You would think that's a surprisingly easy concept to grasp, but many are viewing this through the lens of desired outcome and not reality.
Antrophic merely said they don't allow their tools to be used for autonomous killing.
A very specific case.
So where is the danger making it necessary preventing all suppliers from using Claude at all? That only concerns those who work directly on autonomous killing and only they will have to go to Altman or Musk.
So none of that is any threat to the military - so it was just black mailing to make them do the governments will - which is something usually dictatorships do, not democratic systems.
Private companies can not be allowed to control what our military does I feel like I'm in a crazy worlds how can people possible be arguing for that.
In a democratic society, the default should be, the military just buy somewhere else, then force companies to build them the terminator. So no private company controls what the military does, they just control their product. You want the military to control private companies? There is a name for that kind of system, where this is conmon.
And yes companies should be able to control how their products are used, particularly in the military. Or do you believe in compelled speech?
The US military asks me to build the super bioweapon. I say no thanks, please ask someone else.
Am I a supply chain risk?
Perhaps people who are noticing politics here - including in the decision of two Trump-appointed judges, against the he vote of another Republican-appointed judge- are not the ones who are choosing not to see reality?
(I think it's also the case that Anthropic didn't make any public statements about the negotiations until after the DoD was already publicly threatening this designation. But that seems less important than the question of: is it good for the US government to try to destroy companies whose public statements it dislikes?)
We also have the Defense Production Act: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R43767. It doesn’t happen more often because most people aren’t stupid enough to say “no” to the U.S. military. These Effective Altruists, however, are too big for their britches.