I think the big problem is that this is more like a sanction, more than the government saying they don't want to do business with them. They government is saying that anyone they do business with can't do business with Anthropic.
So it's extremely important that they get an injunction that allows the cloud compute companies to continue to work them. I think they probably will, but it's really crazy that the government is actively trying to kill them off over this.
You certainly seem to support the government designating a company a SCR at gunpoint when they refuse to renegotiate a signed, agreed to, and finalized contract.
...You realize the only valid uses of supply chain risk you mentioned were DJI and Huawei. TikTok isn't providing services to the U.S. Gov. Anthropic is an American company with no foreign ownership. A supplier does not have to sell it's product to a government it knows is liable to misuse it. Not as a SaaS provider. Nvidia and ASML are both now covered under ITAR. Your specification of Democrat &Republican admins just demonstrates both are two sides of the same coin. Both need a good and thorough cleaning out.
> They government is saying that anyone they do business with can't do business with Anthropic.
Is neither unusual nor extraordinary. The 2022 TikTok ban on government devices—enacted under the Biden administration—carried the same viral-as-in-GPL terms.
The TikTok ban upheld by the courts was a law enacted by Congress, not an executive action, specifically targeting Tiktok. The legal challenges were all about the law's constitutionality.
This dispute challenges the executive's action, not the underlying law (10 USC 3252). Anthropic does make some constitutional claims regarding the 1st and 5th amendments, but they also advance procedural challenges under the Administrative Procedures Act and statutory arguments about whether the law authorized the action.
At least TikTok is owned by China, which is the US’s rival. Nothing Anthropic has done gives me the impression they’re working against anything America.
The story is they started fishing for classified info on how their tooling was used from their prime contractor, Palantir, who rightfully blew the whistle on them and told DOD what they were up to.
The actual letter the govt sent Anthropic narrowed the supply chain risk to DoD usage. Far less than the Epstein administration poffered on social media
It’s not just the supply chain risk designation from the Department of defense. Trump then added that he would order all government agencies to stop doing business with them. Basically, if you do not cave to their ideology, you will be coerced through such unethical means.
Palantir famously sued the army and won, now accounting for the majority of their USG revenue. So, this is not necessarily a bad strategy.
Key differentiator though is Palantir’s suit was based primarily on Congressional acts and explicit clauses of the FAR. This absolutely does not seem to be the case for Anthropic, who could easily do the same, but chooses another ideological battle. I can’t imagine their legal counsel would recommend this route (actually asking Claude it doesn’t either!) which would imply this is Anthropic leadership’s move.
I’d gamble they’ve already given up on actual business with the government/military and that this is more of a PR move to further distance themselves and maintain a high road image.
Actually Anthropic is just refusing to renegotiate a contract. If the DoW cared so much about these restrictions, they shouldn't have signed the contract. Attempting to mike the company is childish behavior that will be stopped in court.
The government has near-absolute discretion over whom it contracts with, and no company has a constitutional right to be a federal vendor. Courts treat military technology decisions as core Commander-in-Chief functions subject to minimal judicial review, and the political question doctrine may bar second-guessing what the Secretary deems a security risk.
The supply chain risk statute grants broad, largely unreviewable national security discretion and doesn't require the threat to originate from a foreign adversary.
Finally, the First Amendment claim faces the problem that the government was responding not to abstract speech but to a concrete refusal to provide services on the military's terms, which courts are unlikely to treat as protected expression warranting judicial override of procurement choices.
While this suit has a weak basis, what you’re saying is not at all how government contracting and procurement works.
> The government has near-absolute discretion over whom it contracts with,
Not at all the case, procurement is dictated by a maze of Congressional acts and the FAR.
> and no company has a constitutional right to be a federal vendor.
Not constitutional but federal law actually dictates they do. Many companies actually have _more_ of a right to contracts than primes.
> Courts treat military technology decisions as core Commander-in-Chief functions subject to minimal judicial review,
Not at all the case there have been many disputes and it’s not uncommon to see a protest filed against procurement decisions in even innocuous cases. Many companies (eg Palantir) have sued the government on procurement and won.
> and the political question doctrine may bar second-guessing what the Secretary deems a security risk.
Sure, lowercase security risk, but uppercase Supply Chain Risk designation is an actual action subject to administrative procedure. There are many laws (eg Administrative Procedure Act) that allow judges to overturn this. The current basis of their suit is largely ideological but if they instead argued the designation was arbitrary the APA could very possibly be used to overturn it.
>The current basis of their suit is largely ideological but if they instead argued the designation was arbitrary the APA could very possibly be used to overturn it.
Their front-line complaint (Count 1 in the brief linked elsewhere in this thread) invokes the APA.
It goes much further than the "refusal to provide services" speech. By blacklisting them, they are blocked from doing any future business, which is prior restraint. Courts aren't very friendly to that.
While it's difficult to eschew all government money, given the current political climate it would be interesting to turn the tables so to speak: updating their ToS to disallow any use by the federal government
This would hand the federal govt to OpenAI and Google but would certainly be head-turning. Hard to say if it would pay off positively for them though.
It aligns with Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer who said "I need someone who’s not going to wig out in the middle"
Both statements give the impression Anthropic is looking to be directly inserted into the kill chain command structure which as far as I understand is not accurate.
Not placing ethical judgment: Why would Anthropic care about the designation? They want the money from government contracts? Does the designation keep them from any non-governmental income sources of significant size?
A pointless publicity stunt because of state secrets privilege that will lead to more extreme actions from the Trump admin against Anthropic like the DoJ pulling the trigger on a selectively prosecuted company ending copyright/hacking case for stealing all their training material.
I've found it surprising how pro-Anthropic everyone here has been in this saga.
I assume it's for political reasons because they dislike the current US administration, as all of the government's claims that I've seen have been completely reasonable, and their actions justified.
Resist everything the Trump government does, whether it's good, bad, reasonable, or indifferent, is just a viewpoint that I find shortsighted.
> all of the government's claims that I've seen have been completely reasonable, and their actions justified
you must not be seeing what I'm seeing
refusing to renew Anthropic's contract because Anthropic doesn't want to comply with their terms, would have been reasonable; retaliating by designating them a SCR is not
Anthropic as a whole isn’t perfect, but in this specific scenario they seem to be.
Or, when Anthropic re-iterates “no murder without human approval, no domestic mass surveillance”, why should the government not only change suppliers (free-market), but label Anthropic a “supply-chain risk”?
If you listen to the government officials explain the situation:
All this began after the Maduro raid, when executives from Anthropic allegedly called an intermediary vendor, Palantir, seeking specifics of how their software was used. Because this is classified information, Palantir refused to disclose it, which led to Anthropic threatening to shut off service to Palantir. Palantir reported this to the pentagon who then contacted Anthropic directly.
Obviously, the military can’t have Palantir’s services suddenly stop working mid-operation because one of their suppliers objects to it. So they can’t risk having Claude anywhere in the supply chain.
Assuming the government isn't lying, then the designation is completely and entirely appropriate. You can substitute out any other vendor, and they'd receive the same treatment.
>All this began after the Maduro raid, when executives from Anthropic allegedly called an intermediary vendor, Palantir, seeking specifics of how their software was used....
Let's see if the govt includes these assertions in their reply brief since such a factual record would obviously help their case.
Cancelling Anthropic's contract, and maybe even restricting Anthropic's use as a component to DoD certain contract work might be reasonable.
However, Anthropic's lawsuits are broader than that - partly because the government's actions were broader than that.
* Trump did post a "truth" ordering all Federal agencies to stop using Claude. Anthropic claims that many federal agencies did stop using Claude, and is suing saying that the order is not lawful.
* Hegseth then posted saying that no DoD contractor can work with Anthropic or use Claude at all. This is much broader order than the actual delivered letter which is much narrower - contractors can use Claude, but you can't use Claude as part of your solutions that you deliver to DoD. Anthropic is claiming damages from the difference between the first announcement, and the actual delivered scope, and is also claiming that the actual order did not follow procedures.
* Finally, Anthropic is claiming that the pattern of behaviour by the administration demonstrate that the administration is not simply trying to protect against supply chain risk, but is actively trying to harm Anthropic out of spite.
Frankly, you just have to read Trump's or Hegseth's posts to just get the vibes that this isn't just a technocratic calculation.
> If you sell to the War Department, the CIA, the NSA, or ICE/Border Patrol, you know exactly how it is going to be used.
Yes, you know their use of your services will legally be limited by the contact you both signed.
> This after the fact naiveté by Anthropic is crazy.
The real naiveté here is in the government signing a contract they ended up not liking after all, and in viewers who don't realize that there was a signed contract on place already, which included said restrictions.
> Speaking as a patriot I’d be incredibly proud if my tool was used in a supporting role for one of the most perfect military operations ever executed.
The usage we're talking about is exclusively: mass domestic surveillance of civilians; and fully-autonomous killbots which can (and will) be used against those same civilians. Weird pride to have.
How do you mean exactly? They have clearly stated that they're willing to work with the government without passing their red lines. And Trump is now blackmailing them. How can you interpret their reaction as a shortsighted viewpoint?
My trust in the judicial system in the USA is so eroded that I could easily be convinced that this is just a PR move and they don’t expect to win anything that goes against Trump‘s wishes.
The judicial system aside, it was a deliberate legislative choice (in many countries, with the US being among the most enthusiastic) to allow the executive to unilaterally designate arbitrary entities to be bad. Every system of this nature eventually gets turned against people you yourself consider good. I don’t get the surprise, frankly.
Yeah, back during Trump's first term I was hoping Congress would rein in executive power a bunch as he is prone to do stuff like this, didn't turn out that way unfortunately...
Now the main constraint on executive power seems to be due process and habeas corpus.
tl;dr the Major Questions Doctrine is something SCOTUS has been using to decide of Congress has given wide latitude. For big questions, Congress needs to be explicit. They used this in the IEEPA and tariffs case to end the arbitrary levies. Tariffs were not mentioned and are a big issue. Similar story here with claiming broad interpretation on an important issue.
So it's extremely important that they get an injunction that allows the cloud compute companies to continue to work them. I think they probably will, but it's really crazy that the government is actively trying to kill them off over this.