[colek42]

The voters and congress tell the military how to use technology, not Anthropic. Shifting the decision to Anthropic takes away power from the citizenship.

Edit: The point is, go vote if you don't agree with what the administration is doing. Somebody will sell the DoD whatever they want no matter what Anthropic does.

[enoch_r]

Say I own a spoon company. The government says "hey, I'd like to buy a million spoons from you!" I say "sure, sounds great." We sign a contract stating that I'll give them 1M spoons and they'll send me $1M.

Then the government comes to me and says "hey, actually, turns out we need 500,000 forks and 300,000 knives and only 200,000 spoons."

I say "no, we are a spoon company. Very passionate about spoons. Producing forks and knives would be an entirely different business, and our contract was for spoons."

The military now threatens to destroy my company unless I give them forks and knives instead of spoons.

You say "the voters and congress tell the military how to use utensils, not SpoonCo. Shifting the decision to SpoonCo takes power away from the citizenship."

The military can sign contracts if they wish! They can decline to sign contracts if they wish!

But private citizens can also choose whether to sign or not sign contracts with the military. Threatening to destroy their business if they don't sign contracts the military likes (or to renegotiate existing contracts in the military's favor) is a huge violation.

[kalkin]

What percentage of voters do you think want the Pentagon to institute an AI-powered domestic mass surveillance program?

[blargey]

The poll linked in the article shows even trump voters have <30% approval for the pentagon’s actions here, so if the citizenship tells the military how to do things…

[oceanplexian]

You might want to go look at the laws that were passed in the wake of WWII. The US could trivially nationalize Anthopic if they want to play games with a weapons technology.

[mattnewton]

This could kill the golden goose. There is a strong argument to be made that Anthropic has a leading model because of the principled people who built it, and I don’t see how they won’t leave, like many did to go to Anthropic from OpenAI and Google.

Forcing those people to make weapons to be used against citizens is nothing like the total war in WW2. Why wouldn’t the pentagon just buy from another LLM supplier?

[JetSpiegel]

They would leave to what company? Microsoft? OpenAI? Grok? All those are defense contractors as well.

Now, if you said "the Deepseek" guys, that would be different.

[mattnewton]

Sounds like the voters and congress should buy from someone else then if this is what they want?

[colek42]

Bingo, DoD does not want Anthropic to set guardrails on the technology it buys. If they don't want to abide they are free to deny service. We all know how that will turn our for them with the current administration. All while the DoD will just move to another provider that WILL abide. The only power really lies in whatever our elected officials want to do. Take the responsibility seriously.

[vonneumannstan]

I'm sorry but the Pentagon already had a contract with Anthropic and is now threatening to use the supply chain risk law to essentially kill their entire company because they wanted to re-write the contract. They could easily just not sign the contract and move to a competitor. Its an incredibly disturbing and chilling move by the Pentagon...

[buellerbueller]

The government is bound by its contracts. The government is not Darth Vader: "I am altering the deal; pray I don't alter it any further."

[sandworm101]

If voters had any say in how software services were delivered, Windows 11 would be such a s--t pile.

There is a name for a system of government whereby a ruling party dictates how industry should employ its property, and it isn't democracy.