So the Pentagon is strongarming a company into cooperation? That reminds of how my alcoholic neighbor used to treat his family. It's almost as if someone let a mean drunk be in charge of the Pentagon.
It isn't in private. It's a public threat in the court of public opinion to apply societal pressure on the company. They are attempting to reshape Anthropic's decision into a tribal one, and hurt the brand's reputation within the tribe unless it capitulates.
There are two possibilities:
> The government would likely argue that dropping the contractual restrictions doesn't change the product. Claude is the same model with the same weights and the same capabilities—the government just wants different contractual terms. […] Anthropic would likely argue the opposite: that its usage restrictions are part of what Claude is as a commercial service, and that Claude-without-guardrails is a product it doesn't offer to anyone. On this view, the government is asking for a new product, and the statute doesn't clearly authorize that.
and
> The more extreme possibility would be the government compelling Anthropic to retrain Claude—to strip the safety guardrails baked into the model's training, not merely modify the access terms. Here the characterization question seems easier: a retrained model looks much more like a new product than dropping contractual restrictions does. Admittedly, the government has a textual argument in its favor: the DPA's definitions of "services" include “development … of a critical critical technology item,” and the government could frame retraining Claude as exactly that. Whether courts would accept that framing, especially in light of the major questions doctrine, is another matter.
* https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-the-defense-produc...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
A more extreme situation: could the DPA be used to nationalize the model so the government has ownership, and then allow access to more amenable AI players?
"We made these compromises because national defense is really super important." has historically proven to be a really effective explanation for tech companies that want to abandon some of their previously-stated "nice and friendly" values in exchange for money.
That being said, I imagine it also factors into internal dialogue that allows those higher up to explain to the boots-on-the-ground researchers that "no you're not working for the military industrial complex, they're just stealing your work that was intended to feed the orphans!"
One would think that "Make sure to frequently evaluate whether or not the techniques you're using are actually effective, and adjust your actions if they're not." would be something that member of that group would do automatically as a matter of habit. But, it turns out that many folks shut off their brains when they get to wrap things in jargon as extraneous as it is impenetrable and slap ass-pulled percentages and betting receipts on to the exterior.
The only threat the Pentagon has is to terminate the contract.
We don’t know this
Much like FISA court-enabled unaccountable surveillance, this may be another of the increasing number of things where neither major party is will actually stop it. In terms of real-world outcomes, it doesn't much matter whether the party in control has just enough of their members (in the safest seats) vote with the minority to pass an unpopular measure or if they all vote for it. When the votes are stage managed in advance, the count being close is merely optics to further the narrative that the two major parties represent meaningfully different outcomes on every major issue.