Point blank one of the most nakedly evil things the government has ever tried to do. Apparently Anthropic's sticking points were no using the model for autonomous kill orders and no mass surveillance...
Between military threats and this, are they trying to slaughter the golden geese of things the US has going for it?
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.
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.
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?
Now, if you said "the Deepseek" guys, that would be different.
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.