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Comment by suid | Hacker News Reader

That may be, but the government doesn't need to declare Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" in order to just not do business with it. A simple clause in all RFPs is all that is needed.

The problem with this declaration by the government is that now any company doing any business with the US government would be effectively forbidden from using Anthropic ANYWHERE within their company, which is a huge deal, because the government does want to vet any vendors' software development practices.

But as long as the Judge in this case pushes back against such an action by the government, that leaves companies free to use Anthropic for their own internal uses. And most companies WILL continue to use them if it makes economic sense.

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Any company that feels the need to send data in plain text to third party LLM providers has absolutely no business having government contracts. OpenAI and Anthropic are both a complete joke when it comes to data security.

It is hard to believe how few companies seemingly lack even one person with the basic technical skills required to rack up a server or two or find a service that supports verifiable end to end encryption.

While I agree, the government just gave all of its and it's citizens data to the owner of xAI/Grok. I think the US is way past any security concerns of sharing plain text chat logs to OpenAI/Anthropic.

I would be okay with the US government being labeled a supply chain risk.

> The problem with this declaration by the government is that now any company doing any business with the US government would be effectively forbidden from using Anthropic ANYWHERE within their company

That is not true, even if the supply chain risk designation held. The sad thing is that so many people (myself included) also believed this, because this is what Hegseth said. He was lying. Thanks to another comment further down in this thread that led me to this page that explains what the supply chain risk designation actually does: https://www.justsecurity.org/132851/anthropic-supply-chain-r...

Perhaps. But certainly those companies will factor in the risk that this is overturned, or that the government pursues other extrajudicial means to punish those who do business with Anthropic.

All things equal, you’d be better off not exposing yourself to risk of financial harm or other punitive measures. Which is the whole point of the government’s action in the first place.

This is, unfortunately, a legitimate concern for some companies. There are a lot of DOD contractors out there that if they are cut off they have nothing else. With the current administration it is clear that they can, will and have taken these kinds of measures based purely out of malice. Anthropic may get a win out of this though in the short and long term depending on how non DOD/govt affiliated companies see their actions but small fish can't take those chances.

> All things equal, you’d be better off not exposing yourself to risk of financial harm or other punitive measures.

This isn't necessarily true. This is a complex decision; the logic above frames the decision narrowly, with a short-term time horizon. This kind of decision calls for game theory, not merely an individualistic calculus. Appeasing Trump isn't a winning strategy in the long-run. History shows that cooperation (e.g. pushing back) against authoritarianism is often a better strategy. Consumers may reward companies that behave well. Bottom line: you have to game it out -- no one commenting here has done that, I'll bet. So until someone has ... stay agnostic analytically.

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