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Comment by iamEAP | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Both canbe true: the law as written is too broad and enables petty vindictive behaviors from politicians to punish companies that don't ask "how high" when prompted to jump.

It can also be the case that the law is applied in a way unintended by it's writers to enable corrupt choices.

At which point, you need to look beyond the letter of the law to contextualize whether the law is applied correctly.

Feels real basic to me.

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?

OK, explicitly designed to be used against adversaries. So the government is explicitly designating Anthropic as an adversary of the United States of America (a domestic adevarsary, not foreign, sure, GP was wrong on that part).

And the reason Anthropic is an adversary of the USA? They have a clause in their license agreement that their products must not be used in surveillance or military targeting decisions.

Sounds like a fair characterization then? Trying to dictate or restrict the (domestic) military uses of a product is literally an adversarial position to the national military interest.

Where did you get "trying to dictate" from? The text is "the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert [...]"

A mutually agreed upon "you may not use our product for X or Y purpose" in a contract clearly doesn't pose any such risk.

Trying to argue for and enforce a 'you may not use our product for an express objective of the US military' provision is pretty clearly "trying to dictate". Actively cancelling, moving capabilities behind a 'safety' wall, or even threatening to would be a clear sabotage of the US military's operational capabilities. It'd be one thing is Anthropic merely expressed an opinion, but my understanding is that it was/is an outright 'we will not allow' as opposed to a 'we'd prefer you didn't'.

Imagine if Microsoft tried the same with excel or power point. "um actually in the fine print of the EULA it says you may not use our product for military purposes so we will revoke your access unless you stop using power point for mission briefings that might result in the deaths of civilians". Would fly about as well as a lead brick.

Again, the statute says nothing about "dictating terms." It covers an adversary who might sabotage or subvert a system. And no, Anthropic did not cancel anything, did not pull any capabilities, and has no backdoor into deployed models. There was no "um actually." It wrote two prominent usage restrictions into a contract, the military read and signed it, and then later demanded the terms be removed.

As a sanity check, I’d highly recommend trying out your own line of reasoning in cases which you think you might feel differently about. For example, imagine it's instead a certain authoritarian state saying "obey the Party or get blacklisted as a national security threat."

It might feel good in the moment, like "yeah, Anthropic, don't tell the military what to do," because you agree with this particular call. But the government doesn't give that power back, and you might not be so happy about the next way it gets used.

The statute defines a supply chain risk as “the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert” a covered system. It says adversary, not foreign adversary.

Even so, this designation had never previously been applied to a domestic company. The Pentagon applied it to Anthropic after a dispute over how it could use its AI. To me, the circumstances suggest the designation was used to punish Anthropic for refusing the Pentagon’s terms.

It was clearly retaliatory and because of that unlawful.

adversary seems like an odd designation without also charging them with treason

Yes, if they are an adversary, the company should have been dissolved and leaders and board in jail.

But this was a bad faith temper tantrum, plain to see for anybody looking.

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

This is some radical new definition of "explicit" that hasn't caught up to public usage nor the dictionary.

In normal parlance, explicit just means that someone involved in the crafting, at some point, stated "I am writing this bill for X reasons". There's often quite a lot of evidence about that, which is not contained in the statue itself.

Show me one law that has its justification/purpose explicitly encoded in the law itself.

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