[nickysielicki]

DoD would like to use Palantir. DoD also believes Anthropic is pursuing posttraining in future models that will limit the effectiveness of Palantir tooling, if used by Palantir, for the purposes of DoDs mission.

What other legal mechanism do they have to prevent Palantir from specifically not subcontracting out to Anthropic, other than a supply chain risk designation? Note that directly asking Palantir to prefer Google or OpenAI over Anthropic is a violation of procurement law and highly illegal.

What other mechanism do they have?

[dathery]

They can say "sorry Palantir, we will only sign a contract with you if you commit not to use Claude to provide services" and then Palantir is free to decide if they want to accept the terms of the contract or not. This is how business works.

[nickysielicki]

That would be illegal and ripe for corruption. It would also require the DoD to renegotiate the thousands of existing defense contract it has outstanding.

That’s the entire reason this law exists, because what you’re suggesting is impractical. The department has to confidentially document its rationale for marking a company as a supply chain risk. It’s in the confidential record of this very court case. That’s the legal way to do this.

[dathery]

Again, did you read the order? The judge's order explicitly said this would be legal and cites the law permitting it, then goes on to explain why this action did not satisfy it:

> Covered procurement actions include “[t]he decision to withhold consent for a contractor to subcontract with a particular source or to direct a contractor . . . to exclude a particular source from consideration for a subcontract.” 10 U.S.C. § 3252(d)(2)(C).

I strongly suggest reading the order. I have included the link again: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...

[nickysielicki]

You can’t be serious…

Covered procurement actions are the things the Secretary can do after making a supply chain risk designation under 3252. The designation is a prerequisite. You can’t direct a contractor to exclude a subcontractor under (d)(2)(C) without first going through the 3252 determination process.

You’re literally posting evidence for why this is the only legal avenue for DoD. Yes, I’ve read everything on courtlistener. I trust you have as well, but did you understand any of it?!

This site keeps getting dumber and dumber.

[etchalon]

Yes, it turns out our laws make it hard for the government to do a lot of things because making it easy for them to do things leads to some deeply authoritarian bullshit.

[nickysielicki]

What a beautiful/horrifying inversion of logic. The government does it the legal way, through an existing law, and you’re short circuiting and pattern matching to “the government is trying to work around the law”.

The DoD is not trying to sneak its way out of behaving legally. On the contrary, they’re doing it the legal way and you’re suggesting that they could just do it the illegal way.

[thereticent]

Again, you of undue certainty: the government attempted this potentially legal avenue, and it was adjudicated as impermissible. Meaning what they tried didn't work. Why are you acting like no one else here understands what has happened? Probability dictates that you are almost certainly not the smartest person in the room.

[nickysielicki]

It wasn’t “adjudicated as impermissible”. You’re misunderstanding what a preliminary injunction represents. It’s right there in the name: preliminary. It’s preliminary because it precedes the actual real adjudication.

> Why are you acting like no one else here understands what has happened?

Because you clearly don’t? Because nobody who has a remote understanding of the legal system would be stupid enough to suggest that a San Francisco district court judge preliminary injunction decision would carry enough weight to dictate DoD procurement during an active hot war.

[etchalon]

The DOD is labeling a domestic company a supply chain risk - label generally reserved for hostile foreign powers and their cooperators - because that domestic company didn't agree to its contract terms.

Judge Lin's order finds that it do so specifically to harm that company, without due process and without the remedies Congress specifically requested be used when it drafted the law. The DOD was, in essence, using a law illegally.

The version of events you present does not seem to be tethered to reality.

[brookst]

Why are they entitled to have a mechanism to force a private company to deal in weapons and surveillance?

[zmmmmm]

I think the whole entire point of this is they shouldn't be excluding Anthropic as an entity, they should be excluding all suppliers on equal terms on the basis of whether they satisfy requirements or not. If it is a requirement that they be able to conduct mass domestic surveillance then they should put that into their contract with Palantir, not "You can't use Anthropic".

So I agree with you, it ought to be illegal for them to tell a supplier what other suppliers to use. But that is exactly the larger point here in the first place that they should not be doing that at all.

[nickysielicki]

The government cannot conduct massive domestic surveillance in any case, that’s illegal. Other vendors are mature and serious enough to understand that the government is subject to American law and must operate under American law. They’re mature and serious enough to understand that it is the exclusive right of the judicial branch to make determinations around whether the law has been violated or not. They’re mature and serious enough to understand that the DoD has a mandate to pursue its mission to the fullest extent allowable by the law, and it is the sole responsibility of the DoD legal team to determine whether they are operating safely within the bounds of the law.

Anthropic is uniquely interested in introducing itself as an external enforcer of US law, a sort of belt-and-suspenders approach, where the Department is not only subject to operate under the constitution and the laws from the legislative branch, but also subject to anthropics interpretation of whether they are operating under the constitution and the laws from the legislative branch.

The department of defense does not want to engage in massive domestic surveillance beyond what the law allows them to do. They have signed agreements with OpenAI and other vendors which reiterate that they do not wish to use AI systems for massive domestic surveillance. These terms were unsatisfactory for Anthropic, for whatever reason.

The problem is not the terms of the agreement. It’s the people and the way they conduct business. It’s the fact that they’ve expressed a willingness to hold their product (or future products) hostage, at the cost of DoD operational excellence. It’s the fact that they’re training a specific model variant for government usage with extra guardrails and limitations and values.

Above all else, it’s the fact that they want to leverage their position as a leading AI company to influence government policy. This is not how a serious reliable partner of the government behaves. The problem from the DoDs perspective is the company itself and the people in charge of it.

[zmmmmm]

I don't think a lot of what you are citing is true or valid - but for the sake of argument, everything valid that you are expressing can be and should be put into terms that don't relate specifically to Anthropic. The government just needs to state what its requirements are and then treat all parties equally. Anything else is crony capitalism.

[nickysielicki]

The government has stated what its requirements are: “all lawful use”. Anthropic is uniquely unwilling to agree to that.

[zmmmmm]

So that should have been the end of it - why didn't the government just do that and leave it there? The gap between the accessible means for them to achieve the requirement they needed and the action they actually took amounts to a harm to Anthropic for which they may have the right to pursue compensation.

[nickysielicki]

Again, you’re ignoring the entire background of this dispute: Palantir. Once DoD has established that Anthropic is an unreliable partner and is liable to act adversarially, they needs a legal mechanism to prevent Palantir (and all companies like Palantir) from taking a dependency on Anthropic. This is what that looks like.

Ceasing to contract with them directly doesn’t change the fact that Anthropic wishes to leverage itself to influence the government. That doesn’t go away. The problem is not with closing all direct contracts between the Pentagon and Anthropic, those don’t matter, it’s with closing all their channels of influence into DoD as a subcontractor.

Similarly to how DoD refusing to buy from Huawei doesn’t protect DoD from their prime contractors buying Huawei gear, they need a supply chain risk designation to ensure they are protected.

[tolerance]

> Anything else is crony capitalism.

Are you new here?!

[dragonwriter]

> DoD would like to use Palantir. DoD also believes Anthropic is pursuing posttraining in future models that will limit the effectiveness of Palantir tooling, if used by Palantir, for the purposes of DoDs mission.

> What other legal mechanism do they have to prevent Palantir from specifically not subcontracting out to Anthropic, other than a supply chain risk designation?

Even assuming the stated concern was justifiable, and even assuming that there was no alternative mechanism, that does not:

(1) Justify them failing to what is explicit required for the supply chain risk designation,

(2) Create an exception to the 5th Amendment Due Process Clause, which (for reasons stated in the ruling) merely meeting the facial standards in the statute for the supply chain risk designation does not do when the supplier is (contrary to the motivating justification for the statutory provision) a domestic supplier where the government has no special evidence that it can demonstrate for exigency,

(3) Justify the other challenged actions covered by the injunction (like the Hegseth Directive ordering a much broader ban than is imposed by the supply chain risk designation, or the earlier Presidential Directive ordering an even broader ban than the Hegseth Directive.)

(4) Really, do anything at all legally, because it is not a principal of US law that the government, if it has a good motive, is free to act outside of the law merely because there is no provision inside the law which meets its desires.

[nickysielicki]

The court hasn’t found anything. A preliminary injunction is a finding of likelihood of success on the merits, not a ruling on the merits. The designation is still in place and will remain in place until the appellate courts weigh in.

On the substance: nothing in 3252 limits ‘adversary’ to foreign actors. Congress used ‘foreign adversary’ in other statutes when it meant foreign adversary. It didn’t here. That’s a problem for you. The government’s brief cites three dictionaries defining adversary as ‘an opponent in a contest, conflict, or dispute.’ A vendor that questions active military operations through intermediaries and demands an approval role in the operational decision chain is an opponent in a dispute. That’s the plain text. Originalist judges will see it that way.

I don’t really follow what you’re saying in point 1, the supply chain risk rationale is in the confidential record of this court case. There’s no way for us to know what’s in there, but it’s safe to assume the government covered their bases.

On point 2, I also don’t understand what you’re saying. They are in court right now. How have they been denied due process?

Point 3 is less interesting to me. Twitter posts by Hegseth obviously don’t really hold water. Anthropic should win here. But that’s not really what this case is about or why it’s interesting.

Your point 4 assumes the government acted outside the law. I’m not convinced of that. That’s the very question being litigated. The government’s position is that it acted within 3252. One San Francisco district judge disagreed at the preliminary injunction stage. That’s not a final answer. Not even close.

[etchalon]

... you're arguing they weren't denied due process because they could always sue to demand due process?

[nickysielicki]

Post-deprivation process is still process.

[dragonwriter]

There is a reason the phrase "due process" has two words instead of just the second one.

[etchalon]

Amazing.