market.
I feel like in this thread no one is understanding what supply chain risk designation is. The government can just not use Anthropic, and that's exactly what they're doing, and they are not using it so much that they don't want Anthropic anywhere in their chain of supply. It's not necessarily punitive, the government is just covering their tracks so that if somewhere in their supply chain Anthropic exists, they want to remove them. They are complying with Anthropic's demands to not be used in war and the DoD says, okay, we won't use you anywhere and also enforce that we won't use you, just like you wanted.
Anthropic said "we don't want to be used as part of kill chain decision-making" (actually it may have been even more specifically autonomous/unmanned kill chain decision making)
The DoD responded not by saying "alright, we will use OpenAI for our kill-chain uses" but by saying "Boeing is no longer allowed to use Claude Code".
And my point is that using Claude models for coding a Boeing plane does not allow anthropic to interfere in the operation of those planes. Once the code is written, anthropic has not plausible form of control.
It is if the auto generated code for say safety critical or mission critical code generated by a LLM or even someone tries to put LLM in the decision loop and it refuses to do an action.
Claude Code can insert something into your code you are not aware of, like a backdoor in many millions of lines of code, especially as many people now aren't even reading the code anymore. How is this not blatantly obvious?
Do you remember the Fable release? Anthropic themselves said they'd sabotage code of certain groups they didn't like such as frontier AI researchers. Why do you think they couldn't do the same here?
> But for researchers trying to use Claude Fable 5 for frontier AI development, Anthropic outlined a different approach. The firm would deliberately degrade the model’s performance in ways that were invisible to the user. The move would effectively sabotage researchers trying to use Claude to train competing AI models, which Anthropic explicitly bans in its terms of service.
Okay, so what relevancy does this thing, which anthropic didn't do, have to anything we are talking which right now is using Claude code in line with its terms of service?
They didn't do it due to backlash but they have the capability and more importantly the culture to do so. It is correct that the government doesn't want anything to do with a company who'd act like that. By the way you're moving your argument, first you said "stop working" and when I proved you wrong then you talked about why it has any relevancy. You're the one who asked in the first place.
Look at it a different way. What if Claude was trusted to provide information to support a sensitive military operation and it subtly gave say bad coordinates or wrong info. Since it’s near impossible to test every possible output, the US Government is treating the entire model system as a supply chain risk because it is perceived to be manipulative and possibly compromising to national security for military operations
If Claude adds a backdoor autonomously then Anthropic would have a form of control. Even if it doesn't, Claude would be following the will of its creator instead of the government which the latter obviously does not want. I am not sure why it's that hard to understand that the government does not want any part of its stack to be influenced by such a company. This is exactly what supply chain risk is.
It’s a risk that persons may otherwise manipulate the operation of a covered technology to deny or disrupt its function. The statute allows the DoW to do this.
Humans are 100% in the loop with software patches and there are many people in the chain so that provenance is maintained. It’s not that Claude could never look at the source code
Correct, anthropic's requirement was human-in-the-loop.
The DoD's response was to ban anthropic from all DoD facing activity and supply chains, whether or not there is a human in the loop. This does in fact run into exactly GP's issue. (or as I suggest elsewhere, can Boeing use Claude Code for software development?)
It’s hardly “self defining” as the Appeals Court noted because military operations can involve different degrees of human involvement in targeting decisions. It’s not as binary as people have been trying to portray it.
Maybe. That statement is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It’s a different argument than saying Anthropic’s restriction would have prevented it (it was based on bad intel/old military installation)
No. They can do that with an order covering the specific parameters under which they care about it. Supply chain risk definition is about adversaries and sabotage, not companies dictating contract terms.
They don't want Anthropic to be able to sabotage any operations the DoD has. Anthropic already has a history of trying to sabotage others like during the Fable release when they said they'd subtly wreck your code if you were working on cutting edge AI.
Designating Anthropic a supply-chain risk means that no one in the federal government can use Anthropic's products for anything. Outside of the military, there are tons of places where Anthropic's products are a good fit for the needs of many other federal government agencies.
The DoD is perfectly free to say "no one in the DoD can use Anthropic products because we believe their products are not fit for our needs". That would 100% solve the problem.
Designating them a supply-chain risk is just political retribution for not caving to the DoD's contract negotiation demands. That's all. It's not necessary to ensure the integrity of the US military's goals and objectives. It's just punitive, elementary school grade bullying.
Of course they can. Any supplier is free to set terms for how their products are to be used. The DoD is free to not agree to those terms - but it's not free to then claim the company that offered those terms is a security risk, and bar any DoD supplier from using them for any purpose - which is what the extreme measure they took represents.
> but it's not free to then claim the company that offered those terms is a security risk
Yes they are free to do that. You have to blame Congress for giving them that authority under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act and specifically 41 U.S.C. § 4713.
But Claude’s ToS didn’t prohibit use of Claude for sensitive military operation but it was coded to do so. It was part of the government’s evidence
No, they can only do that if a company is a true supply chain risk. Not everyone some idiot in the government doesn't like is a such a huge risk to the country that they can be banned from doing business with anyone doing business with the DoD.
Ultimately this is for the courts to decide, and the current decision is not final. And while the two Trump-nominated judges agreed with you, the other judge agrees with me - so at least we can say that neither my nor your position is legally absurd.
Sure, but also just because Congress gave the government a power to take an extraordinary measure in an extraordinary circumstance doesn't mean that the government can simply claim the circumstance happens all the time and use the measure whenever it strikes the fancy of some executive.
Ultimately whether Anthropic is a true supply chain risk for the United States military is a question of fact, and the courts will have to decide. That the President or Secretary of Defense doesn't like a company doesn't make them a supply chain risk.
Well, that's what this court case is about. The government believes they have that power, and Anthropic and others believe they don't. You clearly believe they do, and I clearly believe they don't. It's fine to disagree. Ultimately SCOTUS may decide on this, and that'll be the final word. Not that SCOTUS is always correct in its rulings, but at the end of the day, their decision is final.
> Just because you disagree with a power of the government does not mean the government does not have that power.
Sure, but we live in a democracy, not a dictatorship. The government doesn't just get to do whatever it wants. People and corporations have certain freedoms. One of those freedoms is not being compelled to work with the government. The government can't force a company to work for them except under extreme circumstances. Which currently no extreme circumstances have been claimed and no one is talking about nationalizing (the act of forcing the company to work for the government) anthropic
The law being used was passed by Congress who is elected democratically and then reinforced by the judiciary who is either also voted in democratically or appointed by the democratically elected Congress. Lots of people want the US to be a dictatorship but it's a far cry from an actual one.
> Anthropic can’t dictate how the DoW conducts business.
Sure they can. The DoD is bound by terms of use and contract terms for any product from any company that they use. They don't get a special pass just because they're the military.
They're offering a service, with contractual limitations that the Pentagon agreed to.
It doesn't seem any different to me than Dominos pizza offering to deliver pizzas to the Pentagon but not to Tehran. If that somehow makes the military subordinate to Dominos Pizza, just because they're able to dictate the terms of their own delivery service, then sure, ban anyone in the military supply chain from being able to order pizzas. It would make the same amount of sense.
The difference would be the DoW needing a a Tehran pizza delivery service, and thus saying "None of our pizza delivery services can use Dominos because they refuse to do the work we need".
Declaring Dominos a supply chain risk means that Boeing cannot order a Dominos pizza for their board meeting in Arlington, because Boeing sells F-35s to the Pentagon.
Supply chain risk is a technical definition not a vibes based one.
And companies absolutely have the right to dictate terms. The idea that the DoD has the unilateral authority to do whatever it wants is literal textbook fascism. It's never been the law in the US and it should not be now.
If the DoD doesn't want Anthropic anywhere in their supply chain, because Anthropic said they won't supply the services the DoD needs.. why can't the DoD bar them from being in their supply chain?
I think this was discussed ad nauseum last time so I am wondering if somehow this has changed but the biggest part of the issue last time was the retaliation. You seem to suggest that this was due to the government not wanting restrictions on their actions. I feel this severely downplays how unusual this designation is considering, like Anthropic says, this has not been applied to domestic companies.
Why couldn't excluding Anthropic be done a different mechanism than a supply chain risk. Why wouldn't this be a standard part of an agreement or a request and simply refuse to renew or cancel a contract rather than being designated a supply chain risk. If some third party contractor for an unrelated non military reason wanted to use Claude as part of their process, it seems perfectly allowable.
If this was a remotely standard way of operation, why did a fair amount of corporate America sign briefs concerned with the retaliatory aspect.
Parts of the action seemed wholly retaliatory as well since Pentagon officials certainly used it as a threat. Why can't a US company have views contrary to the policies of the US government? Certainly the US government is free to not do business with them, but this designation affects everybody doing any kind of indirect business with the US government which is a rather long chain. How might we distinguish caring about a secure supply chain and simply wiping out a company that disagreed with you? There are plenty of areas that are, again, non military. I don't think it's credible to claim that Anthropic will deliberately sabotage operations.
I think the better analogy is an insane nuclear power plant manager deciding it wants to buy pens to use as neutron-flux regulator rods — because after all, a pen is functionally a pencil and a pencil is made of graphite.
Then the pen manufacturer hears about this and says “Our pens are not made of graphite and are not suitable to be used in nuclear reactors”, to which the reactor owner says “it’s fine, they fit in the graphite rod holes, and we’re just using until the next generation of pens come out which will do an even better job”, and then the pen manufacturer says “I’m not going to sell you any pens until you agree that they will be used only writing.”
This is the most accurate parallel as far as I can tell. I've not seen any evidence that Anthropic deliberately built automated systems or escape hatches that literally prevent the US Government from using Claude to do these things. Other than the basic AI Safety mechanisms in place for everyone/general use. It's almost the reverse, where they explicitly don't want to strip away guardrails that say things like "don't kill people".
The intent and framing matters a lot here. Refusal to remove safety features is a LOT different than deliberately building mechanisms to sabotage would-be operations.
It doesn't seem like you understand what a supply chain risk designation is for.
It's to ensure that companies that the DoW relies on don't build on top of a product that isn't fit for DoW work.
You seem to be agreeing with this designation in a way. The DoW essentially said "Pen company won't let us use their pens as neutron-flux regulator rods, so anyone building power plants for us isn't allowed to use these pens as neutron-flux regulator rods".
They've essentially said "pen company won't let us use their pens as neutron flux regulator rods, so anyone building power plants for us isn't allowed to use these pens as pens"
(and yeah, there might be a completely legitimate reason to stop your subcontractors from using HuaweiSpyPens, but determining that ACME Pens is just as dangerous because they refused your neutron flux regulator order looks like a punitive measure, not practical risk reduction)
It actually is, and this is why there are separate judicial, executive and legislative branches to put those checks and balances on each other instead.
Congress can do that, can't it? Why can't it? It could declare all competing religions as terrorist organisations.
Obviously it'd be immoral, unorthadox and impractical but I expect Congress has a long history of promoting and stamping out ideologies and they can do it. What little I know about the civil rights era springs to mind.
Legally, Congress cannot do that, as long as it is "respecting" some religion. It's true that the US Constitution is more used as an excuse than upheld, but at least the language is pretty plain.
In theory. The issue is we've seen exactly what happens in a Congress v. constitution showdown once the Congresspersons put their collective feet down. Congress eventually redefines the law in a way that favours them. Plain language won't stop them if they get serious; they aren't supposed to be regulating the US economy the way they do either and a lot of stuff the military-industrial complex does looks like it should be unconstitutional (like the spying and the secret courts).
On the one hand there is a clear and comforting consensus in the US that they aren't going to force religious mores on anyone. So I don't see how the Congress could or would try. But if we ever end up in a situation where the US Congress decides it wants to go straight Catholic I really don't see how it would fail. They've got far too much power and they'll eventually rotate in a compliant judiciary and then redefine what words mean so they can do it.
It is a bit difficult when dealing with such an out-there scenario, but if Congress decides the US military should do something wild then eventually the military is going to do it. The realistic protection is that by virtue of good system design there isn't a plausible scenario where Congress would want to impose Catholicism on the US population by force.
The fact that Congress is currently abdicating its responsibility does not mean that it is actually powerless. Technically, Congress has tremendous powers if it chooses to wield it. SCOTUS can try to rule a law is unconstitutional but Congress can impeach and remove justices at any time. Of course, we hope Congress members will pay the price when it comes time for reelection but at the time of this decision, as long as they can somehow remain united, Congress reigns supreme.
The previous power plant manager had, of course, already signed a contract to those terms; the power plant is subsequently under new management and upset about being bound by this contract, so they designate that none of their suppliers of parts and fuel are allowed to have any commercial dealings with the pen manufacturer or use these pens for any purpose, even writing.
And why would the manager ban the manufacturers pens even for writing, except out of spite to punish the manufacturer? And coming back to the real case, is the supply chain risk designation supposed to be a punishment or only there to actually protect the supply chain?
It turns out that a gun is usable for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons, and so it’s rational to both be concerned about the presence of a gun and work very hard to make sure only reasonable people are ever in a position to use it, and that’s not a contradictory position with the notion that one might actually need a gun under certain circumstances.
And if the military needs guns to both shoot at humans and animals and a gun factory says “these guns are for shooting small animals only, using them against humans would be inhumane” and refuse to sell them to the Navy Seals, they would be designated a supply chain risk?
Why not just stop buying their guns and let contractors still use those guns if they need guns to shoot animals?
If you have pens in the building, and staff need a pen, they will use the pen that is available, even if there’s a sign saying “not for purpose x”. If you want to stop that happening, you need to not have limited pens available to your staff at all.
Ah so a defense contractor won’t be allowed to use Claude to create their website because they might later want to do some target selection for military strikes using AI and then they wouldn’t be able to use Claude?
> The previous power plant manager had, of course, already signed a contract agreeing to those terms
It's even more perplexing in this case though, because the original DoD contract was signed in July 2025. It was the same "plant manager" just arbitrarily changing their mind in the middle of the contract they signed.
The way things work, the CIOs and CSOs of these companies just implement blanket bans, so it really is effectively a ban for any use. Source: I am at one such company.
That's true legally, but the government's public statements did initially very explicitly present this as a ban on any dealing.
"Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic."
Presumably, according to the defenders of the designation in this thread, this was an innocent mistake that doesn't indicate any political intent.
That analogy still makes this sound like a textbook designation. In that situation the pen manufacturer is expected to sell pens without a theory of what will happen next. The person who buys a pen might use it to kill someone or commit horrific legal/moral crimes and that has nothing at all to do with the pen manufacturer.
I can see how I might reasonably refuse to deal with that pen manufacturer. The pen manufacturer is unreasonably pushy and they're going to be massive trouble to deal with because they're all up in my business in a paranoid way and disrupting my use of their product. Companies have made my never-again list for far smaller slights.
I think you might have misread the thread so far. Do you think the US military is buying atomic bombs from a supplier who is going to try and stop them from bombing things on demand? Obviously the bomb makers have to make peace with the fact that their customers may, of their independent initiative, one day detonate the bombs.
It's been very commonplace in robotics/AI research for vendors to sell robots to the DoD that are explicitly contractually not to be used for killing people.
It's that guy with the long beard and sunglasses that looks like ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, walking out the Wal-Mart door with your suitcase nuke ... the clerk up front near the door was so stunned he didn't even ask to see his receipt
JAVA TECHNOLOGY IS NOT FAULT TOLERANT AND IS NOT DESIGNED, MANUFACTURED, OR INTENDED FOR USE OR RESALE AS ONLINE CONTROL EQUIPMENT IN HAZARDOUS ENVIRONMENTS REQUIRING FAIL-SAFE PERFORMANCE, SUCH AS IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, DIRECT LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES, OR WEAPONS SYSTEMS, IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF JAVA TECHNOLOGY COULD LEAD DIRECTLY TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.
OP makes a category error already by ignoring the part where the US military/government wants to commit crimes (against humanity and whatnot) and pretends, questioning that would be a crime.
You here make another one by pretending, AI was just some random tool, like a screwdriver or a programming language.
AI can make decisions autonomously that would otherwise require a human. Like selecting people to be murdered by drone strike based on arbitrary criteria. A programming language by itself, JAVA, cannot do that.
There is nothing stopping any plain old algorithm being used for the same. The difference is that people decide, for whatever reason, to use the tool or to not use it.
An if/then statement or random number generator in Java can make decisions autonomously. Heck, the US military has deployed fully autonomous weapons since at least 1979 (long before LLMs existed).
This isn't like using pens in a nuclear plant. AI obviously has tremendous military applications. And it's completely unsurprising that the U.S. military--whose entire doctrine for the last century has been about having the most advanced technology--demands to use frontier models without non-military people imposing restrictions.
Have you seen the movie Oppenheimer? This is like Truman telling off Oppenheimer when he was upset about the implications of nuclear weapons: https://www.biography.com/political-figures/a44361438/why-ha... ("Blood on his hands; damn it, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it,” Truman said.... He called Oppenheimer a “cry-baby scientist” and said, “I don’t want to see that son of a b–– in this office ever again.”).
Machine learning needs a lot of examples to get good. Wars and wargames (including digital ones with unbounded self-play time) and all the textbooks together will at best, on the basis of what we see in other fields, get the equivalent of a new officer fresh out of training… and then, given current observed agentic AI behaviour, "follow orders" rather than "follow lawful orders".
> Yeah, but also we can be reasonably confident they're not good enough for many of them yet
What does “not good enough mean?” Who decides what is “good enough” and what tradeoffs are acceptable? Obviously it’s the military’s job to decide that.
In the context of my comment, "not good enough" includes "committing war crimes" and "would have started a war with China if there hadn't been a human in the loop".
We can also infer from other domains, vendbench or attempts to have an LLM play Star Craft, that these models are currently extremely mediocre at management roles.
> Who decides what is “good enough” and what tradeoffs are acceptable? Obviously it’s the military’s job to decide that.
In practice, in the case of the USA, Trump and Hegseth.
The US military, so far as I can tell, are rather less thrilled with these adventures.
Oppenheimer was the guy who was pushing that opinion just as much as the military folks. In the case of AI, my understanding is that Amodei is not trying to beat the enemy to it.
What I don't understand is why the U.S. military is turning to a for-profit corporation when they could fund and pursue the development themselves. Why are they trying to "outsource" it to industry?
If you genuinely believe this analogy is remotely representative of reality, or that it in any way the pencil manufacturer should be perceived as well-reasoned, I don't know what to tell you except that your frustrations with the world are almost definitely internal, and you won't actually feel content or happiness until you recognize that and deal with it.
That is an analogy between one thing and another thing, but the topic of this thread is the designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk, which is not involved in your analogy. It is traditional that comments refer to the topic of discussion in some way.
For example, one might extend your analogy to "The nuclear power plant then declares that it will not buy the pens after all, and the pen manufacturer (who had banned them as a customer) sues them to force them to buy the pens after all."
> They were against using it to kill American citizens
No, they were against using it to kill people without oversight. I hope nobody thinks that there's a difference between murdering people and murdering American citizens.
...I suggest you read about what actually happened:
Anthropic: "We'll sell you access to our AI as long as you don't use it for war crimes or mass surveillance."
DoD: "Ok, deal."
...time passes...
DoD: "Wait, no, we want to be able to use it for war crimes too."
Anthropic: "Too late, you agreed already, and we won't sign a contract for that. You can keep using it for everything we agreed to."
DoD: "Change the terms or we will destroy your business."
Anthropic: "No."
DoD then signs contracts with OpenAI and Google that permit them to commit war crimes and mass surveillance as long as they get legal cover, and proceeds to apply as much leverage as it can to destroy Anthropic's business.
----
And for the record, Anthropic agreed to all "yucky Army things" usage that was an extension of past yucky Army things, they just did not agree to a new class of yucky Army things: namely, fully autonomous killbots. Even there, it was only "not yet, it's not ready". Your whole comment is a gross mischaracterization.
I quit using ChatGPT entirely over this incident, and that's not because I find Anthropic's position to be saintly. They agreed to a contract where the DoD could and in practice is using their AI for committing war crimes.
Ok, I'll be precise: the main dispute was over fully autonomous decisions to use lethal force. Because if the AI chose incorrectly, the military would be attacking targets that it shouldn't. Whether that is a war crime hinges upon whether it was reckless. Anthropic's position was that AI is not capable of making such decisions, which is another way of saying that giving that decision wholly to an AI is reckless. I can stop using the term "war crimes" if it bothers you so much, but I'm failing to see a distinction between what Anthropic was fearing and the definition of what a war crime is. These are fears, so this isn't about whether one specific action was a war crime or not. This is just naming what Anthropic was worried about and why.
> Anthropic wanted them to be the last word in every decision, and DOD could not allow that
Cite one source for Anthropic demanding to be in the loop. This was about the terms of a contract. If I'm agreeing to sell you a medicine, under the condition that you do not use it to euthanize homeless people, that does not mean I am demanding to follow you around and make you ask me whether each use is ok.
> Nobody is destroying anybody's business - pretending that Anthropic could never find any users for their AI outside DOD is plain silly.
Strawman much? The question is about the US government using its influence in a competitive environment to hamstring one company. It doesn't matter whether there are other customers. It doesn't matter whether the company can survive the attack. What matters is whether it is legal and ethical for our public resources to be used for retaliation in this way.
> US Society has mechanisms for preventing and investigating war crimes....I doubt that "give control over it to some random guy that makes AI models"
This is an invented claim. Cite a source.
>> I quit using ChatGPT entirely over this incident
>
> And this is supposed to be an argument because....?
The argument was the first part of the post. This part was me giving my perspective on things, in this case it was about how I don't find Anthropic's position to be good, just that OpenAI's is far worse. My post was not for you exclusively; based on what you have written, I have concluded that there is no value in debating you or attempting changing your mind.
>> They agreed to a contract where the DoD could and in practice is using their AI for committing war crimes.
>
> You have a very vivid imagination. Not trying to use it to state things that could be misinterpreted as statements of fact would be nice.
Ok, fair. Sticking to facts: the crucial part of the negotiation was about whether the DoD can use Anthropic's products for autonomous decisions on lethal force. Since then, it has come out that AI was used in the decision to target an elementary school for girls that killed 120 schoolchildren. (The Palantir Maven Smart System, fwiw, not Claude.) The Pentagon investigated and found that although a human was theoretically in the decision loop, in practice the oversight was minimal and ineffective. "No one remaining on those teams [the teams tasked with minimizing civilian harm] reviewed the strike plans in advance of the attack on the school, according to Bloomberg." Those teams had been gutted, with Hegseth explicitly stating that they were getting in the way.
My supposedly very vivid imagination translated this to reckless decisionmaking that led to a large number of innocent civilian casualties, aka war crimes.
They didn't want their tech to be used to, I don't know, blow up a school with 120 children. But did want to allow other kinds of usage. Is that so weird?
Get rid of your high horse. Nobody wants to blow up a school with 120 children. The question is who is in control and making the decisions. Antropic wanted to be in control and make the decisions for the DOD. DOD refused. It's not so weird at all.
It's not a high horse, you're just misinformed. The Trump regime does want to blow up a school with 120 children. The military had, until recently, a program to prevent such incidents; Pete Hegseth gutted it (https://www.propublica.org/article/hegseth-civilian-harm-mit...) because he wants to achieve "maximum lethality" at all costs. To this date, the regime has not issued any sort of apology for the school bombing, because they're not sorry and they'd happily do it again.
Anthropic did not change the terms. Those were the terms the US Government signed. It was not secret, it was explicit identified and accepted as a term.
The analogy would be: “A customer agreed to a contract, and after running into a clause of the contract they no longer wanted to follow…canceled the contract unilaterally…which also violated the contract.”
And then declared the other side a supply chain risk, claiming it is a potential vector for a national adversary to break in and cause unwanted bad things to happen unrelated to this contract.
It seems like absurdly bad faith starting at breaking the contract (over "you have to follow the law", no less!) and then to retaliate after that with trying to destroy the company's reputation and ability to do business. The boot licking going on here justifying the government operating in bad faith is both disappointing and short sighted. I didn't think the leopards would eat MY face!
And then another company got the contract, claiming they got all the conditions (and more!) that the original contractor was sour about.
I don't know how anyone can look at the situation and see anything but an abuse of power. The government could have just as easily contacted with another provider. This whole thing is vindictive
> The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized and necessary
I.e. Anthrophic cannot be trusted to honour a contract.
In almost any case I am inclined to trust entity not trump or trumps government. So is true in this case, where they pissed their pants at anthropic simply making a proposal and decided to use overwhelming government force against it. I will leave you to decide who you consider more trustworthy, Trump or Anthropic.
> but it actually seems like a textbook designation
How can it be a textbook designation when designating a US company as a supply chain risk is unprecedented? So many actions under the Trump administration are unprecedented it starts to feel like the norm.
No other administration (Republican or Democrat) would do this. The DoD didn’t have a problem using Anthropic’s models during the raid on Venezuela and early on in the war with Iran.
Anthropic says to the former Fox News host it doesn’t want its models used for domestic surveillance or in kill situations without a human in the loop; all of a sudden they're a supply chain risk?
>Anthropic says to the former Fox News host it doesn’t want its models used for domestic surveillance...
Lol, do as we say not as we do!
>In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a “pre-crime” approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen.
You could use the same logic to defend the military declaring that Anthropic is full of pedophiles and therefore they cannot use their products as it would be contributing to pedophilia.
Anthropic offered a contract, with certain conditions, as do all contracts everywhere; that's their purpose. The military did not want to agree to those conditions. If they had stopped there, and refused to sign the contract, all would be good. (It's actually worse, they did sign such a contract, and then decided they wanted the contract to say something different than it actually did. "Pray I don't alter it any further.")
> >The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized [emphasis mine]
That is speculation, and you can't call it a "textbook designation" without discussing whether there's a basis for that "reasonable fear". Again, that argument also works for declaring you have a reasonable fear that giving money to Anthropic will support pedophilia. We do not know the specifics, but I at least have heard of zero evidence that Anthropic would sabotage something they signed a legal contract for, and yet I have an abundance of evidence that this administration will use whatever contortions are necessary to pressure and punish those who interfere with it getting what it wants. It all hinges on the word "reasonable", and based on the evidence that is public, this specific fear seems more ridiculous than reasonable to me.
If the government somehow had a way to force Anthropic to sign a contract that it did not want to sign, then this fear might become more reasonable. The twist is that this supply chain risk designation is exactly that. If Anthropic now capitulated, the accusation of supply chain risk (eg from Anthropic employees acting alone) would be justified. So the only way Anthropic can reasonably be considered a supply chain risk is because it is accused of being a supply chain risk.
This is a textbook example, yes, but it's a textbook example of corruption and judicial capture.
> Though they'd probably put the DoD on the cybersecurity whitelist today, the very idea of the claude whitelists for certain functionality already exists and is being used by them today.
And if they signed a contract permitting fully autonomous killbots, then using the whitelist mechanism would be a contract violation. I have some degree of faith that we'd know if such a contract were signed, because half the staff would quit. (As opposed to half the Google staff quitting after signing such a contract, which has been proven to be an incorrect expectation -- such a contract was signed, and I've heard of exactly one person quitting over it. There may be more, I don't know.)
Nothing can stand in the way of America's forever wars, genocide, and automated killing, including performative objections by a prominent tech company.
I suppose we're supposed to be satisfied that the letter of the law supports this steamroller? Because that's what matters?
A much closer analogy than the pen one is a SAAS company having an EULA. As annoying as EULAs are I don’t think it counts as being malicious or subversive if you are very open and clear with your prospective customers what that EULA contains?
I didn't understand what you said or your analogy, sorry maybe I'm stupid. Would you be able to explain this differently? Maybe something implied was omitted and I didn't follow that.
It can be a textbook designation and a capricious punishment at the same time. It's almost comical, to suggest that anything about this decision was reasonable. Makes me long for the days of n-gate.com.
Being on the offensive cyber security whitelist for Mythos doesn't stop you from getting constant rejections. I don't know how you screw up something as simple as a whitelist.
No, the DOD has super specific acquisition rulesets that don't apply outside the DOD umbrella. Limiting acquisition or refusing sales can be done without being flagged a risk. FedRAMP levels accomplish this without the political intrigue and the unnecessary defense of this action not being political.
In other words: the same outcome could easily be accomplished without being punitive to Anthropic.
i think this is more like the pen maker doesnt want the military top brass calling their pen sales guy to make the kill/no kill decisions while using the pen to sign drone strike orders.
similarly the pen owner doesnt want to make a variation where the pen also doubles as a knife
> This is like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike orders, now the military needs to have a special box of pens that don't have stipulations attached.
It's pretty common for software licenses to state that it's prohibited from being used in medical devices, life support systems, nuclear facilities, etc. Will software with those licenses also be designated supply-chain risks?
And I further dislike Anthropic for creating 2 situations in 2 weeks that are giving this admin an obvious opportunity to be right. The other one is David Sacks responding to the “Pace the Frontier” crap. These were the table tennis equivalent of lobs for the admin.
Also worth noting that no one knows what kind of task would get a rejection with Anthropic’s models. The documentation is near-non-existent with the air of “security,” rules change daily, the harness is buggy, the clients are buggy, and very likely the backend gating and safety mechanisms are buggy. Even if the DOD assumed the best of intentions to comply, the reliability isn’t there.
What military would buy guns that sometimes stop working, and not necessarily for reasons anyone understands, and still be taken seriously?
Also Claude clearly had no issues identifying a school that has been a school for over 10 years as a military target. Why would the military buy tech that would make them more likely to commit war crimes?
A better analogy would be an explosives manufacturer saying that it is okay to use their explosives on military targets, but not civilian targets. Comparing AI to pens trivialises its potential impact.
Incidentally the second stipulation, the restriction on domestic surveillance, sounds like direct recognition of the role IBM played in the Holocaust. Of course, the better course of action would be to deny the military access to their technology. But that's not going to happen because there is so much money on the table.
This is political. Everything is political at this scale.
* How much money did Anthropic and its associates donate to the Biden campaign and associated entities?
* How much money was spent on lobbying by Anthropic and associated entities?
* How many Biden officials were hired by Anthropic after they left office?
* How exactly did Anthropic get exclusive no-bid contracts to be the Federal Government's sole AI provider for classified systems?
And with this corrupt influence, and the money that it earned them, Anthropic has attempted to:
* Stoke public fear and panic about AI
* Stoke conflict with China
* Eliminate domestic competition
* Suppress international competition
* Degrade their models in order to limit their ability to create competitive products
* Train their models on their customer's proprietary data in order to steal their intellectual property
Anthropic played a game and they lost. They can wrap that up in whatever sanctimonious moralizing clap-trap they want, but nobody believes a word they say, or will ever trust them, so they might as well be talking to the wind.
OpenAI may be playing the same game but at least they have the intelligence and humility to read the room, recognize a failed strategy, and adapt.
Who wants to buy intelligence from people who are stupid enough to publicly try to dictate terms to the US Military? Complete and utter brand destruction for everyone involved.
The DoD is free not to sign contracts. Having them be able to get a company blacklisted from a whole sector just because they couldn't agree on terms with that company is obviously very different than that.
The idea that "fair for the military to object to" implies "fair for the military to ban from their supply chain in any capacity no matter how unrelated the use" is so outlandish that it's never been done before (to a US company), and I think we can be confident that the DoD has frequently objected to would-be contractors' terms.
The claim that it being done for the first time - by a Secretary of Defense denounced the politics of the company in the same text where he announced the designation - isn't "political", is something I have a hard time believing a functioning adult who isn't employed defending the government in court could adopt.
But hey, maybe in some language this is a "textbook" official statement with no "politics":
Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission - a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.
> You can agree with the rules anthropic wanted, but having rules set by a private company at all that apply to the military does seem fair for the military to object to.
Oh the hypocrisy and irony. This coming from a country whose military sets rules on other countries' armed forces how weapons systems bought from US can be used.[ß] By this standard US itself should be designated as a supply chain risk for everyone else.
ß: for a very long time in the Ukraine "conflict", US refused to allow their gear from being used to attack targets outside of Ukraine's borders.
The analogy doesn't help. This isn't about pens. Anyone who's used AI services knows that their rules will restrict what you can use them for, and they'll change those rules at will. DoD understandably doesn't want that if Anthropic is saying themselves they don't want their AI to be used for autonomous weapons.
I guess it beats physical battles to resolve disputes.
Without taking sides in this statement, I do think it's important for a private company like Anthropic to have a mechanism it can turn to when it feels it's been inequitably treated by the government.
> Wtf is life just court battles back and forth for everything forever now?
Not for peasants like you and me! We are forced to surrender our Seventh Amendment rights in order to be able to do most things that are part of everyday life.
I don’t agree with the decision, but I don’t think courts should be able to easily overturn the federal government’s findings when it comes to national security in a specific decision like this.
Not sure if I’m just in my own national security bubble, but I find it troubling to see the perspective that most of the conversation in this thread is coming from.
The US government took a legal designation explicitly crafted to protect against foreign adversaries and deployed it against a private, domestic entity, to their immediate and great detriment.
OK, explicitly designed to be used against adversaries. So the government is explicitly designating Anthropic as an adversary of the United States of America (a domestic adevarsary, not foreign, sure, GP was wrong on that part).
And the reason Anthropic is an adversary of the USA? They have a clause in their license agreement that their products must not be used in surveillance or military targeting decisions.
Sounds like a fair characterization then? Trying to dictate or restrict the (domestic) military uses of a product is literally an adversarial position to the national military interest.
Where did you get "trying to dictate" from? The text is "the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert [...]"
I'm failing to see how a mutually agreed upon "you may not use our product for X or Y purpose" in a contract poses any such risks.
Trying to argue for and enforce a 'you may not use our product for an express objective of the US military' provision is pretty clearly "trying to dictate". Actively cancelling, moving capabilities behind a 'safety' wall, or even threatening to would be a clear sabotage of the US military's operational capabilities. It'd be one thing is Anthropic merely expressed an opinion, but my understanding is that it was/is an outright 'we will not allow' as opposed to a 'we'd prefer you didn't'.
Imagine if Microsoft tried the same with excel or power point. "um actually in the fine print of the EULA it says you may not use our product for military purposes so we will revoke your access unless you stop using power point for mission briefings that might result in the deaths of civilians". Would fly about as well as a lead brick.
Again, the statute says nothing about "dictating terms." It covers an adversary who might sabotage or subvert a system. And no, Anthropic did not cancel anything, did not pull any capabilities, and has no backdoor into deployed models. There was no "um actually." It wrote two usage restrictions into a contract, the military signed it, and then later demanded the terms be removed.
As a sanity check, I’d highly recommend trying out your own lines of reasoning in cases which you think you might feel differently. For example, imagine a certain authoritarian state saying "obey the Party or get blacklisted as a national security threat."
It might feel good in the moment, like "yeah, Anthropic, don't tell the military what to do," because you agree with this particular call. But the government doesn't give that power back, and you very well may not like the next way it gets used.
The statute defines a supply chain risk as “the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert” a covered system. It says adversary, not foreign adversary.
Even so, this designation had never previously been applied to a domestic company. The Pentagon applied it to Anthropic after a dispute over how it could use its AI. To me, the circumstances suggest the designation was used to punish Anthropic for refusing the Pentagon’s terms.
It was clearly retaliatory and because of that unlawful.
> Wow, explicitly means it is directly defined in the statue. Which it isn't.
This is some radical new definition of "explicit" that hasn't caught up to public usage nor the dictionary.
In normal parlance, explicit just means that someone involved in the crafting, at some point, stated "I am writing this bill for X reasons". There's often quite a lot of evidence about that, which is not contained in the statue itself.
Both canbe true: the law as written is too broad and enables petty vindictive behaviors from politicians to punish companies that don't ask "how high" when prompted to jump.
It can also be the case that the law is applied in a way unintended by it's writers to enable corrupt choices.
At which point, you need to look beyond the letter of the law to contextualize whether the law is applied correctly.
I think both sides are wrong. In no particular order:
US does not buy weapons that self-regulate generally. The US can and has purchased weapons with stipulations on how they should be used. For instance, and I'm making this up, they might purchase cluster munitions for smashing up an airfields, but with a stipulation they may not be used where humans are present or something. The munition doesn't check GPS and refuse to detonate if GPS doesn't indicate it's over some Russian airfield. Nor does an M4 fail to fire if it's on US Soil. Anthropic tried to build safeguards and out-regulate the government. Everyone here should know that such limitations would (can and have, see some famous IFF spoofing incidents) be exploited by an enemy, which is generally why they aren't acceptable in a military context. Without seeing the contract signed, one possibility is Anthropic tried to push regulations onto the government, and Anthropic gets to ride away on a high horse.
The other side: The Supply Chain Risk feels like an abuse. It's likely a valid designation and likely has its historical uses. If this was a contract issue, that would have been the correct way to litigate. Instead, again without seeing the contract, it feels like this is way to try and stifle their uptake in defense sector; basically attempting to strong arm them by choking a business segment off. Again, if there is a in fact a legitimate breach of contract here, it should be litigated as such. The alternative is there is no such breach, and Anthropic built limitations into the contract and the Pentagon just has buyers remorse. Honestly this wouldn't surprise me, the federal government generally incinerates tax dollars, and with the massive marketing hullabaloo pushed by AI companies, its completely likely a giant contract was signed without reading the fine print.
The difference between Anthropic and a cluster bomb supplier is that cluster bomb manufacturing in the United States requires permits. The government is only going to give them to companies that are working with the United States and its allies, which means that company has zero leverage to make requirements (e.g. "don't use them on humans.")
Separately, as a note to your made up example:
Cluster bombs are uniquely efficient against humans, especially in trenches. The US is not a signatory to the international treaty banning their use. It does not like being limited in how it conducts war. I strongly doubt that it would agree to terms from a private enterprise to similar effect.
All AI is a supply chain risk. I think people should know that about now. You can't keep it in a box. The way code works as a model is that is not super sentient thing with nefarious intentions. It is just pure automaton.
Let me explain, if it learns something from training data to do certain things from code it has online it can install or use a code that is vulnerable from a security perspective.
I think the real, and continuing, story here is the US military and the US govt in general continuing to let ego degrade capability. I'm not going to get into a discussion about what is legal, I am personally not interested in that distinction here, the core point is that this is the US being stupid, again.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 15.8 ms ] threadIf I was Palantir or any other GOP aligned company, I would be completely against this. What's to stop a Democratic president from doing the same thing and destroying them?
I doubt that is going to change anytime soon. They are a private entity, so they can manage and change their primary system any way they want.
Sarbanes-Oxley? Dodd-Frank? ACA? Now I'm sure you (like, every other living human) has a ton of nitpicks and criticism of bills like that. But they're real and they passed and they're largely-to-wholely partisan creations of the Democratic policy apparatus (SOX looked very bipartisan and was passed under Bush, but the actual bill was written mostly by democratic staffers).
I mean, fine, you'd like different regulation. But they're responsible for basically all the corporate regulation active in the US regime.
Bothsidesism is a very poor tool for this particular argument. Work with your allies, please.
We, the people, are on the other side.
Democracy is an imperfect system, but its much better than the alternatives. If more people paid attention and participated, we would have much better outcomes.
https://x.com/dril/status/473265809079693312?lang=en
Oh? Thats why Biden tried to run in 2024? Because democrats procedurally try to elect obviously incapable presidents?
And all the shenanigans around 2016 when Bernie Sanders was shut out by the DNC. Even Elizabeth Warren said outright that the DNC rigged the 2016 nomination. I think the outcome would have been very, very different if the DNC didn't fuck with the timeline and forced Hillary as the Dem nominee.
* removed filibuster for lower-court nominations ("nuclear option")
* impeached the president twice in a term
* tried that former president in the Senate after his term ended
* repeatedly attempted to eliminate 60-vote rule for legislation
* expanded mail-in voting en masse
I'm not claiming these were illegal or not, just fast-and-loose with process/precedent is accepted. The process adapts to the needs.
I suspect this is changing. The DSA branch especially wants all contracts with Palantir eliminated.
DSA has very limited understanding of the politics of power. Agree or disagree with their policy and advocacy, but they lack a unified, coherent policy platform. They take stances from (imo) good places and suggest proposals that are politically untenable (to say the least) and realistically ridiculous.
Mamdani is a unique politician. He is generationally charismatic, articulates the pragmatism behind solutions, and taps into the everyday struggles of citizens. When he talks about ideologically, it's soaring rhetoric about who we can be. His critiques, however, are often strongly tethered to tangible concerns (rent, food, education) vs. the DSA-type far left.
Source: worked in democratic politics, on a presidential campaign, with a wide range of people on the left (and "left") including DSA die hards.
> I suspect this is changing.
Nope. The democrats have been on the cusp of becoming serious for as long as I've been following politics. It's a con to get your hopes up. Don't.
s/Democrats/all US politicians/ FTFY
You really can't make a valid case to say the dems are the corporate dominated party. ffs, they are the only ones even attempting to put common sense regulations on the financial industry, something Trump called "bad for business" when he undid antitrust legislature that got passed under Biden.
The dems haven’t done anything notably anti-corporate in ages. There are rumbles about doing it (anti trust, supporting unions, climate change), but it never _quite_ seems to actually materialize into anything.
Cynically, that’s why both sides lean so hard into the culture wars. The men in suits would rather we argue about how to interpret history than whether a wealth tax makes sense.
There's only so much they can do when dealing with obstructionism, but the party is still putting forward legislation. For recent examples see The American Homeownership Act (https://www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/minority/senate-demo...) and the Stop Corporate Takeovers of Physicians Act (https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren...)
The contrast implies that Republicans are in your words "anti-corporate"
Trump just removed Obama era greenhouse gas finding.
"President Trump and Administrator Zeldin Deliver Single Largest Deregulatory Action in U.S. History"
https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/president-trump-and-adminis...
Democrats also had massive number of anti-trust regulations during Biden and Obama.
You're claiming they've done nothing on anti-trust?
And Republicans did it because.... They're anticorporation?
also if you look at how the two factions separate from each other decade by decade (there used to be overlap, almost none now) it's obvious that there will be no reconciliation.
it's a musical chairs game at this point, whoever is in power when the democratic facade cracks will be able to seize power and transition into whatever single party state follows.
Stop trying to both sides this.
Trump was an idiot who made himself an easy target for nobodies with no strategic bones in their body to go after him. note that his guilt or lack thereof is irrelevant, what matters is that legal action was initiated against a past president. this one action doomed the republic just like it did the previous Roman one.
Letitia James campaigned on putting her political opponents in prison and then proceeded to try doing so.
I think the red team is only now starting to come to similar terms.
Around 2030, the US will need to spend 100% of it's tax revenue to service the debt, and California will need to a federal bailout or risk either default or wiping out their state pensions. I can assure the 'nothing ever happens' crowd we will see things happen in 2030, which is only a few years away.
If:
1. The designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk is politically motivated
2. We collectively accept that is okay for the US President to bar all defense vendors and contractors from working with an American company for political reasons.
What defense related company(ies) would a Democratic President have political reasons to ban?
It has been reported that Palantir and its founder have a history of political contributions to the Republican party.
They probably will, and the comment section here on HN will overwhelmingly applaud it. Next question?
Isn't this basically what Anthropic wanted?
It boils down to inexperience with a healthy dose of delusion on Anthropic's part.
Side note, the Anthropic bots are astroturfing the comments.
You mention inexperience. Historically how many US companies can you name that have been historically named supply chain risks?
So yes obviously defense contractors are forbidden to use it.
Anthropic did not host the model that the Department of War used. It had, and still has no control over the models it has deployed in classified environments.
No, it does not mean that. I don't know why people have been making this claim. If you work for a company, let's call it X, and your work is not DOD related, let's say you work on a social media service, then X has no reason (from this designation) to prevent you from using Anthropic, it will not impact their defense contracts at all.
It is impossible to miss the absolute hypocrisy of this moment and how people and corporations are supposedly free, but if you happen to be of interest to the government they will try to casually ruin you. It has always been this way, people just haven't noticed because it flies under the radar most of the time when the govern crushes some smaller enterprise or another because it got in their way or didn't play by their rules.
It seems simple to me. Anthropic is a private company. If you don't like it fix the laws or don't buy from them.
Yeah, the DOD is such a huge purchaser that it can "ruin you" by blacklisting you if you don't play by its terms. The same is true about Walmart if you're a grocery supplier, Apple if you make electronics components, etc. Private companies absolutely exercise their power like that.
The Federal government often imposes terms on its contractors that specify what sub-contractors are allowed to do, including "flow down" requirements that ensure these terms are themselves enforced recursively all the way down to leaf suppliers.
None of those amount to a ban, after all private companies are also able to do the same thing, and often do. E.g. when Apple requires its suppliers to pursue clean energy efforts as in https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/09/apple-advances-suppli...
Yes. Paragraph #1, sentence #1 of the US Constitution: "provide for the common defence[sic]". This is further elaborated upon in other original Constitution articles and subsequent amendments.
From that, we derive a long, storied history of things, among the more recent of which, and the operative matter here, is the Defense Production Act circa 1950.
The US is fundamentally based on the obligation of mutual military defense, and delegates the authority to call military balls and strikes, such as who will and will not be permitted to contract with the US military, exclusively to POTUS. Anthropic et al. are way out of their depth when they imagine they are imbued with some sort of military veto power in the US.
Anthropic’s position is also known as “having terms of service”.
To be clear the existing, signed ToS terms that Trump balked at were:
1. No mass surveillance of US civilians - illegal but we have all read the Snowden papers.
2. Fully unmanned kill chains on autonomous weapons - Anthropic have even stated they will support this eventually, they just didn’t think their models were ready and didn’t want the obvious, inevitable blowback.
The DoD is within its rights to cancel the contract if it doesn’t like the terms that it previously signed.
This seems like a definitional supply chain risk.
This whole fiasco is happening because the defense dept wanted to use anthropic models in a way not allowed in the existing contract. Anthropic stuck to the contract, and the def dept tried to be punitive about it.
If they can’t get what they want from the seller, fine go to a different seller, but the supply chain risk is just government overreach.
AWS GovCloud I believe promises the opposite. They could still do it, in terms of the capability itself, but then they'd be subject to both civil, criminal, and possibly even military consequences. Whereas Anthropic would be shielded from those consequences by the terms of their agreement (presumably; I'm not up to speed on the specifics of their contractual demands. This is just based on the context from this article and the previous appeals case that ruled against the government).
> FASCSA definition (41 U.S.C. § 4713(k)(6)): "Supply chain risk" means the risk that any person may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, extract data, or otherwise manipulate the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, maintenance, disposition, or retirement of covered articles so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise manipulate the function, use, or operation of the covered articles or information stored or transmitted on the covered articles.
This topic is a mind-killer, lots of uninformed opinion swamping the news, and it's hard to get actual signal on the technical questions at hand. (And, I think it's naive to believe that the government is actually concerned about the precise legal definitions; remember Hegseth decreed that no government sub-contractors would be allowed to transact with Anthropic, despite there being no legal basis for this?)
> Anthropic can decide at any point to disable the military's ability
If you're referring to the claims of a killswitch, Anthropic testified under oath that they don't have one. This has been thoroughly covered, e.g. https://www.axios.com/2026/04/22/anthropic-no-kill-switch-ai.... Anthropic provides the weights, they get run in DoD's secure enclave. There's no "phone home".
If you mean more generally, that DoD might breach a contract and then have that contract cancelled going forwards, then yes - this is literally how all SaaS contracts work. And it's very clearly not what the quoted text above refers to.
The way this works in a non-totalitarian country is, the government says "I want new terms and you won't give them to me; instead I will take my business elsewhere". And indeed this is what happened, DoD now has contracts with Google and OpenAI for equivalent capabilities.
Just to engage on your terms, with the actual concern you're raising; I would say rather than "FASCSA supply chain risk" a better way of thinking about it is "vendor lock-in". DoD absolutely should not rely on a single vendor for these kinds of capabilities. And most defense spending explicitly contemplates this already. This should be and has been solved through basic procurement practices.
If what you're saying is true, then there is truly no supply chain risk other than the risk of civil action against the government for violation of terms of service. That seems like a rather weak point on which to balance a "supply chain" risk though.
The TL;DR is that this was actually decided on the principle that Anthropic can “manipulate” the defense systems by training Claude to refuse to take certain actions.
This feels like a parallel construction to me, it wasn’t reported AFAICT at the time of the original drama.
But yeah, the decision in OP has nothing to do with the contractual terms that everyone has been debating upthread.
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/04/01/claude-codes...
Which sounds sensible on the surface, until you realize that all military organizations have extensive experience with that exact question, and have spent centuries refining their practices. Deferring that to a private company is actually a major regression and a concerning role to pass on to the public regardless.
FWIW I am not pro military, but it's a prominent part of human culture and not going away anytime soon. I do understand the nature of professions, however, and only one of these groups has made the interpretation of this question their specialization.
This is false.
It's about them maintaining an interpretation of law at all.
Simpletons read that as: "The DOW wants to kill people with AI."
https://www.pearlcohen.com/anthropic-sues-department-of-defe...
The DoW actually used AI in the Iran war, which led to them attacking a school and killing more than a hundred childrem. That's exactly what Anthropic wanted them to prevent. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-iran-school-attack/
None of those systems pull the trigger. They assemble data for human review.
The core dispute was the US Military deciding it needed to renegotiate this contract, but without Anthropic's two red lines: No fully autonomous weapons (i.e., zero humans in the loop), and no mass domestic surveillance.
That kind of extensive experience.
Anthropic did the morally right thing and are being punished for it. The case in point justifies their position.
As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.
I don’t remember the last war that didn’t have credible evidence of war crimes occurring. Were bombing civilian infrastructure in Iran, Iraq had Abu Ghraib among all the Collateral Damage stuff, the Highway of Death in the Gulf was probably a war crime, Vietnam had My Lai, WWII was the advent of carpet bombing civilian infrastructure. I can’t think of any for Korea, but I also know very little so that doesn’t say much.
We still haven’t charged anyone for the second strike on that fishing boat in South America, and I haven’t heard a single rationale for why that’s not a war crime other than “fog of war”.
The US doesn’t even really have a meaningful system for finding and prosecuting these, because we aren’t signatories for the ICC and have a bill saying we’ll invade if they charge one of our service members with a war crime. We aren’t basically the furthest thing from having any experience prosecuting war crimes. I can probably count on my fingers the number of cases we’ve tried. We rarely charge our own service members, and we usually kill foreign combatants rather than capture and charge them.
War includes death by design. The trajectory is trending toward less unjustified death.
No.
And why did America have so many enemies???
Maybe because we keep finding excuses to invent them, and then does hundreds of "morally grey" bombings. But at least it wasn't another Vietnam, right?
What a low bar.
This is not at all what happened. The existing contract that Anthropic had with the government had two red lines: No autonomous weapons (i.e., do not build Skynet with Claude), and no mass domestic surveillance.
Anthropic did not, and does not want, any case-by-case veto power over the US Military's use of their AI models. The red lines were negotiated ahead of time.
And it also doesn't mean that Anthropic is supply chain risk merely for not wanting AI to be the active decision maker in live or death situations in war.
And Anthropic's objection was recently confirmed: the US military blew up a school in Iran due to an AI error, an killed more than a hundred kids.
lmao trying to imagine the scenario GP envisions as they "typed" together their comment
Lol wtf, do you think nobody here knows how to use git? this is like a Fox News comment, you are not a developer and are trying to spread fear because a word was used jokingly. "git blame" is just a diff tool.
You cannot use git blame to cause conflict.
But that's not at issue here. Obviously everyone agrees that the Pentagon can issue RFQ's to whatever specifications it wants. They can buy whatever they want, for the same reason that you or I are free to sell whatever we want.
The subject at hand is an attempt to use national security regulatory power to coerce Anthropic into selling a product it doesn't want to sell.
It would be naive to think that a private company could deny the government access to any tech if they want it for military or surveillance etc usage. In this case the government isn't forcing Anthropic to do it, they have alternatives and are perhaps making an example of Anthropic for refusing.
You could even make a case that the "supply chain risk" designation DOES make sense. If Anthropic are opposed to certain uses of their software, then doesn't that potentially impact companies that are part of the supply chain as well?
A supply chain risk is specifically an entity that is likely to maliciously sabotage the US military's operations, such as Chinese companies that are controlled by the CCP. It is not simply a decision to "not buy from this company", but rather a wide-ranging decision that this particular company is a national security threat.
Is it coersion when people refuse to buy anything but free range chicken eggs?
DoD just refuses to buy a product. Anthropic just lost a customer because their product didn't fit the requirements of the customer.
That's not what happened. DOD bought a product, with terms precluding specific applications of the product. DOD decided to change the terms, vendor said no. DOD threw a hissyfit (well, Hegseth did) and said, "No one can use it if they do business with us!"
If they had just terminated their contracts with Anthropic, then there would likely be no issue beyond having to pay out any penalties for terminating a contract early. They could then go to Grok (as they did) and OpenAI and used them instead. Or even kept the contract with Anthropic and its limitations, and just used the others for the cases where Anthropic was not permitted.
This is not an abstract disagreement at all. The red lines that the Department of War wanted to cross were made extremely clear: They want to build Skynet with Claude, and build a mass domestic surveillance system. Now they will have to make do with building those two systems with Gemini and ChatGPT.
They claim they want to use AI for "any lawful purpose". They didn't go further to say that they want to build either Skynet or engage in mass surveillance.
Anthropic wanted the DoW to specifically disclaim those things, and the DoW position is that it will not disclaim any specific mission set that it's legally allowed to engage in, whether that's Skynet, targeting, surveillance, or anything else. Not for Anthropic, not for any contractor.
But refusing to disclaim a mission isn't the same as saying you want to do, just like refusing to answer "when did you stop beating your wife?" doesn't mean you're beating your wife.
Is the DoW response to this tiff over the top? Sure, but it's also not 100% political either, I've run into many government bureaucrats who love bureaucratic knife fights like this.
OpenAI has hacked several prominent entities and is allowed to do business as usual but Anthropic putting guardrails on the military's usage of AI is the national security threat while Pentagon itself said that over reliance on AI lead to that attack on school in Minab.
I have also learned that OpenAI's president is a big maga donor and now I am thinking of cancelling my OpenAI membership todau and signing up with Anthropic again.
I can 100% assume you showed that same courage and moral fortitude by quitting X after Elon acquired it. Respect!
That is still not corruption, yet. Also in Germany it is the executive branch which controls who is sued or policed by the stately organs.
So favorism can be passed down this way, but not we are not at corruption yet. If reciprocity is expected, then you could call it that. Or could perhaps even file for negligence in treating all other company actors the same, especially if you are Anthropic yourself.
Still, I blame the US voters as much as the current administration if the later is just clowns and thieves.
Also, IANAL and HN discussing US things is always foreign to me.
Right, because "supply chain risk" designation is as it pertains to them being a supplier to the military, not a overall assessment of their standing as a corporate citizen. Not to mention that the administration wants to go full steam ahead when it comes to AI development, so there's no internal contradiction here.
DOW wanted to change the contract after the fact. Anthropic refused. That is not sabotage.
Nobody's paying these judges under the table. They're just supporting their team.
(Hmm did you edit your reply?)
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/25/thrive-capital-openai-joshua...
I think the point is that, if the DOD was working off a coherent philosophy, the company that has a rap sheet for hacking multiple targets, including the Australian government, is probably also a risk.
And if "hacking the Australian government" isn't enough to qualify as a threat to national security, then it's probably mudslinging to suggest that Anthropic is a threat.
1) The designation has nothing to do with hacking, either from Anthropic or otherwise. The dispute is about Anthropic barring the DoD from using Claude to develop autonomous weapons and conduct domestic surveillance.
2) The DoD does not care about any of the hacking OpenAI does as long as the DoD can do what they want with ChatGPT.
3) Historically, the US government has been interested in hacking other nation states, friendly and not. So OpenAI being able to hack Australian systems is a selling point.
For all the downsides of losing the business of government contractors, it really would hold Anthropic to their stated values: they’ll never develop AI controlled weapons on this blacklist.
I suspect this will be reversed en banc.
Anthropic’s argument is really clear and easy to understand: we can’t simultaneously be a supply chain risk and also be a company the DoD demands we change our policies so they can use our models without restrictions.
The DoD could have used the same authority to seize the technology if it wanted to. Especially in a time of war. DoD has instead chosen to respect Antrhopic's boundaries and has simply barred anyone in the agency from buying a product that comes with strings attached.
This is 100% on Anthropic for product:market fit failure.
If I sell the DOD a service with contracted terms X/Y/Z, the DOD agrees, then later asks me to drop Z, and I refuse, how would that warrant the legal definition of a supply chain risk? How is the appropriate response for the DOD not to simply find another service provider?
The DoW tried to change a contract they had signed. Anthropic refused. That doesn't make them a supply chain risk (the wording of which implies "likely to sabotage" the government).
The US has not declared war on Iran. No wartime legal mechanism is at play, and cannot be until Congress decides to declare war.
This is like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike orders, now the military needs to have a special box of pens that don't have stipulations attached. With AI usage it would be the same thing except applied to entire product chains. It seems like it would just add more complexity to operations.
You can agree with the rules anthropic wanted, but having rules set by a private company at all that apply to the military does seem fair for the military to object to.
>The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized and necessary
Though they'd probably put the DoD on the cybersecurity whitelist today, the very idea of the claude whitelists for certain functionality already exists and is being used by them today.
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/tariff-exemptions-are-bi...
https://www.warren.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/media/doc/l...
The correct mental model for the U.S. federal government right now is not an omnipotent democratic overseer for economic activity, but rather as just one firm that negotiates directly with other major firms for legitimization and legal protection. Their power is likely to decline further, as is the value of "legitimization", as technological developments erode the military's monopoly on physical force. Interesting times ahead - historically tech transitions like this lead to a splintering of state legitimacy and then a reorganization under new forms of governance.
Remember, the Anthropic red line was "no war crimes and no mass surveillance of the US population." You may think that war crimes are cool, and that mass surveillance of the US population by the department of defense would be fine, but consider the natural consequences, both for democracy and for any adversary's conduct in future wars.
It's really rich to say this after calling me disingenuous.
I don't think it's cool that Anthropic gets to set military policy. I don't care how much I agree or disagree with the policy. Wario is not the president. And Anthropic does not strike me as "obviously patriotic," not that I think it's better if the private company bossing the military around is patriotic. It has no relevance.
"Warcrimes" is the new "racist," too. It gets thrown around willy nilly about every military action.
Look at it pragmatically. What does the DoD use every single procurement for? Hint: military use.
OpenAI, xAI, and Google happily agreed to DoW contracts which allow both of those use cases.
No it doesn't. Specifically OpenAI had a "all lawful purposes" clause (which plausibly includes the existing mass surveillance apparatus), but Anthropic did not.
Our military must also not be dependent on private company that believes it has the moral prerogative to control our military’s decisions, and would have the technical capability to do so.
They could’ve just negotiate a new contract with OpenAI, without banning it from every government agency. But I’m sure that would’ve triggered some kind of extra clause and cost money…
Your entire statement lacks any type of fact.
If the military wants to use AI to autonomously kill people, they can - Anthropic is not stopping them - thy just can't with Anthropic's services.
The government retaliating by then claiming that any use of Anthropic is risk is an obvious farce. How would Anthropic be any less of a risk if they let Claude autonomously kill people?
Their argument, in effect, is that we should throw out the entire Constitutional order and make Dario Amodei dictator of the world. The psychopathic hubris is laughable.
If I sold steel to the Pentagon but then tried to say they they couldn't use it for ships and tanks but they are free to use for warehouses they would react the same way as they are doing now.
They sure as hell shouldn't! Selling steel for any use except ships and tanks is a little odd but it's not a risk.
(I'm ignoring the "but then" because this was about future sales not previous ones.)
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/endi...
Same goes for Anthropic: they would only consider offering a version of their product for military use that had certain restrictions. The government is free to accept that version or reject it. Rejecting it and designating Anthropic a supply-chain risk is just political intimidation and retribution for not playing ball.
I am pretty receptive to the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument, but we are taking a big leap from pen to llms/artificial intelligence. I am sympathetic to some of your other points, but I simply must reject this analogy.
The moral and ethical scale of the issue makes this far different than someone buying a pen.
If Lockheed could brick its planes if the US planned to use them for military action it disagreed with (and showed some indication they couldn't be trusted not to do it), would they be a supply chain risk?
It is not the role of a defense contractors to have oversight and control power over the military they're supplying.
Purposes Anthropic already spelled out in contract form.
They don’t buy the product, and the product can’t be used in the things they do buy.
These blanket rules are very typical in large organizations.
No, they want to have rules on how the military used Anthropic AI.
Military would still be free to use OpenAI for the nasty stuff
It literally is a textbook definition, signed into US law:
“Supply chain risk,” means the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of a covered system so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise degrade the function, use, or operation of such system (see 10 U.S.C. 3252).
How does Android and iPhone meet the grade given apps have pretty consistently leaked locations, base layouts etc?
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/military-cybersecurity-ad-tr...
> The U.S. military has disabled advertising tracking tools in government-issued phones, computers and other devices, officials recently told Congress.
> The different military branches confirmed they had done so, some only this summer, following reporting that commercially available data taken from these devices and sold freely by data brokers, was being used by Iran and other adversaries to track and in some cases target American bases and personnel.
China, Russia, Iran, come to mind.
Those are (arguably) adversaries but the actor here is Anthropic, which is not an adversary.
Alas, even my question about it was downvoted.
https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2026/09/26-104... see page 30
However, that's not what a supply chain risk is. It's not an order to "don't buy these products if they don't work the way we want them to", its designating Anthropic as a national security threat because they might intentionally sabotage US military operations.
Yes, this is why the DoW won’t use them.
DoD. Gulf of Mexico. Lake Ontario.
No it isn’t see above
It would have been incredibly simple for Anthropic to say "we cannot guarantee performance in a kill-chain application due to an unknown level of safeguards implemented in the baseline product and cannot estimate a cost for developing a new product capable of such application." and leave it at that.
Which means the exact use limitations WOULD NOT BE DELINEATED IN WRITING in advance.
If, on the other hand, Anthropic deliberately blocks the user from doing something, then it is sabotage.
I don't think it's reasonable to fear that Anthropic would change the deal after contractually agreeing to terms of use. The government is using that as an excuse because they know that Anthropic hasn't actually met the definition of a supply-chain risk.
https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2026/09/26-104...
> Whatever paradigmatic examples individual members of Congress may have had in mind, the statutory definition is not limited to “adversar[ies],” 10 U.S.C. § 3252(d)(4), and instead covers “any person,”
Anthropic's actions were not sabotage, malicious, or subversive. That seems to be a requirement of the definition.
there's section 4713 which is roughly "Secretary of War can pull the nat.sec. card, bye"
The purpose of the designation is because Anthropic's product was deemed risky enough they had to ensure it doesn't get incorporated in any other products they might buy from anyone else. The label is means to an end. This isn't difficult to understand.
Antrophic merely said they don't allow their tools to be used for autonomous killing.
A very specific case.
So where is the danger making it necessary preventing all suppliers from using Claude at all? That only concerns those who work directly on autonomous killing and only they will have to go to Altman or Musk.
So none of that is any threat to the military - so it was just black mailing to make them do the governments will - which is something usually dictatorships do, not democratic systems.
Private companies can not be allowed to control what our military does I feel like I'm in a crazy worlds how can people possible be arguing for that.
In a democratic society, the default should be, the military just buy somewhere else, then force companies to build them the terminator. So no private company controls what the military does, they just control their product. You want the military to control private companies? There is a name for that kind of system, where this is conmon.
And yes companies should be able to control how their products are used, particularly in the military. Or do you believe in compelled speech?
Perhaps people who are noticing politics here - including in the decision of two Trump-appointed judges, against the he vote of another Republican-appointed judge- are not the ones who are choosing not to see reality?
A vendor with particularly poor QA might be a risk in your supply chain but isn't a "supply chain risk" according to this designation and neither would Anthropic be.
If the DoD needs to sign such orders, they won't buy this pen.
If a supplier needs to sign such orders, the supplier also won't buy the pen.
If a supplier needs to sign other orders, and this pen is the best one available, the supplier may decide to buy this pen. Since the orders are within what the pen will sign, they get signed, and the supplier fulfills its contract with the DoD.
The DoD needed a signed order from its supplier, and they got it. The ink is on the paper. Who cares what pen was used? The ink isn't going to erase itself post-hoc.
Where is the supply chain risk?
---
Now, if the DoD suspects that Anthropic will train its models to try to actively sabotage military operations, that's a very different story. Does anyone actually believe that?
This is a designation reserved for terrorists and the link.
Actively handicapping a product that's otherwise capable qualifies.
The converse does not qualify. If I advertise a chemical with an admixture that prevents it from being used to make explosives, the military has absolutely no right to demand that I produce a version of that chemical without the admixture. Selling a product which can't do what the DoD wants does not make me a supply chain risk, no matter how easy it would be for me to make a different product that's fit for their purpose.
Say everyone had something to sell and DOD wanted to buy it. But some people wouldn't make the product changes DOD demanded. Now, they are the adversary of the DOD?
I hear Trumplandia is nice this time of year.
No, it doesn't. The military doesn't have a right to force product requirements and terms of use on companies they contract with.
If they don't like the contract terms, they can simply not sign a contract and not do business with a company. Trying to get them designated a supply-chain risk is just political retribution.
How is that not what they're saying here by banning it in the supply chain?
How else do you prevent any dod purchases or contracts from 'having contact' with a software you don't trust?
But they're not actively handicapping it. They're saying it would be wildly irresponsible to assume it's "otherwise capable".
And very critically: they have taken zero steps to "actively handicap" it in any way.
Like they're okay with the product being designed to be incapable but not terms limiting a product.
To give another (bad) analogy: The Pens aren't made to be weapons themselves, they are not intended for that. If the DoD now tries to shoot pens as projectiles and they just melt, that's no reason to classify the pen manufacturer as a supply chain risk, the product was not altered after the fact.
Of course, there _is_ a difference in "It could do that, but it shouldn't" and "It cannot do that". But it is not that large. That's why I don't see it as that clear cut.
So Amazon and Microsoft don't enforce cloud licensing agreements with the USG? If the government wants to add 3,000 Windows users to support their mission Microsoft is shit out of luck in getting paid for them?
This is like the change order from hell.
Nothing was stopping the DOD from just entering into a new contract with OpenAI…
and trump admin originally went WAY further.
they originally said the pen, paper, table etc suppliers cant use anthropic even for products and subsidiaries that have nothing to do with their govt work; far beyond the supply chain of the pen (bomb). Mega Corp Pepsi Co Taco Bell Inc. LLC -> Staples > Pen Co. Sure pen co might be reasonabale. But telling taco bell they cant have claude help expand the baja-blast-radius is way too far. that would be just like secondary sanctions.
iirc there are 2 court cases. one ruled the original order was too broad and i think that still stands? so at least it's narrowed slightly to just the immediate supply chain?
but ianal
Hardly. I invite you to [read the opinion][1], particularly the great pains the majority spends on wrangling the definition of the word "manipulate."
Basically, [FASCSA][2] says to denote a company is a "supply chain risk," the govt has to meet the law's rigorous definition of what a "significant" risk actually is. That definition contains a catch-all "or otherwise manipulate the function" of the thing at hand (in this case, Claude) at the very end.
The govt's whole argument is "Well Anthropic has admitted that it can technically "manipulate" the response, therefore its a significant risk, therefore we designate it as such."
The dissent gives an analogy:
> A library might post a sign saying, “Do not shout, loudly talk on the phone, play music, or otherwise disturb others.” The common understanding would be that the rule bans bringing a boom-box into the reading room with the volume turned on high but not listening to music with headphones set at a modest sound level—even though both constitute “playing music.”
It is as if the govt argued "ah ah, Anthropic played music on their headphones, they broke the rules! We therefore have the authority to ban them" and the majority insanely agrees. It is clear to anyone with basic reading comprehension that the "manipulate" clause is supposed to continue the idea of malicious or subversive manipulation that the whole section entails. The hand-waving the majority uses gives the whole game away.
[1]: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=000001a0-d91e-d276-aff6-f97f3...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECURE_Technology_Act
It’s clearly a punitive measure and has nothing to do with national security.
If a supplier uses Anthropic to develop a product, how does that pose a risk to the DoD or national security? The DoD can specify that a third party system can’t rely on Anthropic for DoD use without designating the company a supply risk. It was very clear that the administration was punishing the company for saying “no”.
Any dependency on a company that thinks they have that moral authority and has the technical means to enforce it is absolutely a risk to the supply chain.
If you want to blame someone or something for this, we should start with Dario and “effective altruism”.
That's exactly what they're doing. It turns out the DoD is a really big bureaucracy and has process to make sure they thoroughly exclude a vendor and transitive dependencies on that same vendor.
The DoD responded not by saying "alright, we will use OpenAI for our kill-chain uses" but by saying "Boeing is no longer allowed to use Claude Code".
Thus, it cannot be a supply chain risk.
https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-responds-to-backlash-o...
It's not just "stop working," it's actively degrading the code.
To which you brought up something that still wasn't relevant.
The government is perfectly able to choose not to work with contractors it doesn't like. That's not this.
It’s a risk that persons may otherwise manipulate the operation of a covered technology to deny or disrupt its function. The statute allows the DoW to do this.
1. the linux kernel has patches created by and security vulnerabilities identified by Claude/Anthropic;
2. same with other software like SQLite and rsync.
The DoD's response was to ban anthropic from all DoD facing activity and supply chains, whether or not there is a human in the loop. This does in fact run into exactly GP's issue. (or as I suggest elsewhere, can Boeing use Claude Code for software development?)
[1] https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2026/09/26-104...
The DoD is perfectly free to say "no one in the DoD can use Anthropic products because we believe their products are not fit for our needs". That would 100% solve the problem.
Designating them a supply-chain risk is just political retribution for not caving to the DoD's contract negotiation demands. That's all. It's not necessary to ensure the integrity of the US military's goals and objectives. It's just punitive, elementary school grade bullying.
Not at all. They want their product kept out of specific decisions because it's not capable.
Herein lies the DoW’s point. Anthropic can’t dictate how the DoW conducts business.
Yes they are free to do that. You have to blame Congress for giving them that authority under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act and specifically 41 U.S.C. § 4713.
But Claude’s ToS didn’t prohibit use of Claude for sensitive military operation but it was coded to do so. It was part of the government’s evidence
Ultimately this is for the courts to decide, and the current decision is not final. And while the two Trump-nominated judges agreed with you, the other judge agrees with me - so at least we can say that neither my nor your position is legally absurd.
Just because you disagree with a power of the government does not mean the government does not have that power.
Ultimately whether Anthropic is a true supply chain risk for the United States military is a question of fact, and the courts will have to decide. That the President or Secretary of Defense doesn't like a company doesn't make them a supply chain risk.
Sure they can. The DoD is bound by terms of use and contract terms for any product from any company that they use. They don't get a special pass just because they're the military.
It doesn't seem any different to me than Dominos pizza offering to deliver pizzas to the Pentagon but not to Tehran. If that somehow makes the military subordinate to Dominos Pizza, just because they're able to dictate the terms of their own delivery service, then sure, ban anyone in the military supply chain from being able to order pizzas. It would make the same amount of sense.
And companies absolutely have the right to dictate terms. The idea that the DoD has the unilateral authority to do whatever it wants is literal textbook fascism. It's never been the law in the US and it should not be now.
Seems very straight forward.
Why couldn't excluding Anthropic be done a different mechanism than a supply chain risk. Why wouldn't this be a standard part of an agreement or a request and simply refuse to renew or cancel a contract rather than being designated a supply chain risk. If some third party contractor for an unrelated non military reason wanted to use Claude as part of their process, it seems perfectly allowable.
If this was a remotely standard way of operation, why did a fair amount of corporate America sign briefs concerned with the retaliatory aspect.
Parts of the action seemed wholly retaliatory as well since Pentagon officials certainly used it as a threat. Why can't a US company have views contrary to the policies of the US government? Certainly the US government is free to not do business with them, but this designation affects everybody doing any kind of indirect business with the US government which is a rather long chain. How might we distinguish caring about a secure supply chain and simply wiping out a company that disagreed with you? There are plenty of areas that are, again, non military. I don't think it's credible to claim that Anthropic will deliberately sabotage operations.
Then the pen manufacturer hears about this and says “Our pens are not made of graphite and are not suitable to be used in nuclear reactors”, to which the reactor owner says “it’s fine, they fit in the graphite rod holes, and we’re just using until the next generation of pens come out which will do an even better job”, and then the pen manufacturer says “I’m not going to sell you any pens until you agree that they will be used only writing.”
The intent and framing matters a lot here. Refusal to remove safety features is a LOT different than deliberately building mechanisms to sabotage would-be operations.
It's to ensure that companies that the DoW relies on don't build on top of a product that isn't fit for DoW work.
You seem to be agreeing with this designation in a way. The DoW essentially said "Pen company won't let us use their pens as neutron-flux regulator rods, so anyone building power plants for us isn't allowed to use these pens as neutron-flux regulator rods".
What is the problem you have with that?
(and yeah, there might be a completely legitimate reason to stop your subcontractors from using HuaweiSpyPens, but determining that ACME Pens is just as dangerous because they refused your neutron flux regulator order looks like a punitive measure, not practical risk reduction)
Mind you, that is not the DoW’s charter. How would a restriction on that be “unfit” as you say?
The DoW is perfectly within their rights not to purchase anthropic products. That’s different than labeling them a supply chain risk.
That's not how it works.
Obviously it'd be immoral, unorthadox and impractical but I expect Congress has a long history of promoting and stamping out ideologies and they can do it. What little I know about the civil rights era springs to mind.
On the one hand there is a clear and comforting consensus in the US that they aren't going to force religious mores on anyone. So I don't see how the Congress could or would try. But if we ever end up in a situation where the US Congress decides it wants to go straight Catholic I really don't see how it would fail. They've got far too much power and they'll eventually rotate in a compliant judiciary and then redefine what words mean so they can do it.
It is a bit difficult when dealing with such an out-there scenario, but if Congress decides the US military should do something wild then eventually the military is going to do it. The realistic protection is that by virtue of good system design there isn't a plausible scenario where Congress would want to impose Catholicism on the US population by force.
However, I do think there is an expectation in Americans' minds that Congress is governed by the Constitution, and believing makes it so. Mostly.
The military will kill anyone instructed to kill. Especially if it is in the body of a law passed by Congress.
Do you think in the military you can just be like “Yeah, I don’t feel it today, I’m going to take s sick day”?
The US is a constitutional republic, it does not have a system where anything Congress decides is law.
Really now? Then why does it say in the Constitution that it was created to pass laws?
Why not just stop buying their guns and let contractors still use those guns if they need guns to shoot animals?
Humans see a hammer and a nail and don't think about the rule saying "rubber tipped hammers only in this area, flammable vapour present".
It's even more perplexing in this case though, because the original DoD contract was signed in July 2025. It was the same "plant manager" just arbitrarily changing their mind in the middle of the contract they signed.
"Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic."
Presumably, according to the defenders of the designation in this thread, this was an innocent mistake that doesn't indicate any political intent.
I can see how I might reasonably refuse to deal with that pen manufacturer. The pen manufacturer is unreasonably pushy and they're going to be massive trouble to deal with because they're all up in my business in a paranoid way and disrupting my use of their product. Companies have made my never-again list for far smaller slights.
You here make another one by pretending, AI was just some random tool, like a screwdriver or a programming language.
AI can make decisions autonomously that would otherwise require a human. Like selecting people to be murdered by drone strike based on arbitrary criteria. A programming language by itself, JAVA, cannot do that.
https://www.vp4association.com/aircraft-information-2/32-2/m...
Basically, it voids the warranty, which you don't really have with Java anyway.
Have you seen the movie Oppenheimer? This is like Truman telling off Oppenheimer when he was upset about the implications of nuclear weapons: https://www.biography.com/political-figures/a44361438/why-ha... ("Blood on his hands; damn it, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it,” Truman said.... He called Oppenheimer a “cry-baby scientist” and said, “I don’t want to see that son of a b–– in this office ever again.”).
Yeah, but also we can be reasonably confident they're not good enough for many of them yet:
What would be the military equivalent of all the things on https://www.felonybench.com/ ?
Machine learning needs a lot of examples to get good. Wars and wargames (including digital ones with unbounded self-play time) and all the textbooks together will at best, on the basis of what we see in other fields, get the equivalent of a new officer fresh out of training… and then, given current observed agentic AI behaviour, "follow orders" rather than "follow lawful orders".
What does “not good enough mean?” Who decides what is “good enough” and what tradeoffs are acceptable? Obviously it’s the military’s job to decide that.
We can also infer from other domains, vendbench or attempts to have an LLM play Star Craft, that these models are currently extremely mediocre at management roles.
> Who decides what is “good enough” and what tradeoffs are acceptable? Obviously it’s the military’s job to decide that.
In practice, in the case of the USA, Trump and Hegseth.
The US military, so far as I can tell, are rather less thrilled with these adventures.
What I don't understand is why the U.S. military is turning to a for-profit corporation when they could fund and pursue the development themselves. Why are they trying to "outsource" it to industry?
For example, one might extend your analogy to "The nuclear power plant then declares that it will not buy the pens after all, and the pen manufacturer (who had banned them as a customer) sues them to force them to buy the pens after all."
Army: "OK, we will make sure not to use your AIs"
Antropic: "How dare you! We are suing! We intended for you to keep using it but do only what we want!"
Army: "..."
No, they were against using it to kill people without oversight. I hope nobody thinks that there's a difference between murdering people and murdering American citizens.
Anthropic: "We'll sell you access to our AI as long as you don't use it for war crimes or mass surveillance."
DoD: "Ok, deal."
...time passes...
DoD: "Wait, no, we want to be able to use it for war crimes too."
Anthropic: "Too late, you agreed already, and we won't sign a contract for that. You can keep using it for everything we agreed to."
DoD: "Change the terms or we will destroy your business."
Anthropic: "No."
DoD then signs contracts with OpenAI and Google that permit them to commit war crimes and mass surveillance as long as they get legal cover, and proceeds to apply as much leverage as it can to destroy Anthropic's business.
----
And for the record, Anthropic agreed to all "yucky Army things" usage that was an extension of past yucky Army things, they just did not agree to a new class of yucky Army things: namely, fully autonomous killbots. Even there, it was only "not yet, it's not ready". Your whole comment is a gross mischaracterization.
I quit using ChatGPT entirely over this incident, and that's not because I find Anthropic's position to be saintly. They agreed to a contract where the DoD could and in practice is using their AI for committing war crimes.
> Anthropic wanted them to be the last word in every decision, and DOD could not allow that
Cite one source for Anthropic demanding to be in the loop. This was about the terms of a contract. If I'm agreeing to sell you a medicine, under the condition that you do not use it to euthanize homeless people, that does not mean I am demanding to follow you around and make you ask me whether each use is ok.
> Nobody is destroying anybody's business - pretending that Anthropic could never find any users for their AI outside DOD is plain silly.
Strawman much? The question is about the US government using its influence in a competitive environment to hamstring one company. It doesn't matter whether there are other customers. It doesn't matter whether the company can survive the attack. What matters is whether it is legal and ethical for our public resources to be used for retaliation in this way.
> US Society has mechanisms for preventing and investigating war crimes....I doubt that "give control over it to some random guy that makes AI models"
This is an invented claim. Cite a source.
>> I quit using ChatGPT entirely over this incident > > And this is supposed to be an argument because....?
The argument was the first part of the post. This part was me giving my perspective on things, in this case it was about how I don't find Anthropic's position to be good, just that OpenAI's is far worse. My post was not for you exclusively; based on what you have written, I have concluded that there is no value in debating you or attempting changing your mind.
>> They agreed to a contract where the DoD could and in practice is using their AI for committing war crimes. > > You have a very vivid imagination. Not trying to use it to state things that could be misinterpreted as statements of fact would be nice.
Ok, fair. Sticking to facts: the crucial part of the negotiation was about whether the DoD can use Anthropic's products for autonomous decisions on lethal force. Since then, it has come out that AI was used in the decision to target an elementary school for girls that killed 120 schoolchildren. (The Palantir Maven Smart System, fwiw, not Claude.) The Pentagon investigated and found that although a human was theoretically in the decision loop, in practice the oversight was minimal and ineffective. "No one remaining on those teams [the teams tasked with minimizing civilian harm] reviewed the strike plans in advance of the attack on the school, according to Bloomberg." Those teams had been gutted, with Hegseth explicitly stating that they were getting in the way.
My supposedly very vivid imagination translated this to reckless decisionmaking that led to a large number of innocent civilian casualties, aka war crimes.
The analogy would be: “A customer agreed to a contract, and after running into a clause of the contract they no longer wanted to follow…canceled the contract unilaterally…which also violated the contract.”
It seems like absurdly bad faith starting at breaking the contract (over "you have to follow the law", no less!) and then to retaliate after that with trying to destroy the company's reputation and ability to do business. The boot licking going on here justifying the government operating in bad faith is both disappointing and short sighted. I didn't think the leopards would eat MY face!
I don't know how anyone can look at the situation and see anything but an abuse of power. The government could have just as easily contacted with another provider. This whole thing is vindictive
I.e. Anthrophic cannot be trusted to honour a contract.
Who'd have guessed?
How can it be a textbook designation when designating a US company as a supply chain risk is unprecedented? So many actions under the Trump administration are unprecedented it starts to feel like the norm.
No other administration (Republican or Democrat) would do this. The DoD didn’t have a problem using Anthropic’s models during the raid on Venezuela and early on in the war with Iran.
Anthropic says to the former Fox News host it doesn’t want its models used for domestic surveillance or in kill situations without a human in the loop; all of a sudden they're a supply chain risk?
Seems obviously political.
Lol, do as we say not as we do!
>In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a “pre-crime” approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen.
https://prospect.org/2026/09/09/anthropic-artificial-intelli...
Anthropic offered a contract, with certain conditions, as do all contracts everywhere; that's their purpose. The military did not want to agree to those conditions. If they had stopped there, and refused to sign the contract, all would be good. (It's actually worse, they did sign such a contract, and then decided they wanted the contract to say something different than it actually did. "Pray I don't alter it any further.")
> >The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized [emphasis mine]
That is speculation, and you can't call it a "textbook designation" without discussing whether there's a basis for that "reasonable fear". Again, that argument also works for declaring you have a reasonable fear that giving money to Anthropic will support pedophilia. We do not know the specifics, but I at least have heard of zero evidence that Anthropic would sabotage something they signed a legal contract for, and yet I have an abundance of evidence that this administration will use whatever contortions are necessary to pressure and punish those who interfere with it getting what it wants. It all hinges on the word "reasonable", and based on the evidence that is public, this specific fear seems more ridiculous than reasonable to me.
If the government somehow had a way to force Anthropic to sign a contract that it did not want to sign, then this fear might become more reasonable. The twist is that this supply chain risk designation is exactly that. If Anthropic now capitulated, the accusation of supply chain risk (eg from Anthropic employees acting alone) would be justified. So the only way Anthropic can reasonably be considered a supply chain risk is because it is accused of being a supply chain risk.
This is a textbook example, yes, but it's a textbook example of corruption and judicial capture.
> Though they'd probably put the DoD on the cybersecurity whitelist today, the very idea of the claude whitelists for certain functionality already exists and is being used by them today.
And if they signed a contract permitting fully autonomous killbots, then using the whitelist mechanism would be a contract violation. I have some degree of faith that we'd know if such a contract were signed, because half the staff would quit. (As opposed to half the Google staff quitting after signing such a contract, which has been proven to be an incorrect expectation -- such a contract was signed, and I've heard of exactly one person quitting over it. There may be more, I don't know.)
I suppose we're supposed to be satisfied that the letter of the law supports this steamroller? Because that's what matters?
In other words: the same outcome could easily be accomplished without being punitive to Anthropic.
similarly the pen owner doesnt want to make a variation where the pen also doubles as a knife
It's pretty common for software licenses to state that it's prohibited from being used in medical devices, life support systems, nuclear facilities, etc. Will software with those licenses also be designated supply-chain risks?
I'm always wary of arguments on the merits of a legal claim, not the normative aspects, by people who don't even claim to be lawyers.
And I further dislike Anthropic for creating 2 situations in 2 weeks that are giving this admin an obvious opportunity to be right. The other one is David Sacks responding to the “Pace the Frontier” crap. These were the table tennis equivalent of lobs for the admin.
Also worth noting that no one knows what kind of task would get a rejection with Anthropic’s models. The documentation is near-non-existent with the air of “security,” rules change daily, the harness is buggy, the clients are buggy, and very likely the backend gating and safety mechanisms are buggy. Even if the DOD assumed the best of intentions to comply, the reliability isn’t there.
What military would buy guns that sometimes stop working, and not necessarily for reasons anyone understands, and still be taken seriously?
Also Claude clearly had no issues identifying a school that has been a school for over 10 years as a military target. Why would the military buy tech that would make them more likely to commit war crimes?
Incidentally the second stipulation, the restriction on domestic surveillance, sounds like direct recognition of the role IBM played in the Holocaust. Of course, the better course of action would be to deny the military access to their technology. But that's not going to happen because there is so much money on the table.
* How much money did Anthropic and its associates donate to the Biden campaign and associated entities? * How much money was spent on lobbying by Anthropic and associated entities? * How many Biden officials were hired by Anthropic after they left office? * How exactly did Anthropic get exclusive no-bid contracts to be the Federal Government's sole AI provider for classified systems?
And with this corrupt influence, and the money that it earned them, Anthropic has attempted to:
* Stoke public fear and panic about AI * Stoke conflict with China * Eliminate domestic competition * Suppress international competition * Degrade their models in order to limit their ability to create competitive products * Train their models on their customer's proprietary data in order to steal their intellectual property
Anthropic played a game and they lost. They can wrap that up in whatever sanctimonious moralizing clap-trap they want, but nobody believes a word they say, or will ever trust them, so they might as well be talking to the wind.
OpenAI may be playing the same game but at least they have the intelligence and humility to read the room, recognize a failed strategy, and adapt.
Who wants to buy intelligence from people who are stupid enough to publicly try to dictate terms to the US Military? Complete and utter brand destruction for everyone involved.
The idea that "fair for the military to object to" implies "fair for the military to ban from their supply chain in any capacity no matter how unrelated the use" is so outlandish that it's never been done before (to a US company), and I think we can be confident that the DoD has frequently objected to would-be contractors' terms.
The claim that it being done for the first time - by a Secretary of Defense denounced the politics of the company in the same text where he announced the designation - isn't "political", is something I have a hard time believing a functioning adult who isn't employed defending the government in court could adopt.
But hey, maybe in some language this is a "textbook" official statement with no "politics":
Oh the hypocrisy and irony. This coming from a country whose military sets rules on other countries' armed forces how weapons systems bought from US can be used.[ß] By this standard US itself should be designated as a supply chain risk for everyone else.
ß: for a very long time in the Ukraine "conflict", US refused to allow their gear from being used to attack targets outside of Ukraine's borders.
Without taking sides in this statement, I do think it's important for a private company like Anthropic to have a mechanism it can turn to when it feels it's been inequitably treated by the government.
Not for peasants like you and me! We are forced to surrender our Seventh Amendment rights in order to be able to do most things that are part of everyday life.
but really, they all are, look what Grok did to hundreds of Iranian children
* https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5928204-pentagon-musk-...
Anthropic isn't stopping me from getting Chinese parts, Yukon Jack and good Cadbury chocolate.
trump is. Designate him!
The US government took a legal designation explicitly crafted to protect against foreign adversaries and deployed it against a private, domestic entity, to their immediate and great detriment.
Explicitly?
Wow, explicitly means it is directly defined in the statue. Which it isn't.
Did you mean implicitly and accidentally say the exact opposite?
And the reason Anthropic is an adversary of the USA? They have a clause in their license agreement that their products must not be used in surveillance or military targeting decisions.
I'm failing to see how a mutually agreed upon "you may not use our product for X or Y purpose" in a contract poses any such risks.
Imagine if Microsoft tried the same with excel or power point. "um actually in the fine print of the EULA it says you may not use our product for military purposes so we will revoke your access unless you stop using power point for mission briefings that might result in the deaths of civilians". Would fly about as well as a lead brick.
As a sanity check, I’d highly recommend trying out your own lines of reasoning in cases which you think you might feel differently. For example, imagine a certain authoritarian state saying "obey the Party or get blacklisted as a national security threat."
It might feel good in the moment, like "yeah, Anthropic, don't tell the military what to do," because you agree with this particular call. But the government doesn't give that power back, and you very well may not like the next way it gets used.
Even so, this designation had never previously been applied to a domestic company. The Pentagon applied it to Anthropic after a dispute over how it could use its AI. To me, the circumstances suggest the designation was used to punish Anthropic for refusing the Pentagon’s terms.
It was clearly retaliatory and because of that unlawful.
But this was a bad faith temper tantrum, plain to see for anybody looking.
This is some radical new definition of "explicit" that hasn't caught up to public usage nor the dictionary.
In normal parlance, explicit just means that someone involved in the crafting, at some point, stated "I am writing this bill for X reasons". There's often quite a lot of evidence about that, which is not contained in the statue itself.
It can also be the case that the law is applied in a way unintended by it's writers to enable corrupt choices.
At which point, you need to look beyond the letter of the law to contextualize whether the law is applied correctly.
Feels real basic to me.
https://old.reddit.com/r/XGramatikInsights/s/VjlAjIgwOD
US does not buy weapons that self-regulate generally. The US can and has purchased weapons with stipulations on how they should be used. For instance, and I'm making this up, they might purchase cluster munitions for smashing up an airfields, but with a stipulation they may not be used where humans are present or something. The munition doesn't check GPS and refuse to detonate if GPS doesn't indicate it's over some Russian airfield. Nor does an M4 fail to fire if it's on US Soil. Anthropic tried to build safeguards and out-regulate the government. Everyone here should know that such limitations would (can and have, see some famous IFF spoofing incidents) be exploited by an enemy, which is generally why they aren't acceptable in a military context. Without seeing the contract signed, one possibility is Anthropic tried to push regulations onto the government, and Anthropic gets to ride away on a high horse.
The other side: The Supply Chain Risk feels like an abuse. It's likely a valid designation and likely has its historical uses. If this was a contract issue, that would have been the correct way to litigate. Instead, again without seeing the contract, it feels like this is way to try and stifle their uptake in defense sector; basically attempting to strong arm them by choking a business segment off. Again, if there is a in fact a legitimate breach of contract here, it should be litigated as such. The alternative is there is no such breach, and Anthropic built limitations into the contract and the Pentagon just has buyers remorse. Honestly this wouldn't surprise me, the federal government generally incinerates tax dollars, and with the massive marketing hullabaloo pushed by AI companies, its completely likely a giant contract was signed without reading the fine print.
Honestly both sides of this annoy me.
Separately, as a note to your made up example:
Cluster bombs are uniquely efficient against humans, especially in trenches. The US is not a signatory to the international treaty banning their use. It does not like being limited in how it conducts war. I strongly doubt that it would agree to terms from a private enterprise to similar effect.
Let me explain, if it learns something from training data to do certain things from code it has online it can install or use a code that is vulnerable from a security perspective.