Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
anthropic.com
anthropic.com
I think many people on HN have a cynical reaction to Anthropic's actions due to of their own lived experiences with tech companies. Sometimes, that holds: my part of the company looked like Meta or Stripe, and it's hard not to regress to the mean as you scale. But not every pattern repeats, and the Anthropic of today is still driven by people who will risk losing a seat at the table to make principled decisions.
I do not think this is a calculated ploy that's driven by making money. I think the decision was made because the people making this decision at Anthropic are well-intentioned, driven by values, and motivated by trying to make the transition to powerful AI to go well.
So, with all respect, when someone tells me that the people they worked with were well-intentioned and driven by values, I take it with a grain of salt. Been there, said the same things, and then when the company needed to make tough calls, it all fell apart.
However, in this instance, it does seem that Anthropic is walking away from money. I think that, in itself, is a pretty strong signal that you might be right.
I’m on the camp “the world is so fucked up, take the good when you can find it”.
Beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to taking a stand against dictatorships.
Not sure why it's controversial that they said no, regardless of the reasoning. Yeah there's a lot of marketing speak and things to cover their asses. Let's call them out on that later. Right now let's applaud them for doing the right thing.
FWIW I do not think they are the "good guys" (if I had a dollar for every company that had a policy of not being evil...). But they are certainly not siding with the bad guys here.
For if you don't the next step is cynicism maximally operationlized: what you're not doing game/political BS to get ahead? What are you? A chump? An idiot?
That kind of stuff spreads like wild fire making corporate America ... something else to put it politely.
Doing the right thing has cost me big time here and there. I don't care. Simultaneously orgs are not all bad; thats another distortion we can do without.
Like Google's support for the open web: They very sincerely did support it, they did a lot of good things for it. And then later, they decided that they didn't care as much. It was wrong to put your faith in them forever, but also wrong to treat that earlier sincerity as lies.
In this case, Anthropic was doing a good thing, and they got punished for it, and if you agree with their stand, you should take their side.
Many of us remember that OpenAI was also started by people with strong personal values. Their charter said that they would not monetize after reaching AGI, their fiduciary duty is to humanity, and the non-profit board would curtail the ambitions of the for-profit incentives. Was this not also believed by a sizeable portion of the employees there at the time? And what is left of these values after the financial incentives grew?
The market forces from the huge economic upside of AI devalues individual values in two ways. It rewards those that choose whatever accelerates AI the most over any individuals who are more careful and act on individual values--the latter simply loses power in the long run until their virtue has no influence. As Anthropic says in their mission statements, it is not of much use to humanity to be virtuous if you are irrelevant. The latter, as is true for many technologies, is that economic prosperity is deeply linked to human welfare. And slowing or limiting progress leads to real immediate harm to the human population. And thus any government regulations which are against AI progress will always be unpopular, because those values which are arguing future harm of AIs is fighting against the values of saving people from diseases and starvation today.
The supply chain risk designation will be overturned in court, and the financial fallout from losing the government contracts will pale in comparison to the goodwill from consumers. Not to mention that giving in would mean they lose lots of their employees who would refuse to work under those terms. In this case, the principles are less than free.
In fact, a friend heard about this and immediately signed up for a $200/year Claude Pro plan. This is someone who has been only a very occasional user of ChatGPT and never used Claude before.
I told my friend "You could just sign up for the free plan and upgrade after you try it out."
"No, I want to send them this tangible message of support right now!"
Unfortunately this is really bad for Anthropic. Given how quickly the other providers jumped on the opportunity, you can tell how fast things move here and ultimately that could mean the difference between survival in this industry.
I hope something changes, but it can get a lot worse. Individual developers signing up won't help Anthropic. If things get worse, you can rule out Anthropic in most enterprise situations. Supply chain risk means you can't even build software with the thing. Forget about using AI as part of the product, as a user facing feature - people won't be able to build with it as it's part of the supply chain.
I'm honestly uncertain how the courts will rule. You could be right, but it isn't guaranteed. I think a judicial narrowing of it is more likely than a complete overturn.
OTOH, I think almost guaranteed it will be watered-down by the government. Because read expansively, it could force Microsoft and AWS to choose between stopping reselling Claude vs dropping the Pentagon as a customer. I don't think Hegseth actually wants to put them in that position – he probably honestly doesn't realise that's what he's potentially doing. In any event, Microsoft/AWS/etc's lobbyists will talk him out of it.
And the more the government waters it down, the greater the likelihood the courts will ultimately uphold it.
> and the financial fallout from losing the government contracts will pale in comparison to the goodwill from consumers.
Maybe. The problem is B2B/enterprise is arguably a much bigger market than B2C. And the US federal contracting ban may have a chilling effect on B2B firms who also do business with the federal government, who may worry that their use of Claude might have some negative impact on their ability to win US federal deals, and may view OpenAI/xAI (and maybe Google too) as safer options.
I guess the issue is nobody yet knows exactly how wide or narrow the US government is going to interpret their "ban on Anthropic". And even if they decide to interpret it relatively narrowly, there is always the risk they might shift to a broader reading in the future. Possibly, some of Anthropic's competitors may end up quietly lobbying behind the scenes for the Trump admin to adopt broader readings of it.
Surely OpenAI cannot but notice that those values, held firmly, make you an enemy of the state?
Indeed. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority; you only know that something is a real priority when you get an answer to the question "what will you sacrifice for this".
MAGA isn't going to last forever, and when it collapses, the ones who publicly stood up to it will be better positioned to, I don't know, not face massive legal problems under whatever administration comes next. A government elected by middle-aged moms who use "Fuck ICE" as a friendly greeting isn't going to have any incentives to go easy on Palantir and Tesla.
I think OpenAI's IPO will be interesting. Not even the conservative media will be happy about mass surveillance of Americans.
For non-Americans not much change, they don't really care about your rights more than about a pile of dog poo.
Don't surviel the US populace? Don't automate killing, make sure a human is in the loop? No, sorry, don't automate killing yet.
Yeah dude, I'm sure just about any burglar I pull out of prison will agree.
Listen yes, it's good compared to like 99% of US companies. But that really speaks more to the absolute moral bankruptcy of most companies, and not to Anthropics principles.
That being said, yes we should applaud anthropic. Because yes this is rare and yes this is a step in the right direction. I just think we all need to acknowledge where we are right now, which is... not a good place.
ehh.. I'd say it's a smaller step in the wrong direction than it could be.
The entire problem is that this lasts as long as those people are in charge. Every incentive is aligned with eventually replacing them with people who don’t share those values, or eventually Anthropic will be out-competed by people who have no hesitation to put profit before principle.
Meaning, they're a-okay with:
- Mass surveillance of non-US peoples (and let's be completely real here, they're in bed with Palantir already, so they're obviously okay with mass surveillance of everyone as long as they're not the ones that will be held culpable)
- Autonomous murder bots. For now they want a human in the loop to rubberstamp things, but eventually "when the models improve" enough, they're just fine and dandy with their AIs being used as autonomous weapons.
What the fuck are the principles we're talking about here? Why are they being celebrated for this psychotic viewpoint, exactly?
I don't know why a personal testimony to the effect that "these are the good guys" needs to be at the top of every Anthropic thread. With respect to astroturfing and stealth marketing they are clearly the bad guys.
So of course they would work with Palantir to deploy those tools.
The issue we're seeing is because the DoW decided they no longer like the "with safeguards" part of the above and is trying to force Anthropic to remove them.
> the mass domestic surveillance of Americans
This they say they don’t like. The qualifiers tell you they’re totally fine with mass surveillance of Palestinians, or anyone else really, otherwise they could have said “mass surveillance”.
> fully autonomous weapons
And they’re pretty obviously fine with killing machines using their AI as long as they’re not fully autonomous (at the moment, they say the tech is not there yet).
All things considered they’re still a bit better than their competitors, I suppose.
While I've talked a lot about Anthropic this week, if I was astroturfing for a positive image, I'd be very bad at it [1][2][3].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47150170
There’s a comment that’s sort of handwaving and saying “because America”, but I would imagine that someone with direct knowledge of the people involved would have something more substantive than “thems the breaks” when it comes to working with Palantir
They exist within the regime of capital and imperialism that all of us who are American citizens exist within. This isn't a cop-out or cope. It's just the reality of the world that we live in. If you are an American and somehow above it, let me know how you live.
My personal belief is that the closer to god you are; the more easily you can justify evil. How could you not? If my entire belief system is derived from faith, then there are *no* conclusions I could not come to, and therefore anything can be justified.
What is that? Some new bit you're working on?
Would the people who have invested in the company like that? Or would they like the company to make some money? Are they going to piss off their investors by being "driven by values"?
I mean, please explain it to me how "driven by values" can be done when you are riding investor money. Or may be I am wrong and this company does not take investments.
So in the end you are either
1. funding yourselves, then you are in control, so there is at least a justification for someone to believe you when you say that the company is "driven by values".
2. Or have taken investments, then you are NOT in control, then anyone who trusts you when you say the company is "driven by values", is plain stupid.
In other words, when you start taking investment, you forego your right to claim virtuous. The only claim that you can expect anyone to believe is "MY COMPANY WILL MAKE A TRUCKLOAD OF MONEY !!!!"
The bottom line is that if the investment is not profitable, then there will be less and less investment, because only fewer and fewer can afford to lose money and stick to their values, until no one will be investing; how ever high your values might be...
Sticking to your values when it cost growth is not sustainable for publicly traded companies...
It's also completely reasonable to expect that if Anthropic is the real deal and opposed to where the current agenda setters want to take things, they'll be destroyed for it.
I think "enthusiastically" looks different. They had to choose between kissing Trumps butt to make good business for 4 years or see their companies at a severe disadvantage. I'm not saying what they did was good, nor do I support it. But from a business angle it's not hard to see why they chose to do that. If you'd ask them privately off the record then I'm sure most of them would tell you that Trump is an idiot and dangerous.
Personally, I wish that the political alignment I favour was as Big Tent as Donald Trump's administration is. I think he can get Zohran Mamdani in the room and say "it's fine; say you think I'm a fascist" and then nonetheless get what he wants. But it just so happens that the other side isn't so. So such is life. We lose and our allies dwindle since anyone who would make an overture to us, we punish for the sin of not having been born a steadfast believer.
Our ideals are "If you weren't born supporting this cause, we will punish you for joining it as if you were an opponent". I don't think that's the path to getting what one wants.
I'm not sure how accurate this sentiment is. Your desire is to embrace your enemy without resolving the differences, and get what you want. It's not clear here if you're advocating compromise and negotiation, or just embracing for the sake of embracing while just doing what you wanted all along.
And evaluating Trump's actions against this sentiment doesn't seem to be the negotiation and compromise interpretation. Given the situation with tariffs and ICE enforcement, there is no indication of negotiation or compromise other than complete fealty/domination.
So as grandiose and noble your sentiment is, Donald Trump is hardly the epitome of it as you seem to suggest.
I think Donald Trump has pretty much let Zohran Mamdani operate without applying the kind of political pressure he has applied to other people, notably his predecessor Eric Adams. Also, I think saying "let people be your allies when they take your position" is less "grandiose and noble" than demanding someone agree on all counts before you will accept any political alignment. But it's fine if everyone else disagrees. It's possible there really just isn't a political group which will accept my views and while that's unfortunate because it means I can't get all that I want, I think it'll be okay.
One could reasonably argue that the meta-position is to either join the Republicans full-bore (somewhat unavailable to me) or to at least play the purity test game solely because that's the only way to have any influence on outcomes. If it comes to that, I'll do it.
Political witch hunts, women and minorities forced out of the military, and kicking out all the allied countries that used to be in the tent with us?
Bullshit of the finest caliber.
Is your perception that warped? Mamdani is the one who knows how to play Trump as a fiddle, and the one who walks away with something from the exchange.
Every single one of these CEOs happily pirated unimaginable amounts of copyrighted content. That directly hurt millions of real human beings. Not just the prior creators but also crushing the future potential for success of future ones.
https://www.susmangodfrey.com/wins/susman-godfrey-secures-1-...
It’s clear that this is mostly a glorified loyalty test over a practical ask by the administration. Strangely reminiscent of Soviet or Chinese policies where being agreeable to authority was more important than providing value to the state.
If we're going by Occam's razor: it's Friday so Pete probably started drinking ~10:30-11am.
> In conjunction with the President's directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service. https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070?s=20
This has never happened before. It just goes to show how overextended the USG is these days. America is broke. Anthropic is about to IPO. Most stock market money comes from foreign countries like Japan these days. All those people are going to trust Anthropic more if they believe the company is neutral among nations and acting as a check and balance to power.
It is not just a test, it is PR of sorts. They want to bully everyone into loyalty.
> If we're going by Occam's razor: it's Friday so Pete probably started drinking ~10:30-11am.
If we're going by Occam's razor, then we should cut away the drinks. USSR started its terror not because someone was drunk, it was a deliberate action to make everyone afraid to do anything. They targeted people at random and executed them accusing them of counterrevolution or espionage. The goal was to instill fear.
Now Putin regime does the same, they are instilling fear in people. It is a basic authoritarian reflex to make people afraid of being marked as disloyal. They prefer to do it in unpredictable ways to create an uncertainty of where the red lines are so people don't try even to toeing them.
Trump is not very skilled in the mechanics of terror. He is predictable which is unfortunate for a would-be dictator. It is an incompetence, and if a hypothesis resort to it, it is a bad sign for a hypothesis. But AFAIK no hypotheses explaining Trump can avoid introducing his incompetence into the picture. In this light the reliance of a hypothesis on incompetence loses its discriminatory power.
I don't know how the business leadership community could watch this whole affair and still be in support of them AT ALL. This is well past getting a crappy twitter rant from Trump on the weekend that maybe one could ignore until the next rant.
I think he is just too dumb to figure out a way to "finesse" the situation so the NSA etc. can use it however they want, or at least to know that it's politically intractable to make it a public fight.
The new thing that I know about leading AI companies that aren't Anthropic (i.e. OpenAI, Google, Grok, etc) is that they knowingly support using their tools for domestic mass surveillance and in fully autonomous weapon systems.
if they went to toronto or montreal or something, that would be wildly different
How about much is daycare in the U.S. for 3 children? Conservative estimates put that at $4-$5,000 per month, and that's after tax.
Is there a reason your comment omits these key differences when comparing a SWE's quality of life living in the United States vs. Canada?
A coworker mentioned there's an autonomous marine sensing startup right in the downtown area. I want to look into that.
Any specific areas you want to buy in?
generally okalands/fernwood, though ive been eyeing some spots on the gorge
Oaklands is awesome. I haven't lived there but I love it. We've got a lot of friends out there.
I've been seeing it a lot lately, but don't remember ever really seeing it before. Do members of the military prefer this title?
The reason that no one involved in the game's development objected to the word "warfighter" is that the U.S. Defense Department has used "warfighter" as a standard term for military personnel since the late 1980s or early 1990s: Thus Earl L. Wiener et al., Eds. Human Factors in Aviation, 1988
Warfighter is literally the Department of War's Amazonian or Googler or any other cringe term you'd see in company PR or recruiting material.
I find it otherwise peculiar some feel like it appeared out of thin air, while others feel like it's always been a thing.
‘Department of War’ is merely an authorised second name for the department, but legally it remains the Department of Defense until/if Congress changes it.
I thought the marines were just the ones in the navy that couldn’t stop eating the crayons? :P
That's exactly it.
It's trade jargon from those in the industry that make more money off of full-blown war than merely maintaining extreme readiness for a more secure defense.
We have soldiers, sailors, airman/women, Marines (who really do not like being called soldiers), Coast Guardsman/women, and now the Space Force. Granted, I do not know why "service member" did not catch on. Perhaps because "warfighter" is a bit shorter.
Yeah, it's basically this. "service member" is clunky, like saying "person with enlistment".
Warfighter has its own issues as a descriptor but it at least rolls off the tongue better and is easier to read through in policy and regulation to the millions in the DoD.
edit: To be clear, Hegseth didn't create it, merely has popularized its use recently. Eg his speech at Quantico last Sept
The term—and its use in the now-Department of War—dates back to the late 80s.
This isn't true, and there's no need to flame and be disingenuous.
> The term—and its use in the now-Department of War—dates back to the late 80s.
Maybe you can provide evidence instead of restating the same claim that sibling comments to mine have made?
I've already admitted that it wasn't invented by Hegseth. My claim is that he is popularizing it. In fact, your comment further down agrees with this:
> It really isn't—it's all perception. Hegseth has a much more outgoing and public persona so it's more visible. Heck, can you even name the last 5 Secretaries that preceded him? I can't.
As you say, he has a much more public persona - as does his jingoistic rhetoric.
Edit: so it's been around for longer, but the Trump regime seems to love it bigly so I'm sticking with my observation.
It's a trump regime thing.
“To the best of our knowledge, these exceptions have not affected a single government mission to date.”
I had assumed these exceptions (on domestic surveillance and autonomous drones) were more than presuppositions.
Democracy isn't dead folks, but it takes more work than usual.
For example, in case of tariffs, they found another loophole and went on their way.
It's nice to have a little guy take a stand, but without major collective pressure, nothing will change.
So yeah, extremely few have.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_Resources,_Inc._v._Tr...
DPA? All Writs Act?
Force them to comply and then prevent them talking about it with NSLs?
I appreciate that Anthropic may be the least bad of a bunch of really bad actors here, but this has played out before in the US, and the burden of trust is, and should be, really high. I believe that Anthropic don't want to remove the "safety barriers" on their tech being used for domestic surveillance and military operations, but that implies they're ok with those use-cases so long as the "safety barriers" are still up. Not really the best look, IMHO.
So what happens when we all get rosy eyed about Anthropic (the only slightly evil company) winning a battle against the purely evil government, and then the gov use the various instruments at their disposal to just force anthropic to do what they want, and then force them to never disclose it?
Did the world learn nothing from Snowden?
It's also incoherent that the DoD/DoW was threatening to invoke the Defense Production Act OR classifying them as "supply chain risk". They're either too uniquely critical to national defense OR they're such a severe liability that they have to be blacklisted for anyone in the DoD apparatus (including the many subcontracts) to use.
How are other tech companies supposed to work with the US government and draw up mutual contracts when those terms are suddenly questioned months later and can be used in such devastating ways against them? Setting the morals/principals aside, how does this make for rational business decision to work with a counterparty that behaves this way.
They are required to notify Congress (they have not), prepare a report with specific sections (they have not), and the reasons must fall within a set of categories outlined by statute (this does not).
There will be a court fight and they will lose, just like they lost the tariff battle, because of poor competence.
(Trump's post on Truth Social was actually fine. He said the USG would stop doing business with Anthropic, which is within its legal right. Hegseth's follow-on post is the problem. It is possible that Trump did not expect or want Hegseth to do that, that this was meant as bluster to bump along the negotiations; Hegseth has a recent history of stepping out of line within the administration and irritating people like Rubio.)
Here, Hegseth has simply made a social media post. He did not publish any official investigation which led to the report. He did not explain what legal power would permit him to impose all the restrictions the post claims to impose. There is not, five hours later, any order on an official government website about it. So we have a real question. If a Cabinet secretary posts "I am directing the Department of War to designate...", does that in and of itself perform the designation, or is it simply an informal notice that the Department of Fascist Neologisms will perform the designation soon?
It's an honest question by the way - not trying to throw any gothas.
Just trying to understand if comoanies or people that don't orbit defense contracting are free to operate with Anthropic still or risk being sanctioned too.
Mass surveillance of people constitutes a violation of fundamental rights. The red line is in the wrong place.
"Zee rockets go up! Who cares vhere zey come down? Zat's not my department" says Wernher von Braun.
Europe is a nice place, too. In case you need GPUs we have AI factories for you : https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/ai-factori...
We also don't engage in mass surveillance or develop autonomous weapons.
> we don't engage in mass surveillance
you're incredibly naive
What?
Perhaps it’s time or even past time to think of ways of screwing up their training sets.
I guess our democracies don't count and we don't have any rights.
I don’t really expect this to last but if it does I will happily continue to offer this kudos on an indefinite basis.
/In theory./
In practice, if your biggest customer tells you to drop Anthropic, you listen to them.
"Secretary Hegseth has implied this designation would restrict anyone who does business with the military from doing business with Anthropic. The Secretary does not have the statutory authority to back up this statement. Legally, a supply chain risk designation under 10 USC 3252 can only extend to the use of Claude as part of Department of War contracts—it cannot affect how contractors use Claude to serve other customers.
In practice, this means:
If you are an individual customer or hold a commercial contract with Anthropic, your access to Claude—through our API, claude.ai, or any of our products—is completely unaffected. If you are a Department of War contractor, this designation—if formally adopted—would only affect your use of Claude on Department of War contract work. Your use for any other purpose is unaffected."
If the legal system works as intended, the blast radius isn't too big here and something Anthropic will accept even if it hurts them. Maybe they even win and get the supply chain risk designation lifted. But I have zero faith that the legal system will make a difference here. It all comes down to how far the administration wants to go in imposing it's will.
Bleak.
GCP and AWS cannot use Claude to build anything part of a DoD contract, but they do not need to deny Anthropic access to compute itself.
Surely that would cover both buying things from and selling things to Anthropic.
Sure, there will be a court battle, but I don't think these companies want to take that chance. They'll capitulate after the lawyers realize that option is on the table.
Hopefully their lawyers read HN comments so they can negotiate with your deeper understanding of the legal landscape.
Nuclear weapons technology is restricted under very specific legislative authority, where is the corresponding authority that could be selectively applied to a particular vendors AI models or services?
I applaud Anthropic's candor in the public sphere. Unfortunately the country party is unworthy of such applause.
The most import point of this story is that this is already happening. And it will likely continue regardless of who is elected.
> Sam Altman told OpenAI employees at an all-hands meeting on Friday afternoon that a potential agreement is emerging with the U.S. Department of War to use the startup’s AI models and tools, according to a source present at the meeting and a summary of the meeting seen by Fortune. The contract has not yet been signed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188698
Fuck this authoritarian bullshit.
You're absolutely right to point that out -- thank you for catching it. I made a mistake in my previous response and that last act appears to have caused civilian casualties. Let me take a closer look and clarify the correct details for you.
(Will leave you to imagine the bullseye emoji, etc.)
Best scenario it will get TikTok-ed, otherwise it will become the real national security risk
Had the exit happen, well, as US has a monopoly of compute on this planet for next 2-3 years at least, the company, even though they would take the researchers with them, will certainly cease to exist as it exists now.
Hegseth's statement already leans towards accusations of treason and duplicity, I would say people trying to export the company would face significant risk of arrest or worse.
That’s okay! The use of autonomous weapons is only risky for the civilians of the country you’re destabilizing this week!
If the government really wants to, it could try building its "Skynet" on open-source Chinese models.. which would be deeply ironic.
Do you see the problem here. Genuinely don't think we would've won WWII if these people were running things back then.
How can we expect the VPs of these companies to make to make tough decisions like this when half can be pressured via immigration status? It’s hard enough being a normal citizen sticking your neck out in these circumstances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Maven
The Epstein adjacent crew (Palantir) took over. Palantir was using Anthropic. No one could possibly have foreseen this. /s
The problem isn't that fascism will kill all of us, but that you will not get to choose. If the regime decides that your city, your company, or your friends are an enemy, they will destroy you, and if your fellow strawberry-pickers bother to read about it in the paper they'll be told that you were an anti-government radical who had it coming.
1. I don’t understand what is controversial about any supplier making their own rules for trade. I don’t have to agree with their beliefs, but I find it the basis of a functioning society to allow others to hold beliefs that I do not share, and to develop products as they want, as long as they don’t pose any dangers. If I don’t like the product, I am free to shop elsewhere or develop my own.
2. I thought that there is was a shared understanding of the line between voluntary business deals, and coercion and punishment. I thought we agreed that the law should protect people and businesses in ways so that nobody can exert power over another. Not on the hows, but on the why. And not based on ethical considerations (beliefs) but purely on logical grounds that we know how violence begets violence, use of it will only escalate conflict, and we will ultimately lose.
3. I thought we all agreed that government agencies were bound by the law and its policies. If you were to use the designation of Supply Chain Risk, you would at least have to sufficiently provide logical arguments. Here, they even openly disclose how they plan to use the mechanism purely as punishment, against the spirit of the law, not because a product carries any risk and should be limited, but because it is too limited.
Is this some form of collective narcissistic psychosis? The desire to burn it all down in suicide?
"We'd sure love to turn our AI into a mass surveillance tool! Please, aim it at the Americans Population! And Kill Bots, we can't wait!"
They want to present themselves as moral. What better endorsement than by being rejected by the US military under Trump? You get the people who hate trump and the people who hate the military in one swoop.
At the same time its kind of a non story. Anrhropic says it doesn't want its products used in certain ways, US military says fine, you can't be part of the project where we are going to make the AI do those things. Isn't that a win for both sides ? What's the problem?
It would be like someone part of a boycott movement being surprised the company they are boycotting doesn't want to hire them.
Think. The problem is that being branded a "supply chain risk" prohibits vast chunks of the US corporate landscape from doing business with Anthropic.
The problem is that the government is attempting to destroy a company rather than simply terminate their contract.
They want their products to not be used for some purposes. That's fine, that is their right. But that doesn't just stop at direct purchases. If the US buys from a defense contractor who bought from abthropic, that really isn't that different from buying direct. The moral hazard is still there and the risk that anthropic will try to prevent their product from being used in that fashion is still there.
I think anthropic wants their cake and to eat it too. You can't take a principled stand against something and then be shocked the thing you are taking a principled stand against might think you are a risk.
Is it a principled stand or not? In your first comment, you said 'anthropic's "moral" stances are bullshit', their actions here are merely (or at least primarily) a successful marketing exercise, and the result is "a win for both sides". Are you now acknowledging that it's a costly, risky action on Anthropic's part? Because you haven't said anything to refute that; you've just changed the subject.
You need to look closer at how the government is trying to use the 'supply chain risk' designation. Hegseth said this:
> Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.
It remains to be seen whether they'll actually be able to enforce this. But it clearly goes far beyond what would be justified by the kind of supply chain risk you are describing.
Instead of just canceling the contract, the DoD is trying to destroy Anthropic to make it comply with their whims.
IMO this will probably be quickly defeated in court.
If it isn't, comrade Hegseth will have done an impressive job of weakening the American empire. You simply can't do business with an entity that would try to destroy you over dumb bullshit like this.
LMFAO
This administration is comfortable with blatantly picking winners and OpenAI is better connected with the admin than Anthropic.
What the actual fuck. How can anyone side with Anthropic. They are not the good guys by any means whatsoever. Mass surveillance against anyone is wrong and having killbots "when AI is ready" is totally fucked and dystopian. Imagine killbots rampaging while the good American people are at home living a nice peaceful life. Fuck any of that, fuck Anthropic, fuck ClosedAI, fuck Google, fuck Trump, fuck the DoD and fuck every American who is patriotic to the monster their country became. Fuck every country that also tries to do stuff like this. Fuck all companies taking part in such insanity.
This is another statement, to their customers about Hegseth's social post, but perhaps resulting in further escalation because you know the other side doesn't like having their weaknesses pointed out.
Perhaps they should've found their spine a year earlier; right now their only hope is that the admin isn't stupid enough to crash the propped-up economy over petty bullshit. But knowing how they behave, well.
Anthropic will then find out that you don’t oppose a hyperpower - the United States.
This is criticism that I would use to describe countries like China and Russia, and many other poorer ones. Were the Trump administration to do this, it would be unequivocal evidence that we are dealing with an unlawful insurgent government. I doubt it will happen, but I'm often wrong.
It’s the library of Alexandria all over again.
1) The US gov generally does have close partnerships with most large-scale, mature tech companies. Sometimes this is just a division dedicated to handling their requests, often it’s a special portal or API they can use to “lawfully” grab information from for their investigations. Often times these function somewhat like backdoors. Anthropic is large, but not mature. Additional changes must still take place for “backdoor” style partnerships to be effected.
2) The NSA can pretty much use any computer system they set their eyes on - famously including computers that were never connected to the internet secured in the middle of a mountain (Stuxnet). If they wanted to secretly utilize the Claude API without Claude finding out, that is within their capabilities. Google had to encrypt all their internal datacenter traffic to try to prevent the NSA from logging all their server-to-server traffic, after mistakenly thinking their internal networks were secure enough not to need that.
3) This isn’t about being “able” to do whatever the administration wants. This is the administration demonstrating the consequences of perceived insubordination to make other companies think twice about ever trying to limit use of corporate technology.
On point 3, are you saying this will dissuade other companies from taking Anthropic's stance? Somehow I actually thought this would set precedent for how to actually stand up to gov. Quite interesting how we see the same situation and come up with totally different conclusions.
It's one of the hidden and forgotten revelations about the Snowden leaks, where he showed that the NSA had a bunch of filters in their top-secret classified systems to filter out communications from US citizens. Those filters exist because of Posse Comitatus.
The model of Claude the DoD is asking for more than likely doesn't even exist in a production ready form. The post-training would have to be completely different for the model the DoD is asking for.