[sho]

I'm not some kind of OpenAI or Pentagon fanboy, but it's pretty easy to for me to understand why a buyer of a critical technology wants to be free to use it however they want, within the law, and not subject to veto from another entity's political opinions. It sounds perfectly reasonable to me for the military to want to decide its uses of technologies it purchases itself.

It's not like the military was specifically asking for mass surveillance, they just wanted "any legal use". Anthropic's made a lot of hay posturing as the moral defender here, but they would have known the military would never agree to their terms, which makes the whole thing smell like a bit of a PR stunt.

The supply chain risk designation is of course stupid and vindictive but that's more of an administration thing as far as I can tell.

[lifeformed]

As long as it's within the law? What if they politically control the law-making system? What if they've shown themselves to operate brazenly outside the law?

[stahtops]

Why downplay the mass surveillance aspect by saying it's a request by "the military". It's a request by the department of defense, the parent organization of the NSA.

From what has been shared publicly, they absolutely did ask for contractual limits on domestic mass surveillance to be removed, and to my read, likely technical/software restrictions to be removed as well.

What the department of defense is legally allowed to do is irrelevant and a red herring.

[borski]

“Any legal use” is an exceptionally broad framework, and after the FISA “warrants,” it would appear it is incumbent on private companies to prevent breaches of the US constitution, as the government will often do almost anything in the name of “national security,” inalienable rights against search and seizure be damned.

If it isn’t written in the contract, it can and will be worked around. You learn that very quickly in your first sale to a large enterprise or government customer.

Anthropic was defending the US constitution against the whims of the government, which has shown that it is happy to break the law when convenient and whenever it deems necessary.

Note: I used to work in the IC. I have absolutely nothing against the government. I am a patriot. It is precisely for those reasons, though, that I think Anthropic did the right thing here by sticking to their guns. And the idiotic “supply chain risk” designation will be thrown out in court trivially.