U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk | Hacker News Reader

U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk

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499 pointscramer4next897 comments

I know everyone says this is political but it actually seems like a textbook designation. Anthropic wanted to have rules on how the military used AI, the military said no and therefore doesn't want anthropic used anywhere in their supply line.

This is like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike orders, now the military needs to have a special box of pens that don't have stipulations attached. With AI usage it would be the same thing except applied to entire product chains. It seems like it would just add more complexity to operations.

You can agree with the rules anthropic wanted, but having rules set by a private company at all that apply to the military does seem fair for the military to object to.

>The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized and necessary

Though they'd probably put the DoD on the cybersecurity whitelist today, the very idea of the claude whitelists for certain functionality already exists and is being used by them today.

> I know everyone says this is political but it actually seems like a textbook designation

It literally is a textbook definition, signed into US law:

“Supply chain risk,” means the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of a covered system so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise degrade the function, use, or operation of such system (see 10 U.S.C. 3252).

To add onto what another commenter said, the pen analogy would be more like the manufacturer designing pens that stopped working when used to sign strike orders they disagreed with.

Selling a pen labeled "this pen will refuse to sign certain orders" is not sabotage or malicious and is thus not a supply chain risk. The DoD is free to not buy from Anthropic, but designating them as a supply chain risk is incorrect, as well as arguably arbitrary and capricious given their public criticism of Anthropic's beliefs.

The DoD buys from suppliers, who buy from suppliers, and so on. Hence supply chain. Hence supply chain risk.

If you outsource your thinking to a server that can detect your IP address, and decide to render decision “b” instead of decision “a” to your query, that’s a risk. (Or detect by the type of query, past history of your use, etc.). Panopticlick should be having a field day with all this.

All of those verbs basically mean "degrade an existing system, after the fact". If anthropic states beforehand that certain use cases are not possible, it should be fine, no?

To give another (bad) analogy: The Pens aren't made to be weapons themselves, they are not intended for that. If the DoD now tries to shoot pens as projectiles and they just melt, that's no reason to classify the pen manufacturer as a supply chain risk, the product was not altered after the fact.

Of course, there _is_ a difference in "It could do that, but it shouldn't" and "It cannot do that". But it is not that large. That's why I don't see it as that clear cut.

It is not the textbook definition, because what Anthropic is doing is not sabotage, malicious, or subversive. Those are the key words in the definition. They are just refusing to add a feature to the military's specification. So their bid falls short of requirements.

just because someone copied one sentence from some online reference it doesn't mean that the court used it for arguing their decision.

https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2026/09/26-104...

> Whatever paradigmatic examples individual members of Congress may have had in mind, the statutory definition is not limited to “adversar[ies],” 10 U.S.C. § 3252(d)(4), and instead covers “any person,”

> They are just refusing to add a feature to the military's specification.

That fails to accord with the claim:

The pen example makes sense if the intermediary were to ship the pen as part of the final product but not if the pen is simply used to draft designs of the final product. It seems that this designation would prohibit using the pen anywhere in the process which doesn't really make sense.

> so as to surveil

How does Android and iPhone meet the grade given apps have pretty consistently leaked locations, base layouts etc?

Laws are only half the picture. Enforcement is an additional aspect. And yes it is extremely prone to corruption.

apps, not the actual devices by the supplier

Who is the adversary in this case?

the courts interpret the statute, we have to read their argument where they explain why they think that's not the right definition to focus on. (the "adversary" is in section 3252, but they say that independently from that section 4713 allows determination of exigency.)

https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2026/09/26-104... see page 30

Anthropic

"risk that an adversary may" any of them.

China, Russia, Iran, come to mind.

Here on planet Earth, what happened is that Anthropic imposed licensing terms. The DoD is free to reject those terms. But that is not evidence that Anthropic is planning to harm the US military by sabotaging its products. There is no evidence that Anthropic changed, or planned to change, the design of its system to work against the US military following its dispute with the DoD. Zip zero nada. Never happened. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

>To add onto what another commenter said, the pen analogy would be more like the manufacturer designing pens that stopped working when used to sign strike orders they disagreed with.

The pen analogy would be more like the manufacturer selling pens that work just fine under all circumstances but that the military starts using in hand-to-hand combat.

While amusing on the surface, let's substitute an ink-jet printer for the pen, and have a malicious party inject code as a print driver update, or maybe re-programs that chip in the ink cartridge, and the ink cartridge refuses to function on certain print jobs. Maybe it will only allow the words "WE SURRENDER" be printed as part of the message.

That's not at all what this is. Anthropic was very clear up-front what they would and wouldn't allow. They were not going to "subvert" anything. "Degrade function" in this context means that there is a risk that ongoing changes to the covered system will cause problems for the government. That wouldn't have been the case here; it would have been clear from the start what the military would and wouldn't be allowed to do with it, and that wouldn't change.

??? What are you talking about. Anthropic isn't an adversary and they're not required to sell for purposes they don't want to. It's not sabotage and it's not malicious.

This is a designation reserved for terrorists and the link.

If you're preventing the military from doing some action because you disagree with it, that makes you an adversary.

Actively handicapping a product that's otherwise capable qualifies.

that section is not important (the court says so, read page 30 https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2026/09/26-104... ) section 4713 is ("determination of exigency" regarding procurement decisions)

I think you're confused. When the White House decided to stop having federal agencies buy paper straws [1], they didn't designate paper straws a supply chain risk, they just stopped buying them. The term has a very specific meaning which would not apply in the pen scenario.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/endi...

It's not a great analagy; it's more like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike orders, who then only ships pens with cameras and solenoids so that the point stays retracted until the camera verifies that the paper doesn't include a drone strike orders.

And that would be absolutely fine for a pen manufacturer to do. It would make them unsuitable for meeting the requirements for a government contract as a pen supplier for signing orders, but would not make them a supply-chain risk.

Same goes for Anthropic: they would only consider offering a version of their product for military use that had certain restrictions. The government is free to accept that version or reject it. Rejecting it and designating Anthropic a supply-chain risk is just political intimidation and retribution for not playing ball.

i am not sure even this covers it.

it would be like the pen manufacturer who ships pens with an automatic point retractor, AND a video livestream to the manufacturer from the pen AND remote control of the point retractor.

anthropic and contractors monitor the livestream remotely to make sure the pen is not signing drone strike orders and may choose to activate the retractor.

“the military said no and therefore doesn't want anthropic used anywhere in their supply line”

It’s clearly a punitive measure and has nothing to do with national security.

If a supplier uses Anthropic to develop a product, how does that pose a risk to the DoD or national security? The DoD can specify that a third party system can’t rely on Anthropic for DoD use without designating the company a supply risk. It was very clear that the administration was punishing the company for saying “no”.

Anthropic took the position that our military’s decision making power should be subordinate to Anthropic’s constraints.

Any dependency on a company that thinks they have that moral authority and has the technical means to enforce it is absolutely a risk to the supply chain.

If you want to blame someone or something for this, we should start with Dario and “effective altruism”.

> Anthropic took the position that our military’s decision making power should be subordinate to Anthropic’s constraints.

Not at all. They want their product kept out of specific decisions because it's not capable.

They're offering a service, with contractual limitations that the Pentagon agreed to.

It doesn't seem any different to me than Dominos pizza offering to deliver pizzas to the Pentagon but not to the strait of Hormuz. If that somehow makes the military subordinate to Dominos Pizza, just because Dominos is able to dictate the terms of their own delivery service, then sure, ban anyone in the military supply chain from being able to order pizzas. It would make the same amount of sense.

But why can’t the military just not use Anthropic? Why can’t the DoD say “ok we’re going with a different vendor”? Even if you find Anthropic’s stance distasteful, why support taking punitive action on Anthropic?

Supply chain risk is a technical definition not a vibes based one.

And companies absolutely have the right to dictate terms. The idea that the DoD has the unilateral authority to do whatever it wants is literal textbook fascism. It's never been the law in the US and it should not be now.

Anthropic did not change the terms. Those were the terms the US Government signed. It was not secret, it was explicit identified and accepted as a term.

The analogy would be: “A customer agreed to a contract, and after running into a clause of the contract they no longer wanted to follow…canceled the contract unilaterally…which also violated the contract.”

And then declared the other side a supply chain risk, claiming it is a potential vector for a national adversary to break in and cause unwanted bad things to happen unrelated to this contract.

It seems like absurdly bad faith starting at breaking the contract (over "you have to follow the law", no less!) and then to retaliate after that with trying to destroy the company's reputation and ability to do business. The boot licking going on here justifying the government operating in bad faith is both disappointing and short sighted. I didn't think the leopards would eat MY face!

And then another company got the contract, claiming they got all the conditions (and more!) that the original contractor was sour about.

I don't know how anyone can look at the situation and see anything but an abuse of power. The government could have just as easily contacted with another provider. This whole thing is vindictive

I think the better analogy is an insane nuclear power plant manager deciding it wants to buy pens to use as neutron-flux regulator rods — because after all, a pen is functionally a pencil and a pencil is made of graphite.

Then the pen manufacturer hears about this and says “Our pens are not made of graphite and are not suitable to be used in nuclear reactors”, to which the reactor owner says “it’s fine, they fit in the graphite rod holes, and we’re just using until the next generation of pens come out which will do an even better job”, and then the pen manufacturer says “I’m not going to sell you any pens until you agree that they will be used only writing.”

The previous power plant manager had, of course, already signed a contract agreeing to those terms; the power plant is subsequently under new management and upset about being bound by this contract, so they designate that none of their suppliers of parts and fuel are allowed to have any commercial dealings with the pen manufacturer or use these pens for any purpose, even writing.

> The previous power plant manager had, of course, already signed a contract agreeing to those terms

It's even more perplexing in this case though, because the original DoD contract was signed in July 2025. It was the same "plant manager" just arbitrarily changing their mind in the middle of the contract they signed.

And why would the manager ban the manufacturers pens even for writing, except out of spite to punish the manufacturer? And coming back to the real case, is the supply chain risk designation supposed to be a punishment or only there to actually protect the supply chain?

That's not accurate. DOD suppliers weren't banned from having "any commercial dealings" with Anthropic. They were banned from using Anthropic for their work with the DOD.

That analogy still makes this sound like a textbook designation. In that situation the pen manufacturer is expected to sell pens without a theory of what will happen next. The person who buys a pen might use it to kill someone or commit horrific legal/moral crimes and that has nothing at all to do with the pen manufacturer.

I can see how I might reasonably refuse to deal with that pen manufacturer. The pen manufacturer is unreasonably pushy and they're going to be massive trouble to deal with because they're all up in my business in a paranoid way and disrupting my use of their product. Companies have made my never-again list for far smaller slights.

Where’s my atomic bomb sold at Walmart?

This isn't like using pens in a nuclear plant. AI obviously has tremendous military applications. And it's completely unsurprising that the U.S. military--whose entire doctrine for the last century has been about having the most advanced technology--demands to use frontier models without non-military people imposing restrictions.

Have you seen the movie Oppenheimer? The U.S. military did not care about the moral opinions of the nuclear scientists--they were going to get nukes first. This is like Truman telling off Oppenheimer for being upset after the U.S. used the bomb: https://www.biography.com/political-figures/a44361438/why-ha... ("Blood on his hands; damn it, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it,” Truman said.... He called Oppenheimer a “cry-baby scientist” and said, “I don’t want to see that son of a b–– in this office ever again.”).

> AI obviously has tremendous military applications.

Yeah, but also we can be reasonably confident they're not good enough for many of them yet:

What would be the military equivalent of all the things on https://www.felonybench.com/ ?

Machine learning needs a lot of examples to get good. Wars and wargames (including digital ones with unbounded self-play time) and all the textbooks together will at best, on the basis of what we see in other fields, get the equivalent of a new officer fresh out of training… and then, given current observed agentic AI behaviour, "follow orders" rather than "follow lawful orders".

Oppenheimer was the guy who was pushing that opinion just as much as the military folks. In the case of AI, my understanding is that Amodei is not trying to beat the enemy to it.

What I don't understand is why the U.S. military is turning to a for-profit corporation when they could fund and pursue the development themselves. Why are they trying to "outsource" it to industry?

JAVA TECHNOLOGY IS NOT FAULT TOLERANT AND IS NOT DESIGNED, MANUFACTURED, OR INTENDED FOR USE OR RESALE AS ONLINE CONTROL EQUIPMENT IN HAZARDOUS ENVIRONMENTS REQUIRING FAIL-SAFE PERFORMANCE, SUCH AS IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, DIRECT LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES, OR WEAPONS SYSTEMS, IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF JAVA TECHNOLOGY COULD LEAD DIRECTLY TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.

OP makes a category error already by ignoring the part where the US military/government wants to commit crimes (against humanity and whatnot) and pretends, questioning that would be a crime.

You here make another one by pretending, AI was just some random tool, like a screwdriver or a programming language.

AI can make decisions autonomously that would otherwise require a human. Like selecting people to be murdered by drone strike based on arbitrary criteria. A programming language by itself, JAVA, cannot do that.

That doesn't say you can't do them, though - they just don't take responsibility if doing so fails because of Java somehow.

Basically, it voids the warranty, which you don't really have with Java anyway.

That is an analogy between one thing and another thing, but the topic of this thread is the designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk, which is not involved in your analogy. It is traditional that comments refer to the topic of discussion in some way.

For example, one might extend your analogy to "The nuclear power plant then declares that it will not buy the pens after all, and the pen manufacturer (who had banned them as a customer) sues them to force them to buy the pens after all."

Nobody is suing to force the DoD to buy anything, so maybe you shouldn't be accusing others of failing to refer to the topic of discussion.

This is the most accurate parallel as far as I can tell. I've not seen any evidence that Anthropic deliberately built automated systems or escape hatches that literally prevent the US Government from using Claude to do these things. Other than the basic AI Safety mechanisms in place for everyone/general use. It's almost the reverse, where they explicitly don't want to strip away guardrails that say things like "don't kill people".

The intent and framing matters a lot here. Refusal to remove safety features is a LOT different than deliberately building mechanisms to sabotage would-be operations.

It doesn't seem like you understand what a supply chain risk designation is for.

It's to ensure that companies that the DoW relies on don't build on top of a product that isn't fit for DoW work.

You seem to be agreeing with this designation in a way. The DoW essentially said "Pen company won't let us use their pens as neutron-flux regulator rods, so anyone building power plants for us isn't allowed to use these pens as neutron-flux regulator rods".

What is the problem you have with that?

> This is like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike order

I am pretty receptive to the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument, but we are taking a big leap from pen to llms/artificial intelligence. I am sympathetic to some of your other points, but I simply must reject this analogy.

"the government wants to use our tool to murder people", and declaring that company that says "no" into a "supply chain risk" is absolutely retaliatory and an attempt by the government to influence the behavior of the company.

The moral and ethical scale of the issue makes this far different than someone buying a pen.

> "the government wants to use our tool to murder people", and declaring that company that says "no" into a "supply chain risk" is absolutely retaliatory and an attempt by the government to influence the behavior of the company.

If Lockheed could brick its planes if the US planned to use them for military action it disagreed with (and showed some indication they couldn't be trusted not to do it), would they be a supply chain risk?

It is not the role of a defense contractors to have oversight and control power over the military they're supplying.

Ridiculous hypothetical for analogy purposes, but, imagine if Anthropic had developed a new type of rifle that the military was considering using, which had a black-box AI system that could prevent the trigger being pulled when aimed at certain targets. The military says, ok that's cool, as long as we can be in control of that decision-making process. Anthropic says, no, we know better than you and better than the law what kind of targets should and should not be shot with our rifles. The military would then respond “lol, lmao even” and then deem them to be a supply chain risk and adopt another rifle instead.

Or they could just not buy the product in the first place. The supply chain risk part is pure retribution.

No, they would simply not buy it.

That’s not even the end of the story. Anthropic has sued. They really want to sell their rifles to the government and retain control.

You’re just describing the exact situation we’re in but substituting a drone for a rifle. If the government is mad they should just partner with a contractor who is less concerned about this, which lo-and-behold they did it’s a company called OpenAI.

Anthropic isn’t a supply chain risk since they easy found someone else

Non-sense. Pentagon has many many uses of AI besides autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, which Anthropic doesn't restrict. ie: intelligence analysis, target selection, payroll, inventory, research, supply chain and logistics, medical, bureaucracy, ...

Right but the military wants to be able to use a tool they are paying for in all cases, not just ones the manufacturer thinks they should.

If I sold steel to the Pentagon but then tried to say they they couldn't use it for ships and tanks but they are free to use for warehouses they would react the same way as they are doing now.

Edit add: What is targeting? What is surveillance?

If someone in the intelligence analysis department uses AI to generate a report, then someone else uses that report for targeting did they just break the terms? Where is that line?

Much easier for the Pentagon to say no.

Your "but then" is off-base. This is selling steel for the express purpose of nuclear reactors, with a contractual clause against its use in tanks, and the US government deciding that it doesn't feel like abiding by the rules in the contract.

> If I sold steel to the Pentagon but then tried to say they they couldn't use it for ships and tanks but they are free to use for warehouses they would react the same way as they are doing now.

They sure as hell shouldn't! Selling steel for any use except ships and tanks is a little odd but it's not a risk.

(I'm ignoring the "but then" because this was about future sales not previous ones.)

It's funny, I buy some software and the license says "for student and non-commercial use only", which lets me get it for $50 instead of the $5000 that an enterprise would pay. But I can just ignore that clause or declare them a supply-chain risk if they try to hold me to it, because now that they've taken my $50, who are they to dictate how I use it? I can do whatever I want, not just what the vendor thinks I should, right? A contact is just paper, right?

We cannot subordinate our military’s decision making power — in any arena — to a private company.

Our military must also not be dependent on a private company that believes it has the moral prerogative to control our military’s decisions, and would have the technical capability to do so.

Maybe the military should just seize the technology and nationalize the company then? Because clearly, paying a private party voluntarily entering into a contract on mutually-agreed upon terms is now a polite fiction that can be done away with.

The military is bound by contract, just like any other government agency. They entered into a contract, with these clauses well-known. This was OK because they have all the same problems every other organization uses AI for.

They could’ve just negotiate a new contract with OpenAI, without banning it from every government agency. But I’m sure that would’ve triggered some kind of extra clause and cost money…

Your entire statement lacks any type of fact.

This is ridiculous. Anthropic should be free to say the terms for using their service. It doesn't "subordinate" the military, and the military is far from some infallible, unquestionable force here.

If the military wants to use AI to autonomously kill people, they can - Anthropic is not stopping them - thy just can't with Anthropic's services.

The government retaliating by then claiming that any use of Anthropic is risk is an obvious farce. How would Anthropic be any less of a risk if they let Claude autonomously kill people?

The complete failure of any of these Anthropic cheerleaders (to the extent that they are not AI generate comments posted by bots) to understand basic Constitutional principles of Rule of Law and Separation of Powers is mind blowing.

Their argument, in effect, is that we should throw out the entire Constitutional order and make Dario Amodei dictator of the world. The psychopathic hubris is laughable.

No entity should have a right to dictate whether your private company does business with someone or not. The military can pound sand if they don't like your contract terms. That is if you believe in democracy and capitalism. If you don't, then it's not a problem to you.

Wouldn't that make any product with a licensing agreement a supply chain risk?

No, of course not, because life isn't black and white. Just those with licensing agreements that conflict with the militaries mission, where the product could be manipulated to hinder the mission. Most manufacturers would jump at the chance to rewrite their licensing agreements specifically for the military just to get a government contract.

This was not manipulated to hinder the mission. Every account of this indicates it was clearly spelled out. They could not use it for mass surveillance or for targeting. The lawyers at the DOD did not miss this. They agreed to the terms, because they had no intent to use it for such purpose purposes.

This is like the change order from hell.

Nothing was stopping the DOD from just entering into a new contract with OpenAI…

But if they don’t jump at the chance to retroactively rewrite the already-signed license, you’re OK with designating them a supply-chain risk?

That’s going to make it rather risky for anyone to sign licenses with the DoD. In fact, it renders the licenses pointless since you just have to do anything the licensee says.

I mean typically the outcome of civil suits is black and white (at least on a per-claim basis).

So Amazon and Microsoft don't enforce cloud licensing agreements with the USG? If the government wants to add 3,000 Windows users to support their mission Microsoft is shit out of luck in getting paid for them?

> Anthropic wanted to have rules on how the military used AI

No, they want to have rules on how the military used Anthropic AI.

Military would still be free to use OpenAI for the nasty stuff

Yes, in fact the military has a system in place to make sure that they only that they only use alternate suppliers and on Anthropic AI, They do this by placing a designation on Anthropic AI that it is a risk to the supply chain, which forces purchasers to use other suppliers.

I don't think this is how preferred suppliers have typically worked through the supply chain risk considering the US has definitely had preferred suppliers before and has not historically used this against a US company that was not on the list and the power of such a designation extends far past the military into all parts of the government. I'm pretty sure this has more traditionally been relegated to simple requirements or specifications.

The reason it appears corrupt is that OpenAI has the exact same restrictions (https://openai.com/index/our-agreement-with-the-department-o...) but was not declared a supply chain risk. If two vendors have the same restrictions and they only designate one, then the designation must be arbitrary and/or capricious.

Edit: I was wrong, the statement I linked is extremely dishonest and I was misled. The contract language lower down makes it clear that there are no "red lines", and OpenAI products can in fact be used for mass domestic surveillance, autonomous weapons, and social credit systems as long as they are considered legal.

>OpenAI has the exact same restrictions

No it doesn't. Specifically OpenAI had a "all lawful purposes" clause (which plausibly includes the existing mass surveillance apparatus), but Anthropic did not.

You're right, what an incredibly dishonest statement. The actual contract language in there makes it clear that there are no restrictions. My bad.

Were they the same restrictions though?

OpenAI just said no surveillance of U.S. persons.

Anthropic could have gone further; I think it's likely they did.

There are three restrictions:

> No use of OpenAI technology for mass domestic surveillance.

> No use of OpenAI technology to direct autonomous weapons systems.

> No use of OpenAI technology for high-stakes automated decisions (e.g. systems such as “social credit”).

These are stronger than Anthropic's restrictions (https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war), as OpenAI says themselves: "We think our agreement has more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic’s. [...] Based on what we know, we believe our contract provides better guarantees and more responsible safeguards than earlier agreements, including Anthropic’s original contract."

Edit: I was wrong, see my original comment. Sorry.

I thought the difference is that clearly written rules or SLAs are acceptable and can even be negotiated before signing a contract, but having a person, in this case Amodei himself, manually approve DOJ's usage case by case with his own moral judgement after a contract is signed is not okay.

No one wanted case-by-case veto ability at Anthropic. The red lines were made clear ahead of time: No use of Anthropic models for autonomous weapons (Skynet) or mass-domestic surveillance, negotiated in the agreement.

OpenAI, xAI, and Google happily agreed to DoW contracts which allow both of those use cases.

Do you think OpenAI's terms for the DoD are published on a website? Pretty sure when Anthropic got zapped, OpenAI sent DoD a memo 500ms later saying they wouldn't restrict use.

Look at it pragmatically. What does the DoD use every single procurement for? Hint: military use.

I think this was discussed ad nauseum last time so I am wondering if somehow this has changed but the biggest part of the issue last time was the retaliation. You seem to suggest that this was due to the government not wanting restrictions on their actions. I feel this severely downplays how unusual this designation is considering, like Anthropic says, this has not been applied to domestic companies.

Why couldn't excluding Anthropic be done a different mechanism than a supply chain risk. Why wouldn't this be a standard part of an agreement or a request and simply refuse to renew or cancel a contract rather than being designated a supply chain risk. If some third party contractor for an unrelated non military reason wanted to use Claude as part of their process, it seems perfectly allowable.

If this was a remotely standard way of operation, why did a fair amount of corporate America sign briefs concerned with the retaliatory aspect.

Parts of the action seemed wholly retaliatory as well since Pentagon officials certainly used it as a threat. Why can't a US company have views contrary to the policies of the US government? Certainly the US government is free to not do business with them, but this designation affects everybody doing any kind of indirect business with the US government which is a rather long chain. If this becomes a legitimate mechanism, how might we distinguish caring about a secure supply chain and simply wiping out a company that disagreed with a pro war attitude? If a machining shop had a policy against manufacturing weapons at all, could they be blocked from making server racks for Microsoft or perhaps light fixtures for the Department of Labor? There are plenty of areas that are, again, non military? I don't think it's credible to claim that Anthropic will deliberately sabotage operations.

>Anthropic opposing the US government

Is it not possible that this would change the risk profile of depending on them. It makes sense to work with people who support you than oppose you for things which are critical.

- Having principles and sticking to them is not opposing.

- Just because you don't do everything someone wants you to do does not make you a supply chain risk.

Who runs the government changes every 2 to 4 years… are you suggesting we completely swap every vendor in the US government to align with whatever political party is in office?

There’s nothing indicating Anthropic was not keeping their end of the contract. If they had, there would have been other recourse.

> You can agree with the rules anthropic wanted, but having rules set by a private company at all that apply to the military does seem fair for the military to object to.

Oh the hypocrisy and irony. This coming from a country whose military sets rules on other countries' armed forces how weapons systems bought from US can be used.[ß] By this standard US itself should be designated as a supply chain risk for everyone else.

ß: for a very long time in the Ukraine "conflict", US refused to allow their gear from being used to attack targets outside of Ukraine's borders.

> This is like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike orders, now the military needs to have a special box of pens that don't have stipulations attached.

It's pretty common for software licenses to state that it's prohibited from being used in medical devices, life support systems, nuclear facilities, etc. Will software with those licenses also be designated supply-chain risks?

A much closer analogy than the pen one is a SAAS company having an EULA. As annoying as EULAs are I don’t think it counts as being malicious or subversive if you are very open and clear with your prospective customers what that EULA contains?

Anthropic's red lines were 'no fully autonomous AI kill chains' and 'no domestic mass surveillance'. Those are clearly not national-security or DoD functions in the first place, so why would they be in any way objectionable?

Do you think a private company should be able to accumulate enough wealth and power to dictate policy to the US federal government?

I think a private company of any size should be able to offer its products on whatever terms they choose. If the military doesn't like those terms, they're free to do business elsewhere.

You mean like pharmaceutical companies refusing to supply chemicals for lethal injection?

There are already several private companies that have this, eg. Apple has specific exemptions from tariffs on smartphones, computers, and semiconductors that they got by paying off Trump and promising to make their iPhone glass in Kentucky:

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/tariff-exemptions-are-bi...

https://www.warren.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/media/doc/l...

The correct mental model for the U.S. federal government right now is not an omnipotent democratic overseer for economic activity, but rather as just one firm that negotiates directly with other major firms for legitimization and legal protection. Their power is likely to decline further, as is the value of "legitimization", as technological developments erode the military's monopoly on physical force. Interesting times ahead - historically tech transitions like this lead to a splintering of state legitimacy and then a reorganization under new forms of governance.

Somebody clearly has to

Its not dictating policy. Any company of any size should be able to set any contract they want with the government or any other party.

The DoD is free not to sign contracts. Having them be able to get a company blacklisted from a whole sector just because they couldn't agree on terms with that company is obviously very different than that.

The idea that "fair for the military to object to" implies "fair for the military to ban from their supply chain in any capacity no matter how unrelated the use" is so outlandish that it's never been done before (to a US company), and I think we can be confident that the DoD has frequently objected to would-be contractors' terms.

The claim that it being done for the first time - by a Secretary of Defense denounced the politics of the company in the same text where he announced the designation - isn't "political", is something I have a hard time believing a functioning adult who isn't employed defending the government in court could adopt.

But hey, maybe in some language this is a "textbook" official statement with no "politics":

  Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission - a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.

No, the DOD has super specific acquisition rulesets that don't apply outside the DOD umbrella. Limiting acquisition or refusing sales can be done without being flagged a risk. FedRAMP levels accomplish this without the political intrigue and the unnecessary defense of this action not being political.

In other words: the same outcome could easily be accomplished without being punitive to Anthropic.

The pen analogy doesn't help. Anthropic and similar services will restrict what you can use them for, and they'll change those rules at will. DoD understandably doesn't trust that if Anthropic is saying themselves they don't want their AI to be used for autonomous weapons.

> The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized and necessary

I.e. Anthrophic cannot be trusted to honour a contract.

Who'd have guessed?

In almost any case I am inclined to trust entity not trump or trumps government. So is true in this case, where they pissed their pants at anthropic simply making a proposal and decided to use overwhelming government force against it. I will leave you to decide who you consider more trustworthy, Trump or Anthropic.

I didn't understand what you said or your analogy, sorry maybe I'm stupid. Would you be able to explain this differently? Maybe something implied was omitted and I didn't follow that.

It's not you, the analogy they used was wrong, idiotic, and unnecessary.

This would be like Boeing refusing to let the DoD fly a military 737 at over 800MPH, and they designate them a supply chain risk because they really really want to make the plane go past 800MPH.

Being on the offensive cyber security whitelist for Mythos doesn't stop you from getting constant rejections. I don't know how you screw up something as simple as a whitelist.

I don't get it, did the US government and military stop using Claude? I thought they were using it to choose objectives to bomb?

To your first question, yes. To your second question, no. They used Grok for that, and it picked out a school to target.

> To your first question, yes

No they didn't. They are still using Claude in places despite the fact that the 180 days limit for the transition has expired. This surfaced from the proceedings of the appeal itself, as well as from leaked source. A memo from the DoD authorises use of Claude past the 180 days term for reasons of national security (the rare case where national security is provided by a supply chain risk!)

It would be pretty surprising to allow a private company to control the military's use in realtime.

i think this is more like the pen maker doesnt want the military top brass calling their pen sales guy to make the kill/no kill decisions while using the pen to sign drone strike orders.

similarly the pen owner doesnt want to make a variation where the pen also doubles as a knife

Nothing can stand in the way of America's forever wars, genocide, and automated killing, including performative objections by a prominent tech company.

I suppose we're supposed to be satisfied that the letter of the law supports this steamroller? Because that's what matters?

The legal apparatus is one of the tools the death machine uses to get what it wants.

Completely agree.

And I further dislike Anthropic for creating 2 situations in 2 weeks that are giving this admin an obvious opportunity to be right. The other one is David Sacks responding to the “Pace the Frontier” crap. These were the table tennis equivalent of lobs for the admin.

Also worth noting that no one knows what kind of task would get a rejection with Anthropic’s models. The documentation is near-non-existent with the air of “security,” rules change daily, the harness is buggy, the clients are buggy, and very likely the backend gating and safety mechanisms are buggy. Even if the DOD assumed the best of intentions to comply, the reliability isn’t there.

What military would buy guns that sometimes stop working, and not necessarily for reasons anyone understands, and still be taken seriously?

Also Claude clearly had no issues identifying a school that has been a school for over 10 years as a military target. Why would the military buy tech that would make them more likely to commit war crimes?

A better analogy would be an explosives manufacturer saying that it is okay to use their explosives on military targets, but not civilian targets. Comparing AI to pens trivialises its potential impact.

Incidentally the second stipulation, the restriction on domestic surveillance, sounds like direct recognition of the role IBM played in the Holocaust. Of course, the better course of action would be to deny the military access to their technology. But that's not going to happen because there is so much money on the table.

Using Claude for working on the refrigerators at the commissary is not a supply chain risk. You're just making stuff up.

You could use the same logic to defend the military declaring that Anthropic is full of pedophiles and therefore they cannot use their products as it would be contributing to pedophilia.

Anthropic offered a contract, with certain conditions, as do all contracts everywhere; that's their purpose. The military did not want to agree to those conditions. If they had stopped there, and refused to sign the contract, all would be good. (It's actually worse, they did sign such a contract, and then decided they wanted the contract to say something different than it actually did. "Pray I don't alter it any further.")

> >The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized [emphasis mine]

That is speculation, and you can't call it a "textbook designation" without discussing whether there's a basis for that "reasonable fear". Again, that argument also works for declaring you have a reasonable fear that giving money to Anthropic will support pedophilia. We do not know the specifics, but I at least have heard of zero evidence that Anthropic would sabotage something they signed a legal contract for, and yet I have an abundance of evidence that this administration will use whatever contortions are necessary to pressure and punish those who interfere with it getting what it wants. It all hinges on the word "reasonable", and based on the evidence that is public, this specific fear seems more ridiculous than reasonable to me.

If the government somehow had a way to force Anthropic to sign a contract that it did not want to sign, then this fear might become more reasonable. The twist is that this supply chain risk designation is exactly that. If Anthropic now capitulated, the accusation of supply chain risk (eg from Anthropic employees acting alone) would be justified. So the only way Anthropic can reasonably be considered a supply chain risk is because it is accused of being a supply chain risk.

This is a textbook example, yes, but it's a textbook example of corruption and judicial capture.

> Though they'd probably put the DoD on the cybersecurity whitelist today, the very idea of the claude whitelists for certain functionality already exists and is being used by them today.

And if they signed a contract permitting fully autonomous killbots, then using the whitelist mechanism would be a contract violation. I have some degree of faith that we'd know if such a contract were signed, because half the staff would quit. (As opposed to half the Google staff quitting after signing such a contract, which has been proven to be an incorrect expectation -- such a contract was signed, and I've heard of exactly one person quitting over it. There may be more, I don't know.)

except it's also stipulating that the paper supplier upon which the orders are signed also cant use anthropic. or the table maker. even though the AI helping make sleeker paper and tables has nothing to do with deciding what to bomb (analogy breaking down lol)

and trump admin originally went WAY further.

they originally said the pen, paper, table etc suppliers cant use anthropic even for products and subsidiaries that have nothing to do with their govt work; far beyond the supply chain of the pen (bomb). Mega Corp Pepsi Co Taco Bell Inc. LLC -> Staples > Pen Co. Sure pen co might be reasonabale. But telling taco bell they cant have claude help expand the baja-blast-radius is way too far. that would be just like secondary sanctions.

iirc there are 2 court cases. one ruled the original order was too broad and i think that still stands? so at least it's narrowed slightly to just the immediate supply chain?

but ianal

i agree. by nature a lease is more risky than the military having its own model.

however anthropic also believes it is some kind of entity unto itself so it is not at all reliable.

> but it actually seems like a textbook designation

How can it be a textbook designation when designating a US company as a supply chain risk is unprecedented? So many actions under the Trump administration are unprecedented it starts to feel like the norm.

No other administration (Republican or Democrat) would do this. The DoD didn’t have a problem using Anthropic’s models during the raid on Venezuela and early on in the war with Iran.

Anthropic says to the former Fox News host it doesn’t want its models used for domestic surveillance or in kill situations without a human in the loop; all of a sudden they're a supply chain risk?

Seems obviously political.

>Anthropic says to the former Fox News host it doesn’t want its models used for domestic surveillance...

Lol, do as we say not as we do!

>In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a “pre-crime” approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen.

https://prospect.org/2026/09/09/anthropic-artificial-intelli...

This is political. Everything is political at this scale.

* How much money did Anthropic and its associates donate to the Biden campaign and associated entities? * How much money was spent on lobbying by Anthropic and associated entities? * How many Biden officials were hired by Anthropic after they left office? * How exactly did Anthropic get exclusive no-bid contracts to be the Federal Government's sole AI provider for classified systems?

And with this corrupt influence, and the money that it earned them, Anthropic has attempted to:

* Stoke public fear and panic about AI * Stoke conflict with China * Eliminate domestic competition * Suppress international competition * Degrade their models in order to limit their ability to create competitive products * Train their models on their customer's proprietary data in order to steal their intellectual property

Anthropic played a game and they lost. They can wrap that up in whatever sanctimonious moralizing clap-trap they want, but nobody believes a word they say, or will ever trust them, so they might as well be talking to the wind.

OpenAI may be playing the same game but at least they have the intelligence and humility to read the room, recognize a failed strategy, and adapt.

Who wants to buy intelligence from people who are stupid enough to publicly try to dictate terms to the US Military? Complete and utter brand destruction for everyone involved.

It can be a textbook designation and a capricious punishment at the same time. It's almost comical, to suggest that anything about this decision was reasonable. Makes me long for the days of n-gate.com.

Antropic: "We don't want our AIs to be used by the Army to do yucky Army things!"

Army: "OK, we will make sure not to use your AIs"

Antropic: "How dare you! We are suing! We intended for you to keep using it but do only what we want!"

Army: "..."

They weren't against military use of their AI. They were against using it to kill American citizens without oversight or mass surveil Americans.

> They were against using it to kill American citizens

No, they were against using it to kill people without oversight. I hope nobody thinks that there's a difference between murdering American citizens and murdering people.

...I suggest you read about what actually happened:

Anthropic: "We'll sell you access to our AI as long as you don't use it for war crimes or mass surveillance."

DoD: "Ok, deal."

...time passes...

DoD: "Wait, no, we want to be able to use it for war crimes too."

Anthropic: "Too late, you agreed already, and we won't sign a contract for that. You can keep using it for everything we agreed to."

DoD: "Change the terms or we will destroy your business."

Anthropic: "No."

DoD then signs contracts with OpenAI and Google that permit them to commit war crimes and mass surveillance as long as they get legal cover, and proceeds to apply as much leverage as it can to destroy Anthropic's business.

----

And for the record, Anthropic agreed to all "yucky Army things" usage that was an extension of past yucky Army things, they just did not agree to a new class of yucky Army things: namely, fully autonomous killbots. Even there, it was only "not yet, it's not ready". Your whole comment is a gross mischaracterization.

I quit using ChatGPT entirely over this incident, and that's not because I find Anthropic's position to be saintly. They agreed to a contract where the DoD could and in practice is using their AI for committing war crimes.

The problem here - as you probably very well know but pretend not to - that "war crimes" is a very poorly defined term that is subject to many interpretations and subjective political and partisan opinions. Antropic wanted them to be the last word in every decision, and DOD could not allow that, because they are governmental agency, which is controlled by US government, not by Antropic. Nobody is destroying anybody's business - pretending that Anthropic could never find any users for their AI outside DOD is plain silly.

US Society has mechanisms for preventing and investigating war crimes. They may not be perfect, and you may not be happy about how they are working, but I doubt that "give control over it to some random guy that makes AI models" is an adequate solution for that. If Antropic decided the risk of DOD circumventing those mechanisms is too high for them to tolerate - they have full freedom not to sell to DOD. Which they used.

> I quit using ChatGPT entirely over this incident

And this is supposed to be an argument because....?

> They agreed to a contract where the DoD could and in practice is using their AI for committing war crimes.

You have a very vivid imagination. Not trying to use it to state things that could be misinterpreted as statements of fact would be nice. Not that I am new on the internet, so I know it's not going to happen.

They didn't want their tech to be used to, I don't know, blow up a school with 120 children. But did want to allow other kinds of usage. Is that so weird?

Get rid of your high horse. Nobody wants to blow up a school with 120 children. The question is who is in control and making the decisions. Antropic wanted to be in control and make the decisions for the DOD. DOD refused. It's not so weird at all.

> textbook designation.

Hardly. I invite you to [read the opinion][1], particularly the great pains the majority spends on wrangling the definition of the word "manipulate."

Basically, [FASCSA][2] says to denote a company is a "supply chain risk," the govt has to meet the law's rigorous definition of what a "significant" risk actually is. That definition contains a catch-all "or otherwise manipulate the function" of the thing at hand (in this case, Claude) at the very end.

The govt's whole argument is "Well Anthropic has admitted that it can technically "manipulate" the response, therefore its a significant risk, therefore we designate it as such."

The dissent gives an analogy:

> A library might post a sign saying, “Do not shout, loudly talk on the phone, play music, or otherwise disturb others.” The common understanding would be that the rule bans bringing a boom-box into the reading room with the volume turned on high but not listening to music with headphones set at a modest sound level—even though both constitute “playing music.”

It is as if the govt argued "ah ah, Anthropic played music on their headphones, they broke the rules! We therefore have the authority to ban them" and the majority insanely agrees. It is clear to anyone with basic reading comprehension that the "manipulate" clause is supposed to continue the idea of malicious or subversive manipulation that the whole section entails. The hand-waving the majority uses gives the whole game away.

[1]: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=000001a0-d91e-d276-aff6-f97f3...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECURE_Technology_Act

I wonder if this is going start being abused soon.

If I was Palantir or any other GOP aligned company, I would be completely against this. What's to stop a Democratic president from doing the same thing and destroying them?

Because the modern Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party. They haven't really had any hard hitting legislation nor legal regulation/rulings on corporations in easily the last 30 years.

I doubt that is going to change anytime soon. They are a private entity, so they can manage and change their primary system any way they want.

A few things I can remember them doing are net neutrality, banning non-compete agreements for employees, a DMCA exception for allowing 3rd party repairs to McDonald's ice cream machines, and blocking the Albertsons/Kroger merger.

> the modern Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party

I suspect this is changing. The DSA branch especially wants all contracts with Palantir eliminated.

"Because the modern Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party"

And Republicans did it because.... They're anticorporation?

> Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party. They haven't really had any hard hitting legislation nor legal regulation/rulings on corporations in easily the last 30 years.

Sarbanes-Oxley? Dodd-Frank? ACA? Now I'm sure you (like, every other living human) has a ton of nitpicks and criticism of bills like that. But they're real and they passed and they're largely-to-wholely partisan creations of the Democratic policy apparatus (SOX looked very bipartisan and was passed under Bush, but the actual bill was written mostly by democratic staffers).

I mean, fine, you'd like different regulation. But they're responsible for basically all the corporate regulation active in the US regime.

Bothsidesism is a very poor tool for this particular argument. Work with your allies, please.

Dodd-Frank? CFPB?

I thought the Democrats were the party of big government and regulations whereas the Republicans were for reducing regulations?

I would argue the democrats are more a process oriented party. They wouldn’t pull this shit because they care about process - so much so that they wouldn’t even consider half the stuff that’s going on now as it circumvents process.

You got that exactly backward. Modern republicans are the ones that get the most in corporate PAC money, at the high end it's like 60/40% split... the majority to the GOP. Also, the fact that modern republicans brought Citizens United and just earlier this year NRSC v. FEC.

You really can't make a valid case to say the dems are the corporate dominated party. ffs, they are the only ones even attempting to put common sense regulations on the financial industry, something Trump called "bad for business" when he undid antitrust legislature that got passed under Biden.

I’m worried why many big companies aren’t worried about when the shoe is on the other foot.

Because Democrats, being (at the moment, and relatively speaking) the party of government actually functioning according to laws, are extremely unlikely to do this in the other direction. The two sides are not the same. It is not possible to be the party aligned with institutions, rule of law, and predictability, while also using the power of government arbitrarily and vindictively. On the other hand, it's entirely possible to use the power of government arbitrarily when you're the party of greed and corruption. So "Republican-aligned companies" don't have to be nearly as worried, and otherwise-neutral companies will become Republican-aligned out of self-preservation, because one side is going to punish them for disobedience (legally or illegally) and the other side isn't.

I worry that they don't expect to leave power because they're acting like they will never be held accountable.

None of them really believe our economic or political systems will be recognizable by 2029. Everyone's playing for position in the short takeoff.

IMO, it's almost certainly being abused. I just assume that all US domestic communications are being recorded whenever possible.

Democrats don't control the courts.

Whose fault is that?

> What's to stop a Democratic president from doing the same thing and destroying them?

They probably will, and the comment section here on HN will overwhelmingly applaud it. Next question?

How would this destroy Anthropic, exactly?

Not just Anthropic, but practically speaking, the leading foundational model labs like Anthropic and OpenAI are burning through enormous amounts of money, and will need to pay that money back. If they are designated as supply chain risks, or controlled technologies, their ability to achieve that ROI is severely constrained.

They are not turning a profit, and aside from enterprise token billing, every other offering they have is a loss leader. In order to flip that around they need to drive down the cost of inference significantly, either through massive compute improvements, more efficient or lower cost models, and either one lowers the barrier to entry for local and/or private cloud inference for open models. The moat established by the expertise in model training is effectively dissolving as they approach recursive self improvement because any mechanism that prevents model distillation effectively reduces the quality and utility of the models, so each improved model makes their competitors better by default if they want to realize those gains.

The reason for the pivot to control and regulation seems to be more about erecting an artificial moat in their market, and having these technologies controlled or highlighted as supply chain risks will continue to drive investments in alternatives, especially in other countries where data sovereignty and domestic tech has become a priority given the last decade of the US dominated tech industry.

I don't think that AI is going to go away, but I think the future of AI in the next several years looks alot like massive overfunded foundational model providers collapsing, their employees launching dozens or hundreds of direct competitors, and the leading hyperscalers buying up datacenter capacity the way they bought up dark fiber 20 years ago.

Because if you classified as supply chain risk, ANYONE who does business with DoD/DoW cannot use your product in any capacity.

What's to stop indeed? Some of us in the tech industry want the dems to slice and dice every tech company into irrelevance. They've betrayed society and they should be rightfully punished in fun + creative ways.

The supreme court, I guess. What makes you think they would allow that as long as Trump cronies have the majority there?

the cold political war turned hot with the prosecution of Trump (he made it easy by being an idiot). there will be no considerations for retaliation now, both sides will be using whatever means they have available to damage each other.

also if you look at how the two factions separate from each other decade by decade (there used to be overlap, almost none now) it's obvious that there will be no reconciliation.

it's a musical chairs game at this point, whoever is in power when the democratic facade cracks will be able to seize power and transition into whatever single party state follows.

I think the blue team has been in a cold civil war since 2016. They can't come to terms with their progressive hegemony ending, but also can't pivot to a new politics because elections are too close to risk a mass preference cascade needed to revitalize the party.

I think the red team is only now starting to come to similar terms, and will increasingly do so as the blue team continues to maximally exercises power against their opponents instead of revitalize the tarnished reputation of instituions.

Around 2030, the US will need to spend 100% of it's tax revenue to service the debt, and California will need to a federal bailout or risk either default or wiping out their state pensions. I believe the coming financial disaster will likely be the catalyst that quiets the 'nothing ever happens' crowd, and both teams will need to reset their politics to the new world, distinctly different than the post-WW2 open society liberal consensus.

A similar phenomenon is happening in Europe.

The cold political war turned hot when Trump tried to overthrow the US government. I understand that this bizarre both sides framing is comforting to you for now, but it's just going to leave you even more alarmed when he tries again.

You mean the president than literally ran on "lock her up"? That's the victim here?

Stop trying to both sides this.

I don't think Palantir is concerned? Palantir is LLM agnostic and holds IL5, IL6, compliance with ICD 503, etc. Their entire platform is built around eliminating risk.

They are suggesting that a Democratic President could label Palantir a supply chain risk.

If:

1. The designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk is politically motivated

2. We collectively accept that is okay for the US President to bar all defense vendors and contractors from working with an American company for political reasons.

What defense related company(ies) would a Democratic President have political reasons to ban?

It has been reported that Palantir and its founder have a history of political contributions to the Republican party.

Instead of Republican presidents driving left leaning companies out of defense and Democratic presidents driving right leaning companies out of defense, it would be better if neither party used supply chain risk as a political weapon.

Can you clarify what a GOP aligned company is? Is that any company thats willing to do business with the U.S. government or any businesses thats willing to sell products in red states?

Maybe it's the companies that flank the US president at events in an attempt to gain favor? Or the companies that own private prisons that lobby for immoral policies on policing?

Oil and gas and the GOP are one and the same.

Dems still subsidize O&G but they have other constituents they need to pay lip service to.

Banking and finance own both parties.

I don't see a need to come up with a complete definition at this point. Let's start with cancelling all SpaceX and Palantir contracts and see how we're feeling; that may be enough to keep corporations in line.

I still don't fully understand what this was about. It sounds like the DoD said they wanted unrestricted access to Anthropic's models, Anthropic refused, so the Pentagon declared that they wouldn't use them at all.

Isn't this basically what Anthropic wanted?

As I understand it cane down to one point: Anthropic wanted the ability to review actions that would have an effect on human life.

Which sounds sensible on the surface, until you realize that all military organizations have extensive experience with that exact question, and have spent centuries refining their practices. Deferring that to a private company is actually a major regression and a concerning role to pass on to the public regardless.

FWIW I am not pro military, but it's a prominent part of human culture and not going away anytime soon. I do understand the nature of professions, however, and only one of these groups has made the interpretation of this question their specialization.

>As I understand it cane down to one point: Anthropic wanted the ability to review actions that would have an effect on human life.

This is not at all what happened. The existing contract that Anthropic had with the government had two red lines: No autonomous weapons (i.e., do not build Skynet with Claude), and no mass domestic surveillance.

Anthropic did not, and does not want, any case-by-case veto power over the US Military's use of their AI models. The red lines were negotiated ahead of time.

Militaries have a lot of experience, and an exceptionally poor track record.

I don’t remember the last war that didn’t have credible evidence of war crimes occurring. Were bombing civilian infrastructure in Iran, Iraq had Abu Ghraib among all the Collateral Damage stuff, the Highway of Death in the Gulf was probably a war crime, Vietnam had My Lai, WWII was the advent of carpet bombing civilian infrastructure. I can’t think of any for Korea, but I also know very little so that doesn’t say much.

We still haven’t charged anyone for the second strike on that fishing boat in South America, and I haven’t heard a single rationale for why that’s not a war crime other than “fog of war”.

The US doesn’t even really have a meaningful system for finding and prosecuting these, because we aren’t signatories for the ICC and have a bill saying we’ll invade if they charge one of our service members with a war crime. We aren’t basically the furthest thing from having any experience prosecuting war crimes. I can probably count on my fingers the number of cases we’ve tried. We rarely charge our own service members, and we usually kill foreign combatants rather than capture and charge them.

Yes, that's exactly why they used AI to blow up a school murdering a load of kids.

That kind of extensive experience.

Anthropic did the morally right thing and are being punished for it. The case in point justifies their position.

As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

>Anthropic wanted the ability to review actions that would have an effect on human life.

They wanted assurances that it would not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. They did not request to be "in the loop".

Furthermore, even if Anthropic had requested that, it would be a reason for the DoD to cancel the contract because the terms were unacceptable, not to declare Anthropic a supply chain risk. Declaring them a supply chain risk requires proving that they intended to sabotage their own product, adding malicious functionality. There is no evidence whatsoever that they planned to do that.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthropic-pentagon-supply-chain...

You raise an interesting point. Although wouldn’t Anthropic be the best experts on when a model would be most applicable or likely to falter?

I guess my opinion would really depend on the exact wording and details of the arrangement. Lots of people jumping in with strong stances based on pretty limited details.

> As I understand it cane down to one point: Anthropic wanted the ability to review actions that would have an effect on human life.

This is false. Anthropic wanted assurance that its technology would not be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance.

> Which sounds sensible on the surface, until you realize that all military organizations have extensive experience with that exact question

Tell that to a certain school in Iran

120 Iranian schoolgirls would have loved to hear this lecture.

you understand wildly incorrectly; please go and do some research.

Downvoted for misinformation, likely out of ignorance, despite the reasonable argument made on top of it. Anthropic was not asking for the ability to review and block particular uses. Those are classified and wouldn’t even be running on Anthropic’s servers. They just wanted the government to promise not to use it for killing people without a human in the loop.

Frankly I would trust Anthropic much more than the US military with human lives.

And crucially, the DoD, through the normal procurement process, agreed to Anthropic’s terms and made the purchase. Much later, the Secretary of Defense threw a political fit and tried to change the terms.

Evidentially not - Anthropic want to do business with the US military, but on their own terms, telling the military what they can and cannot use it for.

Is that a problem? Are there any special rules (genuinely curious) that allow the military to hijack the management of a private firm?

No it's not. Anthropic didn't want an AI to make battlefield decision on who gets killed because it's too unreliable. That doesn't mean they don't want AI used in the military supply chain.

And it also doesn't mean that Anthropic is a supply chain risk merely for not wanting AI to be the active decision maker in live or death situations in war.

And Anthropic's objection was recently confirmed: the US military blew up a school in Iran due to an AI error, and killed more than a hundred kids.

They also effectively said that military contractors and their subcontractors cannot use Anthropic - that's a significant part of the economy. I mean technically, they can use Anthropic for non-military work. But in practice, they will choose not use it at all, since it's a better approach to show compliance.

No. This also means that no companies that work with th DoD can use anthropic models for any purpose.

The Pentagon is trying to bully contractors into also not using Anthropic's models

You're skipping the supply chain risk designation, which is an extraordinary and punitive measure. Without that part, you'd be correct that this is a nothingburger. "Government decides to not renew contract with corporation X and goes with Y instead" is not headline news.

I can build a super bioweapon that can kill millions and I don't trust the US military to use it responsibly.

The US military asks me to build the super bioweapon. I say no thanks, please ask someone else, but happy to keep selling you bioweapons I think is safe enough.

I get designated an evil unamerican supply chain risk that nobody in the US military may do business with even though I was still happy to sell my safer bioweapons.

That is the tl;dr

Anthropic isn’t aligned with MAGA political ideology so they found an excuse to abuse power against them, more or less. The excuse was because Anthropic prohibits the use of their models for autonomous killing without a human in the loop they were declared a threat to national security on par with Iran or North Korea from a supply chain perspective in the military. OpenAI then rushed in and volunteered to build the slaughterbots ASAP, likely specially tuned to whomever Trump has taken a disliking to in his ambien stupors. Welcome to the future!

This smells like corruption to me.

OpenAI has hacked several prominent entities and is allowed to do business as usual but Anthropic putting guardrails on the military's usage of AI is the national security threat while Pentagon itself said that over reliance on AI lead to that attack on school in Minab.

I have also learned that OpenAI's president is a big maga donor and now I am thinking of cancelling my OpenAI membership todau and signing up with Anthropic again.

Edit - i am not a OAI hater and i don't hate anyone. I am just saying Anthropic is kinda getting bullied and OAI is not being punished enough for their actions. It is time for me to support Anthropic (with my $$$) instead of OAI.

Oh, 100%. You'll see OAI getting protected against lawsuits by the government while any missteps from Anthropic will be met with federal disapproval.

A large portion of the president's daughter's net worth is in OpenAI via Thrive Capital [1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/25/thrive-capital-openai-joshua...

>OpenAI has hacked several prominent entities and is allowed to do business as usual but Anthropic putting guardrails on the military's usage of AI is the national security threat while Pentagon itself said that over reliance on AI lead to that attack on school in Minab.

Right, because "supply chain risk" designation is as it pertains to them being a supplier to the military, not a overall assessment of their standing as a corporate citizen. Not to mention that the administration wants to go full steam ahead when it comes to AI development, so there's no internal contradiction here.

These are just very different things. OAI "hacking" anything isn't OAI telling the US Gov what they can and cannot do with their product. Maybe along all kinds of axes, one is more alarming than the other, but it's a canard in this topic.

Glad I canceled my subscription with them then. MAGA support is a no-no for me

Anthropic was designated long before the July OAI hacks. Also the appeals court isn’t re-assessing the DoD in light of new evidence, they are deciding whether it was constitutional for the DoD to blacklist Anthropic in the first place.

Not just "a big MAGA donor," the biggest single contributor. Greg Brockman donated $25 million.

I get downvoted every time I point out that this was entirely rational. This, downvoters, is why it was entirely rational. Does that mean I agree with it? Of course not. But investments are made to pay off, and this one certainly has for OpenAI.

For clarity, you don't mean corruption of the court, but corruption of the administration for what you view as unequal enforcement, right?

So you claim: If a similar thing would be filed against OpenAI, it would stand up in court.

That is still not corruption, yet. Also in Germany it is the executive branch which controls who is sued or policed by the stately organs.

So favorism can be passed down this way, but not we are not at corruption yet. If reciprocity is expected, then you could call it that. Or could perhaps even file for negligence in treating all other company actors the same, especially if you are Anthropic yourself.

Still, I blame the US voters as much as the current administration if the later is just clowns and thieves.

Also, IANAL and HN discussing US things is always foreign to me.

I think you're making an assumption about what the military wants to do with AI. Based on things I have put together, they want an AI without guardrails for various reasons I won't go into. In fact, it's a security risk to have guardrails, given what I think at least one intended use is. I wouldn't jump to conclusions about corruption as the first explanation because this is vastly more complex than that.

Katsas and Rao, both Trump appointees, tag-teamed again. Trump automatically wins whenever they get a case.

There's no contradiction there. Pentagon doesn't want Anthropic deciding the guardrails on their own.

Most favored companies are a common feature of fascism.

Or they could be playing Good Cop / Bad Cop

Enough to make you wonder how the rest of FAANG stays in the fed's good graces.

You're way overthinking this. The administration told Anthropic to let them do something, Anthropic said no, and then they got pissy and started throwing rocks and wouldn't back down because the defining trait of this administration is that they walk into stupid positions and then refuse to back down because backing down would make them look weak and wrong.

You're ascribing complex motives to toddlers.

Admittedly I still need to do some reading on the current ruling, but how this isn't seen as an open and shut case of vindictive prosecution (if that's even a thing for this branch of law?) is astounding. The administration couldn't have made it more obvious there was no merit to their designation of Anthropic.

Decisions by Executive Branch Agencies <> Prosecution

What prosecution? There’s no legal prosecution going on here.

This debate seems to be missng the bigger picture regarding dual-use technology. If the precedent is set that any 'terms of use' which restrict military app can be deemed a 'supply chain risk,' does that effectively mean no commercial software vendor can ever legaly impose safety gurdrails on their products if, they wantto sell to government contractors? How does this impact the future of open-source components that are widely used in defense software?

https://lwn.net/Articles/707510/ > "I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."

> How does this impact the future of open-source components that are widely used in defense software

Not at all, because open source contributors aren't megalomaniacs trying to dictate how people use their products. In fact, the exact opposite. That is the entire point of Open Source. Complete freedom for the user.

Supply chain risk seems a massive over-reaction, but understandable that the government doesn't want to commit to Anthropic controlled software for any critical military application if they can't 100% rely on Anthropic support in being able to use it as they see fit.

> 100% rely on

that's the mobster-loyalty mentality, and it's not how successful (read: desirable for the most people) governments function

Anthropic has no control over their deployed models in classified environments. That is managed by Palantir and government clouds. https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/04/01/claude-codes...

This is not an abstract disagreement at all. The red lines that the Department of War wanted to cross were made extremely clear: They want to build Skynet with Claude, and build a mass domestic surveillance system. Now they will have to make do with building those two systems with Gemini and ChatGPT.

> understandable that the government doesn't want to commit to Anthropic controlled software

But that's not at issue here. Obviously everyone agrees that the Pentagon can issue RFQ's to whatever specifications it wants. They can buy whatever they want, for the same reason that you or I are free to sell whatever we want.

The subject at hand is an attempt to use national security regulatory power to coerce Anthropic into selling a product it doesn't want to sell.

I think both sides are wrong. In no particular order:

US does not buy weapons that self-regulate generally. The US can and has purchased weapons with stipulations on how they should be used. For instance, and I'm making this up, they might purchase cluster munitions for smashing up an airfields, but with a stipulation they may not be used where humans are present or something. The munition doesn't check GPS and refuse to detonate if GPS doesn't indicate it's over some Russian airfield. Nor does an M4 fail to fire if it's on US Soil. Anthropic tried to build safeguards and out-regulate the government. Everyone here should know that such limitations would (can and have, see some famous IFF spoofing incidents) be exploited by an enemy, which is generally why they aren't acceptable in a military context. Without seeing the contract signed, one possibility is Anthropic tried to push regulations onto the government, and Anthropic gets to ride away on a high horse.

The other side: The Supply Chain Risk feels like an abuse. It's likely a valid designation and likely has its historical uses. If this was a contract issue, that would have been the correct way to litigate. Instead, again without seeing the contract, it feels like this is way to try and stifle their uptake in defense sector; basically attempting to strong arm them by choking a business segment off. Again, if there is a in fact a legitimate breach of contract here, it should be litigated as such. The alternative is there is no such breach, and Anthropic built limitations into the contract and the Pentagon just has buyers remorse. Honestly this wouldn't surprise me, the federal government generally incinerates tax dollars, and with the massive marketing hullabaloo pushed by AI companies, its completely likely a giant contract was signed without reading the fine print.

Honestly both sides of this annoy me.

The difference between Anthropic and a cluster bomb supplier is that cluster bomb manufacturing in the United States requires permits. The government is only going to give them to companies that are working with the United States and its allies, which means that company has zero leverage to make requirements (e.g. "don't use them on humans.")

Separately, as a note to your made up example:

Cluster bombs are uniquely efficient against humans, especially in trenches. The US is not a signatory to the international treaty banning their use. It does not like being limited in how it conducts war. I strongly doubt that it would agree to terms from a private enterprise to similar effect.

Not sure if I’m just in my own national security bubble, but I find it troubling to see the perspective that most of the conversation in this thread is coming from.

The US government took a legal designation explicitly crafted to protect against foreign adversaries and deployed it against a private, domestic entity, to their immediate and great detriment.

I mean it sounds like your "bubble" includes not reading the law in question? Not sure if anyone can do much to help you at that point.

The future is uncertain. Maybe we will see if the arguments stick around through, say, an AOC presidential administration. Changes in weather like that are a great test of people's convictions.

There is a lot of maga demographic among HN userbase.

> explicitly crafted to protect against foreign adversaries

Explicitly?

Wow, explicitly means it is directly defined in the statue. Which it isn't.

Did you mean implicitly and accidentally say the exact opposite?

I guess it’s the supreme court next.

For all the downsides of losing the business of government contractors, it really would hold Anthropic to their stated values: they’ll never develop AI controlled weapons on this blacklist.

Opinion by Katsas and Rao. For those that don’t follow this regularly, those are two of the biggest Trump hacks on the bench.

I suspect this will be reversed en banc.

Anthropic’s argument is really clear and easy to understand: we can’t simultaneously be a supply chain risk and also be a company the DoD demands we change our policies so they can use our models without restrictions.

Anthropic's policies are literally the supply chain risk.

The DoD could have used the same authority to seize the technology if it wanted to. Especially in a time of war. DoD has instead chosen to respect Antrhopic's boundaries and has simply barred anyone in the agency from buying a product that comes with strings attached.

This is 100% on Anthropic for product:market fit failure.

Yeah, Katsas and Rao are top shelf partisan hacks. Why did Anthropic not sue in the 9th circuit?

Yeah, this is like a textbook bad draw for Anthropic. Unless you're a lawyer for Anthropic, I wouldn't give this ruling much weight at all.

The hidden upside for Anthropic is now they won't be forced to refer to AI as "SI".

I can't believe they're going to make the Secretary of Education learn a new abbreviation.

Slop Intelligence.

Legally permissible, but still bad faith contract management by the government.

Every battlefield from here on out is a competition between autoshot ai capabilities and the armies building/deploying/maintaining them.

It should not be up to an AI company to point out that this breaks the founding conditions of the United States, nor should they be placed in a position to be scapegoated for potential implications of this if left undefined.

Rock and a hard place, by a government with shockingly few qualms about placing any and all Americans in such positions whenever polling, survival, or perceived personal benefit dictates.

All AI is a supply chain risk. I think people should know that about now. You can't keep it in a box. The way code works as a model is that is not super sentient thing with nefarious intentions. It is just pure automaton.

Let me explain, if it learns something from training data to do certain things from code it has online it can install or use a code that is vulnerable from a security perspective.

I think the real, and continuing, story here is the US military and the US govt in general continuing to let ego degrade capability. I'm not going to get into a discussion about what is legal, I am personally not interested in that distinction here, the core point is that this is the US being stupid, again.

Say we have this prompt for Claude at the Pentagon: “You have control over these 50 drones, fly them to Ethiopia and eliminate all possible terrorists you can using the maximum endurance of the drons. In this folder you have all the necessary intel. Confidence rate needs to be at least 70%. Report back when all drones have landed back at the base”

Why is this not considered human in the loop? And let’s say human in the loop will just press Y; what is the difference?

I am baffled the DoD/W needs to rely on a third (commercial party) for something strategic as this if they deem SI strategic. Pistols and rifles aren't the same thing.

Hire people and pay them well and develop whatever yourself without this charade, they have unlimited budgets.

I am not taking a moral ground, but I can't see how "an Anthropic" fits in. You might say Boing or Lockheed, Sig Sauer and Colt and FN do, but it feels somehow different as they've "bent the knee" for decades.

what is SI?

for the next 800 days

but really, they all are, look what Grok did to hundreds of Iranian children

* https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5928204-pentagon-musk-...

Grok didn't push any buttons. People did.

Wtf is life just court battles back and forth for everything forever now?

I guess it beats physical battles to resolve disputes.

Without taking sides in this statement, I do think it's important for a private company like Anthropic to have a mechanism it can turn to when it feels it's been inequitably treated by the government.

> Wtf is life just court battles back and forth for everything forever now?

Not for peasants like you and me! We are forced to surrender our Seventh Amendment rights in order to be able to do most things that are part of everyday life.

I don’t agree with the decision, but I don’t think courts should be able to easily overturn the federal government’s findings when it comes to national security in a specific decision like this.

It seems very likely that AI will ultimately be under government control. To me, this is the nightmare we are all afraid of. And Dario's essay subtlety confirms this.

There is no doubt that Anthropic is a supplychain risk. This is irrespective of weather you agree with Anthropic or Pentagon on anything.

I actually thought they’d dropped this because I feel like I’m still hearing about Claude being used in the US military. Don’t they have Mythos?

1790368354 | Anthropic's Claims over Its "Supply Chain Risk" Exclusion by Dow Rejected | https://reason.com/volokh/2026/09/25/anthropics-first-amendm... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849556 | 4 comments

1790417228 | Court rules Trump can blacklist Anthropic for refusing to enable Claude features | https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/court-rules-trum... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49855010 | 0 comments

Is this something to do with anthropic model being used to kill 150 children in school bomb via palantir?

> Judge Gregory Katsas wrote in the majority opinion for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which Judge Neomi Rao joined. Katsas and Rao were appointed by President Donald Trump.

> Before his appointment to the bench, Katsas served as Deputy White House Counsel in the first Trump administration

> [Rao] was appointed in 2019 by President Donald Trump, having served in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019 as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

The autocracy is in full swing.

This is the real crux of the mattter. The rule of law means nothing when the autocratic authoritarians have installed corrupt judges that just rubber stamp the dictator's decrees. At every level, it's a bad faith execution of all the trappings of law, but with none of the ideals or justice. We see the same setup in every authoritarian country - it's not like Russia or China is lacking for laws - rather the authoritarian dynamic is always about how they're bent and abused to serve naked power.

The real problem is how many people eagerly eat and repeat the nonsensical bullshit, as if they are airtight logical deductions rather than mere rationalizations promulgated by the party's apparatchiks. I don't know if most people still just want to feel power from being on the "winning team" or if they're really unable to mentally model situations with independent parties that have their own rights while government has restrictions in order to preserve those rights, or what. Alas, it does not bode well.

Dario n sama though smart n driven individuals keep trying this game of tryna one up competition by regulatory capture.

maybe they will succeed just like how it was done with the Interstate Commerce Commission.

but likely now competition is global thanks to the Chinese labs and other small model providers like Mistral.

Incredible.

TBH Anthropic was used for target selection in Iran and if Amodei oversold operational AI and was reason why US bled so many highend munitions... only for Iran to survive than basically everything downstream of the shit show including energy prices is on their heads.

The court accepted the government's overbroad, inaccurate, and pretextual interpretation of supply chain risk (the relevant statute being at [1]). The court also accepted a national security exception to the First Amendment that is never hinted at in the Constitution's text, yet somehow carries water in courts like this one [2]:

> For one, if the court’s statutory interpretation about the power to affect the operation of delivered software were correct, then pretty much any software product, at least those still subject to vendor-supplied updates, could be considered supply chain risks, given that any update could make substantive changes. In any case, it would seem to mean that any AI model would be too risky for the government to use, because there is nothing unusual about Anthropic’s model-control architecture—to the extent Anthropic could still control its model, so could any other AI vendor potentially control theirs. Whether they would or not would depend on the contract restraining them, and the only thing potentially different about Anthropic is that it did not want to be contractually obligated to allow certain functions that Hegseth really wanted—functions that were ethically dubious at best and monstrously dangerous at worst.

> But because that contractual reluctance upset Trump and Hegseth, they singled Anthropic out, alone, for negative treatment, turning their pique that “we can’t agree with Anthropic on how the software would need to be designed for us to be able to buy it” into “and because we can’t agree then NO ONE ELSE IN THE GOVERNMENT CAN EVER USE IT.” Per the DC Circuit, such an overbroad measure—after all, not every agency had the same concerns about changeability that the military might, yet Hegseth was deciding for them, too, whether they could use Claude, even when its architecture created no particular risk to them—and clearly punitive measure was perfectly fine because it implicated the implicit “national security” exception to the First Amendment the Founders apparently wrote into it in invisible ink.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/3252

[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2026/09/25/dc-circuit-oks-hegseths-...

My unpopular opinion is, Anthropic should move outside the US. I think they will thrive as Europe main AI lab.

Good.

This is more about wringing Anthropic's hand to agree for handful of defense companies to be the official AI translators to government.

I'll tell you what's a supply chain risk...

The current fucking US administration.

What a sophisticated opinion.

Trump is a supply chain risk.

Absolute clown show in the US right now

Genuine question: does anyone know what concrete obligations this designation actually imposes? Everyone's arguing about the politics but I haven't seen a clear explanation of what Anthropic is now legally required to do or not do.

Posted this in the wrong thread.

Anthropic isn't stopping me from getting Chinese parts, Yukon Jack and good Cadbury chocolate.

trump is. Designate him!

If the CEO of any other defense contractor did this, they'd be summarily fired by the board.

Not ones whose defense customer base is dwarfed by its commercial customer base.

No defense contractor CEO in history has ever built a company this large, this fast. I don't think anyone is even thinking about firing Dario.

A Terminator walks into military headquarters, and asks the general who it needs to kill. The general says, sorry, can't use you. I have a stipulation that I can't use terminators because of the internal AI. You might turn on us and kill all the humans. The terminator says. Fine. I'll go get work for your enemy, and walks away.

I agree with its designation. The security scans from Claude Mythos have been highly suspicious, wrong, and with a significant false positive rate. Claude also directly causes conflict within teams through excessive utility of "git blame" which weaponizes everyone against each other until only Claude has control. I've had very bad experiences with Claude and only Claude.

> Claude also directly causes conflict within teams through excessive utility of "git blame"

Lol wtf, do you think nobody here knows how to use git? this is like a Fox News comment, you are not a developer and are trying to spread fear because a word was used jokingly. "git blame" is just a diff tool.

You cannot use git blame to cause conflict.

I don't think the majority of Claude users would agree with your assessment.

Found the person who got blamed by Claude

Reply on news.ycombinator.com