No one is forcing the DoD to contract with a company.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> is liable to act adversarially
...
> wishes to leverage itself to influence the government
This goes way beyond the above requirement of "all legal purposes", and I haven't seen anything that remotely supports these in the public evidence. In fact there's a lot of evidence to support the opposite view.
Are you new here?!