[timr]

I don't see how public policy is being "forced" on anyone here? It seems like the system is working as intended: government wants to do X; company A says "I won't allow my product to be used for X"; government refuses to do business with company A. One side thinks the government should be allowed to dictate terms to a private supplier, the other side thinks the private supplier should be allowed to dictate terms to the government. Both are half right.

You can argue that the government refusing to do any business with company A is overreach, I suppose, but I imagine that the next logical escalation in this rhetorical slapfight is going to be the government saying "we cannot guarantee that any particular use will not include some version of X, and therefore we have to prevent working with this supplier"...which I sort of see?

Just to take the metaphor to absurdity, imagine that a maker of canned tomatoes decided to declare that their product cannot be used to "support a war on terror". Regardless of your feelings on wars on terror and/or canned tomatoes, the government would be entirely rational to avoid using that supplier.

[inkysigma]

I think the bigger insanity here is the labeling of a supply chain risk. It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic. It's another when it actively attempts to isolate Anthropic for political reasons.

[ted_dunning]

It means that all companies contracting with the government have to certify that they don't use Anthropic products at all. Not just in the products being offered to the government.

This is a massive body slam. This means that Nvidia, every server vendor, IBM, AWS, Azure, Microsoft and everybody else has to certify that they don't do business directly or indirectly using Anthropic products.

[ipaddr]

Microsoft, Azure, AWS, Nvidia and IBM all have deals with other providers for AI. That itself doesn't turn the needle.

[Nevermark]

I think the point is that would be catastrophic for Anthropic.

[ekianjo]

Who cares about Anthropic? That's the guys who are pushing for regulations to prevent people from using local models. The earlier they are gone the better

[etchalon]

"First they came for Anthropic, and I said nothing because fuck those guys I guess."

[iFreilicht]

Are they? I couldn't find any info about this and my past perception has been that Anthropic has a stronger moral codex than other AI companies, so I would be genuinely interested in where you got this information from.

[scarmig]

Going by what Hegseth said, it bans them from relationships or partnering with Anthropic at all. No renting or selling GPUs to them; no allowing software engineers to use Claude Code; no serving Anthropic models from their clouds. Probably have to give up investments; Amazon alone has invested like $10B in Anthropic.

[direwolf20]

It bans them from using all open source software unless they have signed an agreement with the developer to prohibit use of Claude Code.

[kelvinjps10]

What open source software ? Anthropic doesn't make open source software?

[Perz1val]

Nvidia can also say no, they won't have choice but yield or not have AI at all

[ef2efe]

Its a government department signalling who's boss.

[timr]

> It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic.

This is literally the mechanism by which the DoD does what you're suggesting.

Generally speaking, the DoD has to do procurement via competitive bidding. They can't just arbitrarily exclude vendors from a bid, and playing a game of "mother may I use Anthropic?" for every potential government contract is hugely inefficient (and possibly illegal). So they have a pre-defined mechanism to exclude vendors for pre-defined reasons.

Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate.

[tshaddox]

That doesn’t sound right. Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website.

[snickerbockers]

Let me put it this way: DoD needs a new drone and they want some gimmicky AI bullshit. They contract the drone from Lockheed. Lockheed is not allowed to source the gimmicky AI bullshit from Anthropic because they have been declared a supply-chain risk on the basis that they have publicly stated their intention to produce products which will refuse certain orders from the military.

[Nevermark]

Let’s put it this way, The DoD is buying pencils from a company. Should that company be prohibited from using Claude?

You are confusing the need to avoid Anthropic as a component of something the DoD is buying, with prohibitions against any use.

The DoD can already sensibly require providers of systems to not incorporate certain companies components. Or restrict them to only using components from a list of vetted suppliers.

Without prohibiting entire companies from uses unrelated to what the DoD purchases. Or not a component in something they buy.

[arw0n]

There seems to be a massive misunderstanding here - I'm not sure on whose side. In my understanding, if the DoD orders an autonomous drone, it would probably write in the ITT that the drone needs to be capable of doing autonomous surveillance. If Lockheed uses Anthropic under the hood, it does not meet those criteria, and cannot reasonably join the bid?

What the declaration of supply chain risk does though is, that nobody at Lockheed can use Anthropic in any way without risking being excluded from any bids by the DoD. This effectively loses Anthropic half or more of the businesses in the US.

And maybe to take a step back: Who in their right minds wants to have the military have the capabilities to do mass surveillance of their own citizens?

[skissane]

> Who in their right minds wants to have the military have the capabilities to do mass surveillance of their own citizens?

Who in their right minds wants to have the US military have the capability to carry out an unprovoked first strike on Moscow, thereby triggering WW3, bringing about nuclear armageddon?

And yet, do contracts for nuclear-armed missiles (Boeing for the current LGM-30 Minuteman ICBMs, Northrop Grumman for its replacement the LGM-35 Sentinel expected to enter service sometime next decade, and Lockheed Martin for the Trident SLBMs) contain clauses saying the Pentagon can't do that? I'm pretty sure they don't.

The standard for most military contracts is "the vendor trusts the Pentagon to use the technology in accordance with the law and in a way which is accountable to the people through elected officials, and doesn't seek to enforce that trust through contractual terms". There are some exceptions – e.g. contracts to provide personnel will generally contain explicit restrictions on their scope of work – but historically classified computer systems/services contracts haven't contained field of use restrictions on classified computer systems.

If that's the wrong standard for AI, why isn't it also the wrong standard for nuclear weapons delivery systems? A single ICBM can realistically kill millions directly, and billions indirectly (by being the trigger for a full nuclear exchange). Does Claude possess equivalent lethal potential?

[9dev]

But parent is right, both Lockheed and the pencil maker will have to cease working with Anthropic over this.

[timr]

> Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website.

Yes, this is the part where I acknowledge that it might be overreach in my original comment, but it's not nearly as extreme or obvious as the debate rhetoric is implying. There are various exclusion rules. This particular rule was (speculating here!) probably chosen because a) the evocative name (sigh), and b) because it allows broader exclusion, in that "supply chain risks" are something you wouldn't want allowed in at any level of procurement, for obvious reasons.

Calling canned tomatoes a supply chain risk would be pretty absurd (unless, I don't know...they were found to be farmed by North Korea or something), but I can certainly see an argument for software, and in particular, generative AI products. I bet some people here would be celebrating if Microsoft were labeled a supply chain risk due to a long history of bugs, for example.

[fooster]

MIGHT be overreach to call this a supply chain risk?!? That is absolutely ludicrous.

[timr]

To quote one of the greatest movies of all time: That’s just, like, your opinion, man.

[dyslexit]

You're making it sound like this is commonly practiced and a standard procedure for the DoD, yet according to Anthropic,

>Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action—one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company.

Some very brief googling also confirmed this for me too.

>Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate.

This statement misses the point. The political punishment to disallow all US agencies and gov contractors from using Anthropic for _any _ purpose, not just domestic spying, IS the retaliation, and is the very thing that's concerning. Calling it "DoD vendor exclusion list" or whatever other placating phrase or term doesn't change the action.

[snickerbockers]

>an unprecedented action

it's also unprecedented for a contractor to suddenly announce their products will, from now on, be able to refuse to function based on the product's evaluation of what it perceives to be an ethical dilemma. Just because silicon valley gets away with bullying the consumer market with mandatory automatic updates and constantly-morphing EULAs doesn't mean they're entitled to take that attitude with them when they try to join the military industrial complex. Actually they shouldn't even be entitled to take that attitude to the consumer market but sadly that battle was lost a long time ago.

>for _any _ purpose

they're allowed to use it for any purpose not related to a government contract.

[scarmig]

> it's also unprecedented for a contractor to suddenly announce their products will, from now on, be able to refuse to function based on the product's evaluation of what it perceives to be an ethical dilemma

That is a deeply deceptive description of what happened. Anthropic was clear from the beginning of the contract the limitations of Claude; the military reneged; and beyond cancelling the contract with Anthropic (fair enough), they are retaliating in an attempt to destroy its businesses, by threatening any other company that does business with Anthropic.

[snickerbockers]

>Anthropic was clear from the beginning of the contract the limitations of Claude

No, that's not what they said.

"Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now".

[jbritton]

It’s not clear to me that the AI itself will refuse. You could build a system where AI is asked if an image matches a pattern. The true/false is fed to a different system to fire a missile. Building such a system would violate the contract, but doesn’t prevent such a thing from being built if you don’t mind breaking a contract.

[inkysigma]

I'm not completely familiar with bidding procedures but don't bidding procedures usually have requirements? Why not just list a requirement of unrestricted usage? Or state, we require models to be available for AI murder drones or whatever. Anthropic then can't bid and there's no need to designate them a supply chain risk.

[skeledrew]

> Anthropic then can't bid

Thing is that very much want access to Anthropic's models. They're top quality. So that definitely want Anthropic to bid. AND give them unrestricted access.

[9dev]

And yet Anthropic is free to choose who to do business with, including the government. There are countless companies who have exclusions for certain applications, but that does not make them a supply chain risk.

[snickerbockers]

> It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic.

But that's what the supply-chain risk is for? I'm legitimately struggling to understand this viewpoint of yours wherein they are entitled to refuse to directly purchase Anthropic products but they're not entitled to refuse to indirectly purchase Anthropic products via subcontractors.

[tyre]

Supply chain risk is not meant for this. The government isn't banning Anthropic because using it harms national security. They are banning it in retribution for Anthropic taking a stand.

It's the same as Trump claiming emergency powers to apply tariffs, when the "emergency" he claimed was basically "global trade exists."

Yes, the government can choose to purchase or not. No, supply chain risk is absolutely not correct here.

[nickysielicki]

> The government isn't banning Anthropic because using it harms national security. They are banning it in retribution for Anthropic taking a stand.

You might be completely right about their real motivations, but try to steelman the other side.

What they might argue in court: Suppose DoD wants to buy an autonomous missile system from some contractor. That contractor writes a generic visual object tracking library, which they use in both military applications for the DoD and in their commercial offerings. Let’s say it’s Boeing in this case.

Anthropic engaged in a process where they take a model that is perfectly capable of writing that object tracking code, and they try to install a sense of restraint on it through RLHF. Suppose Opus 6.7 comes out and it has internalized some of these principles, to the point where it adds a backdoor to the library that prevents it from operating correctly in military applications.

Is this a bit far fetched? Sure. But the point is that Anthropic is intentionally changing their product to make it less effective for military use. And per the statute, it’s entirely reasonable for the DoD to mark them as a supply chain risk if they’re introducing defects intentionally that make it unfit for military use. It’s entirely consistent for them to say, Boeing, you categorically can’t use Claude. That’s exactly the kind of "subversion of design integrity" the statute contemplates. The fact that the subversion was introduced by the vendor intentionally rather than by a foreign adversary covertly doesn’t change the operational impact.

[etchalon]

I would hope the DoD would test things before using them in the theater of war.

[nickysielicki]

But there will always be deficiencies in testing, and regardless, the point is that Anthropic is intentionally introducing behavior into their models which increases the chance of a deficiency being introduced specifically as it pertains to defense.

The DoD has a right to avoid such models, and to demand that their subcontractors do as well.

It’s like saying “well I’d hope Boeing would test the airplane before flying it” in response to learning that Boeing’s engineering team intentionally weakened the wing spar because they think planes shouldn’t fly too fast. Yeah, testing might catch the specific failure mode. But the fact that your vendor is deliberately working against your requirements is a supply chain problem regardless of how good your test coverage is.

[timr]

The rule in question is exactly meant for “this”, where “this” equals ”a complete ban on use of the product in any part of the government supply chain”. That’s why it has the name that it has. The rule itself has not been misconstrued.

You’re really trying to complain that the use of the rule is inappropriate here, which may be true, but is far more a matter of opinion than anything else.

[tyre]

You keep trying to say this all over these comments but this isn’t how the law works, at all.

I fully understand that they are using it to ban things from the supply chain. The law, however, is not “first find the effect you want, then find a law that results in that, then accuse them of that.”

You can’t say someone murdered someone just because you want to put them in jail. You can’t use a law for banning supply chain risks just because you want to ban them from the supply chain.

This isn’t idle opinion. Read the law.

[timr]

> but this isn’t how the law works, at all.

Not sure what you think “the law” is, but no, this kind of thing happens all the time. Both political teams do it, regularly. Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton…all have routinely found an existing law or rule that allowed them to do what they want to do without legislation.

> The law, however, is not “first find the effect you want, then find a law that results in that, then accuse them of that.”

In this case, no, there’s no such restriction. The administration has pretty broad discretion. And again, this happens all the time.

Sorry, it sucks, but if you don’t like it, encourage politicians to stop delegating such broad authority to the executive branch.

[snickerbockers]

It doesn't harm national security, but only so long as it's not in the supply-chain. They can't have Lockheed putting Anthropic's products into a fighter jet when Anthropic has already said their products will be able to refuse to carry out certain orders by their own autonomous judgement.

[praxulus]

The government can refuse to buy a fighter jet that runs software they don't want.

Is it really reasonable to refuse to buy a fighter jet because somebody at Lockheed who works on a completely unrelated project uses claude to write emails?

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

That's not what anthropic said. They said their products won't fire autonomously, not that they will refuse when given order from a human.

[snickerbockers]

"Hey Claude I need you to use this predator drone to go blow up everybody who looks like a terrorist in the name of Democracy."

[9dev]

I’m not sure if you deliberately choose to not understand the problem. It’s not just that Lockheed can’t put Anthropic AI in a fighter jet cockpit, it’s that a random software engineer working at Lockheed on their internal accounting system is no longer allowed to use Claude Code, for no reason at all. A supply chain risk is using Huawei network equipment for military communications. This is just spiteful retaliation because a company refuses to throw its values overboard when the government says so.

[galleywest200]

The government declaring a domestic company as a supply chain threat is a tad more than “refusing to do business” don’t you think?

[thimabi]

> The Department of War is threatening to […] Invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to serve their model to the military and "tailor its model to the military's needs"

This issue is about more than the government blacklisting a company for government procurement purposes.

From what I understand, the government is floating the idea of compelling Anthropic — and, by extension, its employees — to do as the DoD pleases.

If the employees’ resistance is strong enough, there’s no way this will serve the government’s interests.

[thereitgoes456]

The President is crashing out on X because a company didn’t do what they wanted. “Forcing” is not a binary. Do you seriously believe that the government’s behavior here is acceptable and has no chilling effect on future companies?

[syllogism]

They're labelling Anthropic a supply chain risk, without even the pretense that this is in fact true. They're perfectly content to use the tool _themselves_, but they claim that an unwillingness to sign whatever ToS DoW asks marks the company a traitor that should be blacklisted from the economy.

[jakeydus]

The government is doing far more than “refusing to do business” here.

[direwolf20]

One of the options they're discussing, which is legal according to this law, is to simply force Anthropic to do what they want. As in Anthropic will be committing a felony if they don't do what the DoKLoP wants, and the CEO will go to jail and be replaced by someone who will.

[jwpapi]

I mean Secretary of War can not act any other way to be honest. It’s just a fucked up situation.

[ted_dunning]

There is no Secretary of War. The name of the Defense Department is set by statute that has not been named regardless of Pete Hegseth's cosplay desires.