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U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
(cnbc.com)
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by cramer4next
by cramer4next
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.
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.”
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.
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).
To add onto what another commenter said, the pen analogy would be more like the manufacturer designing pens that stopped working when used to sign strike orders they disagreed with.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/endi...
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”.
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 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 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.
Edit add: What is targeting? What is surveillance?
If someone in the intelligence analysis department uses AI to generate a report, then someone else uses that report for targeting did they just break the terms? Where is that line?
Much easier for the Pentagon to say no.
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.
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
Edit: I was wrong, the statement I linked is extremely dishonest and I was misled. The contract language lower down makes it clear that there are no "red lines", and OpenAI products can in fact be used for mass domestic surveillance, autonomous weapons, and social credit systems as long as they are considered legal.
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?
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. If this becomes a legitimate mechanism, how might we distinguish caring about a secure supply chain and simply wiping out a company that disagreed with a pro war attitude? If a machining shop had a policy against manufacturing weapons at all, could they be blocked from making server racks for Microsoft or perhaps light fixtures for the Department of Labor? 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.
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.In other words: the same outcome could easily be accomplished without being punitive to Anthropic.
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?
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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.
similarly the pen owner doesnt want to make a variation where the pen also doubles as a knife
I suppose we're supposed to be satisfied that the letter of the law supports this steamroller? Because that's what matters?
The legal apparatus is one of the tools the death machine uses to get what it wants.
* 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.
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.)
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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
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.
however anthropic also believes it is some kind of entity unto itself so it is not at all reliable.
I.e. Anthrophic cannot be trusted to honour a contract.
Who'd have guessed?
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: "..."
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...
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.
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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?
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.
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.
Edit - i am not a OAI hater and i don't hate anyone. I am just saying Anthropic is kinda getting bullied and OAI is not being punished enough for their actions. It is time for me to support Anthropic (with my $$$) instead of OAI.
Isn't this basically what Anthropic wanted?
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.
that's the mobster-loyalty mentality, and it's not how successful (read: desirable for the most people) governments function
TBH Anthropic was used for target selection in Iran and if Amodei oversold operational AI and was reason why US bled so many highend munitions... only for Iran to survive than basically everything downstream of the shit show including energy prices is on their heads.
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.
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.
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.
Hire people and pay them well and develop whatever yourself without this charade, they have unlimited budgets.
I am not taking a moral ground, but I can't see how "an Anthropic" fits in. You might say Boing or Lockheed, Sig Sauer and Colt and FN do, but it feels somehow different as they've "bent the knee" for decades.
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.
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.
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but really, they all are, look what Grok did to hundreds of Iranian children
* https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5928204-pentagon-musk-...
> Before his appointment to the bench, Katsas served as Deputy White House Counsel in the first Trump administration
> [Rao] was appointed in 2019 by President Donald Trump, having served in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019 as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
The autocracy is in full swing.
The current fucking US administration.
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Anthropic isn't stopping me from getting Chinese parts, Yukon Jack and good Cadbury chocolate.
trump is. Designate him!
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.
"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.
Why not just stop buying their guns and let contractors still use those guns if they need guns to shoot animals?
Have you seen the movie Oppenheimer? The U.S. military did not care about the moral opinions of the nuclear scientists--they were going to get nukes first. This is like Truman telling off Oppenheimer for being upset after the U.S. used the bomb: 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.”).
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.
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."
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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)
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.
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.
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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.
https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2026/09/26-104... see page 30
China, Russia, Iran, come to mind.
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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"
That fails to accord with the claim:
>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
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.
This is a designation reserved for terrorists and the link.
Actively handicapping a product that's otherwise capable qualifies.
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.
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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.
it would be like the pen manufacturer who ships pens with an automatic point retractor, AND a video livestream to the manufacturer from the pen AND remote control of the point retractor.
anthropic and contractors monitor the livestream remotely to make sure the pen is not signing drone strike orders and may choose to activate the retractor.
again, anthropic is snooping, section F specifically: [https://www.anthropic.com/legal/service-specific-terms].
"Then prove the other ai companies don't."
xAI zdr is not snooping, section 3.4: [https://x.ai/legal/terms-of-service-enterprise]
openai azure zdr is not snooping: [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/foundry/openai/conce...]
gcp zdr is not snooping: [https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platfo...]
only anthropic.
"Then prove that the service they offered to the US government didn't have spying disabled."
the service they offered did have spying disabled. the security risk is from anthropic updating the claude and covertly bricking or degrading it.
quote: "In such an ongoing relationship where the vendor [...] “continuously update[s] and tune[s] the product,” the Department must establish and maintain confidence that the vendor will not add limitations that interfere with the Department’s use of the product." (p26)
"the Department relies on [petitioner] to provide regular updates to Claude" (p27)
[https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cadc.42...]
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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”.
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
It doesn't seem any different to me than Dominos pizza offering to deliver pizzas to the Pentagon but not to the strait of Hormuz. If that somehow makes the military subordinate to Dominos Pizza, just because Dominos is 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.
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
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.
Anthropic isn’t a supply chain risk since they easy found someone else
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.)
Our military must also not be dependent on a 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.
I, as a person, can decide I won't do business with a company that uses Anthropic models for whatever reason. I can even decide I won't do business with a company that relies on suppliers that use Anthropic.
This right applies to private companies too. Like Walmart could set contract terms that their suppliers aren't allowed to use AWS. The suppliers are free to accept those terms or not.
This is like the change order from hell.
Nothing was stopping the DOD from just entering into a new contract with OpenAI…
That’s going to make it rather risky for anyone to sign licenses with the DoD. In fact, it renders the licenses pointless since you just have to do anything the licensee says.
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?
No it doesn't. Specifically OpenAI had a "all lawful purposes" clause (which plausibly includes the existing mass surveillance apparatus), but Anthropic did not.
OpenAI, xAI, and Google happily agreed to DoW contracts which allow both of those use cases.
Look at it pragmatically. What does the DoD use every single procurement for? Hint: military use.
OpenAI just said no surveillance of U.S. persons.
Anthropic could have gone further; I think it's likely they did.
> No use of OpenAI technology for mass domestic surveillance.
> No use of OpenAI technology to direct autonomous weapons systems.
> No use of OpenAI technology for high-stakes automated decisions (e.g. systems such as “social credit”).
These are stronger than Anthropic's restrictions (https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war), as OpenAI says themselves: "We think our agreement has more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic’s. [...] Based on what we know, we believe our contract provides better guarantees and more responsible safeguards than earlier agreements, including Anthropic’s original contract."
Edit: I was wrong, see my original comment. Sorry.
The other stuff...there's zero citations or quotes. Meaning that OpenAI could be having their cake and eating it too, winning a public victory, with no validation on the actual language, consequences, or enforcement.
Is it not possible that this would change the risk profile of depending on them. It makes sense to work with people who support you than oppose you for things which are critical.
- Just because you don't do everything someone wants you to do does not make you a supply chain risk.
Only it turns out that with sufficient corruption, you do.
There’s nothing indicating Anthropic was not keeping their end of the contract. If they had, there would have been other recourse.
I think American companies should be supporting the government as much as possible. Even when it switches.
>There’s nothing indicating Anthropic was not keeping their end of the contract.
Which is why we are talking about risk and not breach of contract.
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...
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.
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.
No, they were against using it to kill people without oversight. I hope nobody thinks that there's a difference between murdering American citizens and murdering people.
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.
US Society has mechanisms for preventing and investigating war crimes. They may not be perfect, and you may not be happy about how they are working, but I doubt that "give control over it to some random guy that makes AI models" is an adequate solution for that. If Antropic decided the risk of DOD circumventing those mechanisms is too high for them to tolerate - they have full freedom not to sell to DOD. Which they used.
> I quit using ChatGPT entirely over this incident
And this is supposed to be an argument because....?
> 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. Not that I am new on the internet, so I know it's not going to happen.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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And Republicans did it because.... They're anticorporation?
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.
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We, the people, are on the other side.
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.
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They are not turning a profit, and aside from enterprise token billing, every other offering they have is a loss leader. In order to flip that around they need to drive down the cost of inference significantly, either through massive compute improvements, more efficient or lower cost models, and either one lowers the barrier to entry for local and/or private cloud inference for open models. The moat established by the expertise in model training is effectively dissolving as they approach recursive self improvement because any mechanism that prevents model distillation effectively reduces the quality and utility of the models, so each improved model makes their competitors better by default if they want to realize those gains.
The reason for the pivot to control and regulation seems to be more about erecting an artificial moat in their market, and having these technologies controlled or highlighted as supply chain risks will continue to drive investments in alternatives, especially in other countries where data sovereignty and domestic tech has become a priority given the last decade of the US dominated tech industry.
I don't think that AI is going to go away, but I think the future of AI in the next several years looks alot like massive overfunded foundational model providers collapsing, their employees launching dozens or hundreds of direct competitors, and the leading hyperscalers buying up datacenter capacity the way they bought up dark fiber 20 years ago.
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They probably will, and the comment section here on HN will overwhelmingly applaud it. Next question?
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.
I think the red team is only now starting to come to similar terms, and will increasingly do so as the blue team continues to maximally exercises power against their opponents instead of revitalize the tarnished reputation of instituions.
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 believe the coming financial disaster will likely be the catalyst that quiets the 'nothing ever happens' crowd, and both teams will need to reset their politics to the new world, distinctly different than the post-WW2 open society liberal consensus.
A similar phenomenon is happening in Europe.
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.
Dems still subsidize O&G but they have other constituents they need to pay lip service to.
Banking and finance own both parties.
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.
Instead of Republican presidents driving left leaning companies out of defense and Democratic presidents driving right leaning companies out of defense, it would be better if neither party used supply chain risk as a political weapon.
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.
OAI hacking the chinese government will definitely raise alarms in DC and will be bad for national security. Just because the country that was hacked (australia) is a weaker one doesn't mean the underlying action is not troubling.
That seems like it's too easy to abuse as a cudgel for whatever companies you vaguely hate. Is ExxonMobil a "supply chain risk" because the effects of climate change might cause geopolitical ructions in the next decade?
[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.
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If you find a person/company/agent odious, why would you want to financially support them?
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.
You argue that the courts are not corrupt, hence there is no corruption. Without considering the president.
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I get downvoted every time I point out that this was entirely rational. This, downvoters, is why it was entirely rational. Does that mean I agree with it? Of course not. But investments are made to pay off, and this one certainly has for OpenAI.
Which if anything seems worse.
1: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/867947/o...
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You're ascribing complex motives to toddlers.
(Hmm did you edit your reply?)
… but I sincerely doubt Apple gave a ~$1M “gold bar” to a political leader, in front of cameras, using a patently transparent ploy like “it’s just a detachable base”.
That would be a phenomenally stupid and obvious violation of bribery law.
And if Trump does keep it as a personal gift, it will be included in a financial disclosure report.
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EDIT: Oh damn getting downvoted, tho not surprising. It looks like Meta Glasses are hated as MAGA, maybe Zuckerberg should call them MAGA glasses ha
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.
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.
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 guess my opinion would really depend on the exact wording and details of the arrangement. Lots of people jumping in with strong stances based on pretty limited details.
This is false. Anthropic wanted assurance that its technology would not be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance.
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...
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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.
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And it also doesn't mean that Anthropic is a 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, and killed more than a hundred kids.
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.
This designation means Athropic's systems can't be used in DOD work, but many companies that work with the DOD also do work outside that. That separate work is not restricted with respect to the use of Anthropic's systems. Repeating a lie as if it were true is just dumb, it helps spread that lie.
So yes obviously defense contractors are forbidden to use it.
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Side note, the Anthropic bots are astroturfing the comments.
if this is more than "people i disagree with are commenting", you should be messaging hn@ycombinator.com rather than writing it as a side note in your comment.
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Not at all, because open source contributors aren't megalomaniacs trying to dictate how people use their products. In fact, the exact opposite. That is the entire point of Open Source. Complete freedom for the user.
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Could you imagine a hypothetical where we're at war and a private company has a potentially war-ending tech (nuclear weapon say) that they refuse to sell to the government?
What the orange turd is going is rather petty bullshit in a market where many options exist.
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it is a bizarre company which also inherits the authoritarian infrastructure of cloud services.
that is: remote control of the software, spying on customers, etc.
The military ran Anthropic models on their own infrastructure; Anthropic had no access to it. "They might disable Claude in the middle of an emergency" was never a possibility.
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.
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.
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.
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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 US has not declared war on Iran. No wartime legal mechanism is at play, and cannot be until Congress decides to declare war.
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).
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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.
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The real problem is how many people eagerly eat and repeat the nonsensical bullshit, as if they are airtight logical deductions rather than mere rationalizations promulgated by the party's apparatchiks. I don't know if most people still just want to feel power from being on the "winning team" or if they're really unable to mentally model situations with independent parties that have their own rights while government has restrictions in order to preserve those rights, or what. Alas, it does not bode well.
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lmao trying to imagine the scenario GP envisions as they "typed" together their comment
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".
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.
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?
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.
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 think it's also the case that Anthropic didn't make any public statements about the negotiations until after the DoD was already publicly threatening this designation. But that seems less important than the question of: is it good for the US government to try to destroy companies whose public statements it dislikes?)
Those are (arguably) adversaries but the actor here is Anthropic, which is not an adversary.
Alas, even my question about it was downvoted.
Yes, this is why the DoW won’t use them.
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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.
DoD. Gulf of Mexico. Lake Ontario.
They didn't "reasonably" fear anything. There is absolutely no evidence to support these allegations. Anthropic has the right to impose licensing terms. Merely disagreeing with the government is not evidence of wrongdoing.
If Anthropic wasn't allowed to say what they said, how would they be allowed to object to their government's illegal use of their products at all? It sounds to me like their only choices were "shut up" or "be punished", which is a clear-cut violation of their rights.
Which means the exact use limitations WOULD NOT BE DELINEATED IN WRITING in advance.
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.
Claude terms here: ANTHROPIC EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
Like most so-called AI, the Claude program is inherently unreliable. I doubt Anthropic would ever agree to "function as contracted".
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.
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.
But also they quite clearly have no idea how classified information systems work: air gapping is step 1 of that process, and no one from Anthropic would be working on those systems without a security clearance.
bedrock IL5, nvidia, palantir and booz allen have all blocked fable.
anthropic is demanding that they rat out their customers on anything better than opus 5.
see: [thein.fo/4dekujW]
also, bedrock govcloud does both log and review customer data. specifically, they log and review customer data when it is flagged by their csam classifier.
I might be mistaken, but in the case of national security deployments the models are airgapped and Anthropic doesn't actually have access to telemetry/logging from them.
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.
> 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.
Declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk means that Boeing can't use Claude to draft a poster informing people about the board meeting.
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.
There was no such demand from Anthropic. Why are you making things up?
EDIT: Honestly, the rest of your comment is even stranger. You're starting from a false premise, a strange belief about what the designation is meant for, but you do end up providing a wonderful demonstration of your opening sentence for yourself at least. You definitely don't know what you're talking about.
> 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.
This reminds me of an old comment here where some idiot claimed that suicide is illegal so police are allowed to stop people from killing themselves. No, if Anthropic doesn't want their systems involved in war (that's a thing you made up, again, just to be clear) then they do not need to be designated a supply chain risk to "protect them" or whatever drivel you come up with next.
The correct response from the DOD would be to terminate contracts with Anthropic, and that's it. Then Anthropic would be responsible for ensuring that any contracts with other parties keep them out of war (again, not a thing they said they want, just your fiction). This is how it works for all other software systems where people don't want their work involved in wars or used by the police or whatever.
Designating them a supply chain risk was punitive. Only fools think otherwise.
> I feel like in this thread no one is understanding what supply chain risk designation is.
I wouldn't say "no one" understands, but you certainly don't.
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 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".
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.
Anthropic said "don't use our products for targetting decisions in military ops". The DoD could have easily said "actually then, we won't use your products at all". Instead, the DoD said "either you let us use your products in targeting decisions, or we won't let you sell to anyone who sells to us for any purpose, using a law that only applies to adversaries of the USA".
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.
Our military is simply choosing not to do business with them, or anyone that depends on them.
If you believed in democracy, you wouldn’t be supporting the EA-infected corporation that tried to make our democratic institutions subordinate to their corporate decision making.
Let me ask you this, if Anthropic did allow them to use it for surveillance… do you think it would stop at the Pentagon?
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.
Hi, just informing you of the typo.
A mutually agreed upon "you may not use our product for X or Y purpose" in a contract clearly doesn't pose any such risk.
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.
How’s ACA hard-hitting on corporations?
The 15/20 rules is what resulted in recorder profits in health insurance business, how’s this anti-corporate?
"You must sell insurance to sick people!", "I don't wanna!", "I don't care, the law now says you must."
I mean, the whole insurance industry had spent the better part of a century (basically its whole existence) denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, and the ACA fixed it via fiat.
Not only is it clearly "hard-hitting", I'd argue it's probably the single most "hard-hitting" invasive change to corporate regulation of the post-war era. Certainly it is in terms of the amount of money involved in the affected market.
> how’s this anti-corporate?
And this is where the rub is. You're not saying that your desired regulatory structure is something different than existing proposals, you're demanding that your government engage in behavior that is expressly "anti" whatever you perceive "corporate" interests to be.
That's not democracy, that's just warfare. You have enemies and you want to win. And the problem there is that the structure of our government requires compromise.
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If their profits are so good, their shares would be worth owning.
Could it be because their profit margins are actually terrible (3% if lucky), and they have to get the price of their product approved by 50 different state government employees, and the federal government constantly changes their customer’s subsidies making revenue and expenses extremely volatile and difficult to forecast?
If you're looking for policies to blame for insurance companies having a rough 2025-2026, look to the Republican-led efforts cap Medicare fees and alter eligibility requirements.
And it is true, that it was signed by Clinton. But it was otherwise an entirely partisan bill passed with exclusively republican votes. All 44 democrats voted nay.
Now, given that, do you really feel that that's a supporting argument to the upthread contention that Democrats are a corporate-dominated party and not interested in regulation?
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.
This is such a tired argument that over simplifies an entire group of people on both sides into a single entity that happens to be the same.
* 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
* expanded mail-in voting en masse
* repeatedly attempted to eliminate 60-vote rule for legislation
I'm not claiming these were illegal, I'm just saying the process adapts to the needs.
Oh? Thats why Biden tried to run in 2024? Because democrats procedurally try to elect obviously incapable presidents?
Incumbent Presidents in the US almost always run for reelection to a second term, that's the normal expected outcome with vanishingly few exceptions in the last century.
The claim was Ds are more procedural than Rs. Asking what process the Ds followed to attempt to run, and then back out of running, biden (who again, was very obviously and publicly mentally incompetent) is clearly a rebuttal to a presented point.
You can repeat that as often as you want, but it doesn't seem well grounded. He's always had a stutter, and since he left office he has given speeches which suggest his mental faculties remain intact. Is he slowing down? Yeah. He's got quite a long ways to go before he's in McConnell territory.
In any case, what does his choosing to run have to do with process? Did he violate the process? Seems to me he was following it to a tee.
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 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?
Letitia James campaigned on putting her political opponents in prison and then proceeded to try doing so.
This isn't difficult to understand.
This doesn't pass a basic logical sniff test.
What if the private prisons provided much greater comfort, rehabilitation, medical and mental care, and so on? How could you call it immoral just for existing?
There's a country in the 30's that used misinformation to sell what you're suggesting and they, at one point, had a thriving prison system in less than a decade.
Don't be so polyannish.
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If democracy is working, isn't using the government to express the collective will of the people exactly how it should work? Else why are we bothering to vote in the first place?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49694185
>For me the end of buying anything Nike for my household and owning there stock was 2018. After their embracement of kaepernick and circus of marketing schemes that followed its no surprise what the outcome would be. Now Lululemon hired one of architects of all this as their CEO. They followed the nike playbook and are already suffering from it. Now their doubling down in a race to the bottom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_champions
>Do they receive different legal treatment from other similar companies? If so, that would be a worrying signal. A common feature of fascism being present doesn't mean you've definitely got fascism, but it does raise a pretty big red flag.
They definitely get assistance from the government. Where that crosses into "different legal treatment" is up to you, though personally I think the distinction (if any) isn't really worth much. The original claim was "Most favored companies", not "are totally exempt from the law". In the case of openai, it's not really clear whether any laws have been broken, because despite all the cries over "they hacked people!", the question of intent would make any prosecution tricky. Not to mention there's similar cries about AI companies in general violating copyright laws, so if the implication is that openai gets to break laws scott free but anthropic doesn't, that really falls flat.
The issue is openai and anthropic both make similar products in similar ways and yet only one has been designated a “supply chain risk” for entirely opaque reasons that based on timing are probably just “they didn’t kowtow correctly”.
The gov putting their finger on the scales for the company that showed the most deference to them is not a good sign for democracy.
Of those who meet that criteria, and especially those with MUCH more money and closer connections, it actually is an extremely smart choice. However, it represents a level of reprehensible naked self-dealing and complicity that I simply can't condone. It really is comparable to the looting if public goods and coffers during and after the fall of the USSR. Nationalism and patriotism are dead.
> That would be a phenomenally stupid and obvious violation of bribery law.
Nope, that's how crazy weak the US bribery laws are. The only time they really sort of kick in is when it's done on behalf of a foreign nation.
To be convicted of current US bribery laws, you essentially need a written note that says "I am giving you this so you can in an official capacity pass this piece of legislation". McDonnell v. United States gutted any sort of accountability for bribery.
But further, Trump v. United States (2022) has granted the president extra immunity so long as he's doing things in an "official capacity".
It's a violation of what bribery laws should be, but not what they actually are.
> And if Trump does keep it as a personal gift, it will be included in a financial disclosure report.
Or what? You think his personal lawyer who heads the DoJ is going to prosecute him?
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In time one of the big tech will solve the pervert issue by randomizing / anonymizing every face in your photos that's not in your personal network. Once this is done / achieved no one will call them pervert glasses anymore. Im surprised Meta hasnt done this already! They really should!
The whole conflict is specifically about uses that do not involve a human decision. The DoD agreed to a contract that said it wouldn't use Anthropic for that, and then tried to change the terms.
Incidentally, the DoD used Claude in its decision that resulted in killing 120 children at an elementary school for girls. The Pentagon concluded that there was human review (which would mean that it fell within the contract's terms) but that the review was hollowed out (which could mean that it was a violation of the contract).
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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.
They absolutely did. If a product is designated a supply chain risk, no one is allowed to use it anywhere in the DoD's supply chain.
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...
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.
It's not like Anthropic will be nationalized any more than the bankrupted auto companies of 2008.
We've forgotten what it means to run a society, we're allowed to change rules how we see fit whenever we want to. Only the elites exercise this power, but people have it too.
In theory, maybe. In reality, this is a privilege for a very small number of rich people.
> Anything that erodes the rights of companies erodes your rights.
How absurd. Food safety regulations don't erode my rights one bit, but they do erode the rights of companies to negligently poison me. I guess I'm losing the right to start a food company that poisons people, but I'm happy to forfeit that right in exchange for not being poisoned. We could extend this list of reasonable tradeoffs in which we all exchange the right to treat people poorly for the right not be treated poorly, and we all would benefit.
Except the people who want to sell poisoned food, those people will be worse off. I am okay with that.
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 their "terms and conditions" imbue them with some sort of military veto power in the US. Trump's action here, given his nature, is actually moderate: he could take this much further if he wishes.
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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).
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/04/01/claude-codes...
> 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.
Or these companies have to completely split the govcloud work from its commercial offerings (which defeats the whole point).
Now you're making changes to the source code used in govcloud using claude, a clear supply chain violation.
It's a very wishy-washy area right now, and the branches are all struggling to figure out how to work around these laws that were mostly intended to keep jobs in the USA but are now hampering productivity. One example is that DoD contractors can't use open source software that has a non-us developer as a core maintainer. Obviously that's extremely hard to track and it's mostly ignored. Pete definitely bit off more than he realized in his effort to seem cool and get what he wanted.
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If you don't like that, and would prefer to discuss a lawful supply chain risk designation, you should convince him to retract the statements or impeach him.
Probably not, no private company has the ability to tell all its suppliers "thou shalt not do business with <some other company>". They lack the pull to compel them to do so. The closest would be things like what MS did back in the 90s, and got them in hot water with the anti-trust case against them.
The reasons why are incidental to that requirement for defense contractors.
What are you talking about? That's nowhere close to a true statement.
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.
by analogy it would be like the us military renting all m4 carbines from a political party.
anthropic treat customers very badly. they have claude lecture the user about the moral law according to anthropic. they change the product all the time. they have safety refusals to degrade functionality, they have mandatory logging so they spy on how it is used.
it's unusable for a serious application.
on top of that it is unsurprising that a big tyrant does not take well to a little tyrant.
To me a fascist government would prevent people from being able to take their power away at all, and simply do whatever they want with impunity, but I don't quite see that happening in the US right now. Courts are still ruling against the government, they're largely complying in most ways, and there will still be more elections.
Are they trying to do some things that smell "fashy"? Maybe. But I still think it's a stretch to say the US government is full blown fascist in the same way we've seen that in the past in some other countries.
The job of a government is to look after the interests of the people who elected it... Is there no point that you think the rights/needs of the many should outweigh the ideological rights of the individual?
In the abstract though, we're just playing the "what if" game. If a company had the nuclear bomb near the end of World war II instead of the government holding it via the Manhattan Project is a different scenario than we're facing today, and if the government in question is the USA, Ukraine, the Nazis, or Russia also makes a difference. The weapon is also hard to abstract away. AI isn't a nuclear bomb, nor is it a weaponized virus/bacteria or a chemical weapon like anthrax or sarin, nor is it simply propaganda leaflefts distributed by airdrop.
anthropic did a prigozhin, got cocky and went behind the DOD's back to palantir and asked them questions about the use of claude.
a big tyrant does not like to be usurped or undermined by a little tyrant.
after pissing off the DOD by trying to get palantir to rat out classified deployments, dario went to the pentagon and behaved like himself in front of pete hegseth. anthropic was not going to come back from that.
fable is on AWS govcloud. but anthropic get the chat logs. specifically section F: [https://www.anthropic.com/legal/service-specific-terms]. this is an anthropic requirement.
notably, fable is not on IL5 or above. the best you can get is palantir AIP opus 5 in AWS IL5. i suspect, because of anthropic demanding that AWS rat out its customers.
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Right, and if they chose independently to do so it would be their right. What makes this problematic is that "all those companies" did not choose to not to work with the Pentagon (or with Anthropic spefically, for that matter). They were compelled to using using a regulatory tool which was originally intended to combat hostile foreign espionage.
That's not a "choice" made by those third party suppliers. The Pentagon is using the Supply Chain Risk designation as a contract negotiating tactic.
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.
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.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
> No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
Example chosen specifically for its unambiguous unconstitutionality.
No it isn’t see above
That distinction is academic, of course, because when the courts decide a certain way, then of course that's how things will play out.
Well, except when the Trump admin ignores court orders.
It doesn't need to say if you do any business with Anthropic (for other customers, internal tools or processes), you lose all your contracts with us.
Why did you make up false claims about Anthropic not wanting their systems to be used for war? They're clearly fine with it, but they wanted human-in-the-loop on decision making. They never asked to not have their systems used for war.
> Again with the lack of understanding why it matters.
It's cool that you were able to open this with at least one sentence containing some useful wisdom. A lack of understanding does, in fact, matter.
> The DoD does not want Anthropic anywhere near any system they'd use!
Nah, the DOD is punishing Anthropic for not agreeing to change the terms of the contract and allow them to use Anthropic's systems to determine, without a human-in-the-loop, who to kill or what to target and to use their systems for mass surveillance.
> Because it's, well, a risk to their supply chain if Anthropic were to somehow find out and then e.g. crash a rocket if the DoD was using a third party rocket provider that used Anthropic models.
What the fuck man. You went from (in your first comment) the DOD is helping Anthropic out by designating them a supply chain risk because it'll keep them out of war (again, a fiction, that isn't what the dispute was over), to now the DOD is worried that Anthropic might throw a tantrum and start crashing rockets if they find out.
Again, Anthropic does not mind their systems being used for war. They sold their systems to be used for war. They have specific, already existing (not changed later) contractual statements about how they can be used for war. That's it. That's the fucking dispute.
> This is the correct response by the DoD, they simply do not want Anthropic in their supply chain.
No. Just like Anthropic wanted (or were fine with) their systems being used to conduct war, the DOD actually does want Anthropic's systems in their supply chain. But they want it without restrictions. Stop making shit up.
> The DoD don't care what Anthropic comes up as reasoning, they want to maintain control of their systems without any (even potential) meddling.
Now this is a true sentence. The DOD does not care as long as they can access the systems without restrictions. I can't believe you wrote that sentence and the one before, though. They are entirely incompatible. It cannot be the case that DOD does not want Anthropic in their supply chain and that they do want it in their supply chain.
> Why did you make up false claims about Anthropic not wanting their systems to be used for war? They're clearly fine with it, but they wanted human-in-the-loop on decision making. They never asked to not have their systems used for war.
That's what I meant, as I left out the "human in the loop" part as that was well understood in the context of the argument, but perhaps not. Anthropic does not want to be used in autonomous systems and thus the DoD agrees that they will not be, in their own supply chain. This is was all quite clear from my point but you felt the need to quote every single sentence and then ask the same question each time because you were starting from a faulty supposition, just wasting your time and mine.
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...
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.
Thus, it cannot be a supply chain risk.
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https://landline.media/affordable-care-act-tax-penalties-end...
>The penalty for not having an ACA-compliant plan or forgoing coverage in 2018 is the greater of $695 per adult and $347.50 per child for a maximum of $2,085 or 2.5 percent of adjusted household income. The percentage penalty is capped at an amount equal to the national average premium for a bronze plan, the minimum coverage available by law
https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/
Since Jan 1, 2010, 18% for UNH, 15% for MOH/CNC, 14% for CI/ELV/HUM/SP500, 8.5% for CVS.
Also, these businesses are competing to sell a completely fungible commodity good with tons of non profits like Kaiser Permanente, HCSC, Cambia, Independence Blue Cross, and many others. It makes no sense to expect those businesses to be able to earn any decent profit margin when their competition only needs 0%.
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CNC is up 90% YoY. That's far more than any of the largest tech companies. Alphabet is the highest of the tech stocks, and it's up 38% in the same period. When we look at the performance of the seven large U.S. publicly traded health insurers, their returns were extraordinary in the decade following the ACA.
SRC: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
If you think prisons should have profit motives where growth only comes from continually seeking punitive policies to imprison people then I don't know what to tell you. The extrapolation isn't that hard and I don't see anything good coming from it. Weird takes.
Prisons don't get to sentence people, courts do.
If you support using AI to kill people without human oversight and using AI to mass surveil the American population, of course its your freedom to.
Source:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-kill-humans-anthropic-resear...
And your worried about the government classifing them as a supply chain risk? Lmao
>> Trump is a thug.
I only use OpenAI since Claude was deemed a a supply chain risk. I never looked back.
That doesnt mean 20 million smart glasses wearers (miniscule population of all are weirdos/creeps) are gonna stop wearing what some others don't like. It's just like smoking. People didnt go up to those smoking and punch them in the face or threaten with violence. Rather laws were made and if no technological solutions is made (serious think Apple is the company that will) maybe laws then will then force such a solution.
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.
For example, if you think Party A and its customers are infringing your patent, you can threaten to sue the customers unless they use your product instead. That’s not tortious interference because suing someone for patent infringement isn’t itself wrongful.
Also what private property? Most Americans can't afford to buy homes and are being priced out of owning property entirely.
Corporations have eroded the livelihood of Americans more than the government ever has.
There is only one class that fights against raising the minimum wage, or establishing a 32 hour workweek, or enacting medicare for all, or providing a society free of pollution and it's always been the corporate class.
There has been no dominating force that has killed more American civilians than the American corporation.
Corporations can't even regulate themselves and you're trying to argue that the true enemy is a democratic government? Come on man. These types of retorts does not convince voters (so please continue saying them). Actually go out there and do some deep canvassing.
People rightfully hate corporations because they are the last vestige of monarchs, oligarchies, and authoritarians that are allowed to ruin + destroy our lives with little repercussions.
One just has to look at the situation of our deteriorating food safety inspections (that were hallowed out by Musk + DOGE goons FYI) to know that corporations absolutely do not care about public safety over profits. Or health insurance companies that are incentivized to deny Americans life saving care for shareholder profits.
We have a sick society and it's mostly due to the unabashed influence of corporations over our lives.
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Also in other comments you seem to be under the impression that corporations should be legally allowed to do what they want with zero government interference? Why do you believe such things over concepts of democracy or regulation?
Society is allowed to tell someone no, not everyone consents to your beleifs.
Regarding housing crisis, its the "small people" who cause this. I don't know of any large corporation that is NIMBY. If I had it, I'd steamroll NIMBY's houses and declare them a blight, they should agree with it since they regularly call various constructions blights. Places that tries building more housing saw reductions in prices. Its not the fault of corporations if people don't want houses built.
You can only say corporations "killed" people in abstract ways, governments not only have the legal power to but have routinely murdered millions very directly and physically.
Even if you believed corporations are authoritarian, its still better to have competing sources of power, not all corporations will always align with the government so it is better for powerful opposition to exist if government turns shit.
You also mentioned monarchs in your list, fascist italy is a direct example in my favor, the king's ego and his own self interest in his power caused him to continually give friction to Mussolini thus weakening the dictator.
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.
In practice, I think it's fair to say there's an informal understanding that AWS will not be punished for this so long as they stay in the regime's good graces. But that's how fascist power accumulation works; now they have to stay in the regime's good graces, or they risk being destroyed.
Honestly that question has been open for as long as GovCloud has been around. I've used it myself as an exercise in pushing within the Navy to adopt public cloud where security requirements permit, rather than forcing everything onto GovCloud.
After all, if it's the same S3 either way then the real point of security isn't the Amazon datacenter employee changing out dead hard disks in a physical GovCloud datacenter, but the S3 service team developers who are frequently not even American citizens, but whose code may very well go on to touch the most sensitive data the nation generates.
You're crediting him with much more power than he has, and somehow you think I'm sane washing by calling a lie a lie. What you're doing is far worse, you're believing his lies.
Anyways, the statement is false, at least the extent to which being designated a supply chain risk can impact who does business with Anthropic. There's no need for him to retract it or even to impeach him over it, because any company with a lawyer and a reasonable separation of their commercial and defense work will be able to determine that they can still do business with Anthropic despite the designation. It'll just have to be confined, so long as the designation stands, to their commercial work.
I suppose you would have us believe that, therefore, we are not at war with Iran?
Just because his statement has no legal basis does not mean that it is unreasonable to believe it will be enforced as-stated.
Indeed, this insistence on prioritizing the written law over the empirical reality borders on the delusional - if concentration camps were not the official policy of Nazi Germany, would you also insist we are making some mistake by "believing the lies" about their existence?
I just don't get what sort of point you're trying to make here - do you really think that the current US government cannot possibly cause problems for people that violate their unofficial edicts?
Do you really think a sensible legal department is going to advise their clients to antagonize the administration by using Claude for their "unrelated" commercial work?
Well, that was attempted...
Do you seriously think that you can go to all your vendors (if you were a business owner) and tell them, "You can't use Atlassian when working on anything you sell us." How will your business actually compel all those vendors to drop their use of Atlassian for that work? How will you verify compliance and why should any of them sign a contract with you with these restriction? And if they do, how will you avoid anti-trust violations because almost certainly the only way you could talk them into signing such a contract would be to be a massive company throwing your weight around (like MS did with hardware OEMs back in the 90s, among other things).
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fable 5.1 doesn't have any option to stop anthropic spying on it. you can't have that...anthropic contractors and actually the rationalist ea clowns themselves don't have security clearance
not even AWS govcloud can offer fable without anthropic snooping. it is the only model with this problem.
the pentagon can't force suppliers to require no snooping policies unless they designate the company a risk.
other than those suppliers who are already working on classified projects and can't have dario write an essay on his blog about 'pace the f35' or 'missiles of loving grace. the adolescence of classified satellites.'
it is a supply chain risk, so they don't want it in the supply chain.
that's logical.
Anthropic doesn't provide model w/o guardrails, suppliers have to use public version, newer model releases surely know about Anthropic standoff with the military.. how to prevent model from realizing that it's doing something for the military (supplier) and sandbagging and/or subtly sabotaging the results?
=====
DOD recommends sandbagging as defense mechanism against destination "attacks":
https://media.defense.gov/2026/Sep/08/2003992823/-1/-1/1/CSA...
Page 13
When suspecting a malicious distillation campaign, consider varying changes to responses across requests to complicate response quality evaluations, such that the subtle changes avoid triggering obvious alerts. Reducing reasoning depth, presenting correct information with different reasoning, or stylistic inconsistencies may evade detection while reducing training usefulness.
Avoid informing China-based AI company users suspected of distillation campaigns of a switch to a downgraded model. Informing malicious distillers would enable them to improve their defense evasions and indicate when to roll back training.
anthropic nanny claude and spy on it, they have ego issues.
if the dod use anthropic it is sort of like putin relying on prigozhin.
prigozhin got ideas and tried to usurp putin. this did not end well for prigozhin.
However, I do think there is an expectation in Americans' minds that Congress is governed by the Constitution, and believing makes it so. Mostly.
> Me: That's not how it works.
> You: It actually is
Moreover, regardless of what the courts do, the military still shouldn't execute a law like that, because they too have the ability to refuse to violate the constitution even if Congress tells them to.
There are a lot of twits on this site (and to your credit, so far you don't seem to be one of them) who will edit their comments so that replies like mine (if I had left out the quotes) turn into non sequiturs, or worse appear unhinged and detached from anything going on in the discussion. Again, to your credit you have not yet edited your original comments. But I have learned to not trust even long time commenters on this site. Even some very high karma commenters will behave like that.
If it annoys you, then that's fine. I'm not terribly bothered.
> That's what I meant
But that's not what you wrote. You wrote:
>>> They are complying with Anthropic's demands to not be used in war
If you had meant what I wrote, then you couldn't have gotten much further away from it with your original comment. You wrote too broadly about what Anthropic wanted and created a fiction instead. You shouldn't be surprised to be called out for it when you do something like that.
> because you were starting from a faulty supposition
No, I started with your words. If you wanted me to start with something else, I could have, like you, imagined other words to reply to. But I chose to reply to what you wrote, not what you apparently want people to imagine you wrote.
(Hey! I didn't quote every sentence, is this less annoying for you?)
https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-responds-to-backlash-o...
It's not just "stop working," it's actively degrading the code.
"“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)."
Src: https://www.acquisition.gov/dfars/subpart-239.73-requirement...
Now why would anyone want to use a product that carries that designation?
Who is sabotaging who? Why are you making shit up?
You are completely confused and speaking random disjointed stuff dude. You bring up some absurd unrelated nonsense about your personal decision and your deluded self diagnoses, then you bring up completely unrelated stuff about human extinction, then you start making up stuff about sabotage.
By chance, are at one of those depenceries with free internet in Portland?
they don't want suppliers to use it because it is a supply chain risk. specifically, the risk is that it is unreliable.
the designation stops suppliers from using it.
it stops it from being in the supply chain.
If Lockheed Martin disabled weapons systems when it discovered the Air Force using its fighters over Iranian airspace based on Lockheed's ideological views, I'm pretty sure they would be labeled a supply chain risk at minimum. What is the issue here?
Do you have a cat?