The disconnect here for me is, I assume the DoW and Anthropic signed a contract at some point and that contract most likely stipulated that these are the things they can do and these are the things they can't do.
I would assume the original terms the DoW is now railing against were in those original contracts that they signed. In that case it looks like the DoW is acting in bad faith here, they signed the original contact and agreed to those terms, then they went back and said no, you need to remove those safeguards to which Anthropic is (rightly so) saying no.
Am I missing something here?
EDIT: Re-reading Dario's post[1] from this morning I'm not missing anything. Those use cases were never part of the original contacts:
> Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War
So yeah this seems pretty cut and dry. Dow signed a contract with Anthropic and agreed to those terms. Then they decided to go back and renege on those original terms to which Anthropic said no. Then they promptly threw a temper tantrum on social media and designated them as a supply chain risk as retaliation.
My final opinion on this is Dario and Anthropic is in the right and the DoW is acting in bad faith by trying to alter the terms of their original contracts. And this doesn't even take into consideration the moral and ethical implications.
> *Isn’t it unreasonable for Anthropic to suddenly set terms in their contract?* The terms were in the original contract, which the Pentagon agreed to. It’s the Pentagon who’s trying to break the original contract and unilaterally change the terms, not Anthropic.
> *Doesn’t the Pentagon have a right to sign or not sign any contract they choose?* Yes. Anthropic is the one saying that the Pentagon shouldn’t work with them if it doesn’t want to. The Pentagon is the one trying to force Anthropic to sign the new contract.
I just wish there was a stronger source on this. I am inclined to agree you and the source you cited, but unfortunately
> [1] This story requires some reading between the lines - the exact text of the contract isn’t available - but something like it is suggested by the way both sides have been presenting the negotiations.
I deal with far too many people who won't believe me without 10 bullet-proof sources but get very angry with me if I won't take their word without a source :(
It isn't about commercial agreements, it's about patriotism. The national industry is supposed to submit to the military's wishes to the extent that they get compensated. Here it's a question or virtue.
The Pentagon feels it isn't Anthropic to set boundaries as to how their tech is used (for defense) since it can't force its will, then it bans doing business with them.
No one cares if the Pentagon refuses to do business with Anthropic. But Hegseth has declared that effective immediately, no one else working with the DoD can either--which includes the companies hosting Anthropics models (Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet).
So it's six months to phase out use of Anthropic at the DoD, but the people hosting the models have to stop "immediately".
Which miiight impact the amount of inference the DoD would be able to get done in those six months.
Regardless of the original contract, it's entirely appropriate for a vendor to tell the customer how to use any materials.
Imagine a _leaded_ pipe supplier not being allowed to tell the department of war they shouldn't use leaded pipes for drinking water! It's the job of the vendor to tell the customer appropriate usage.
Playing devil's advocate: if I did in fact grab one of my kitchen knives to defend myself against a violent intruder into my kitchen, I wouldn't expect to be banned from buying kitchen knives.
I'm not sure this is still a useful analogy, though...
If I shoot someone, something that is explicitly warned against in firearm safety materials that come with every purchase of a new firearm, I am no longer allowed to purchase any more firearms.
And if you grabbed the knife and went on a violent spree, I'd absolutely expect the knife manufacturer to refuse to sell to you anymore.
The knife manufacturer isn't obligated to sell to you in either case, I'd expect them not to cut ties with you in the self defence scenario. But it is their choice.
Not in software though. Clear precedent has been established via EULAs. Software companies set the rules and if users don't like, they can piss off. I don't see why it would be any different for the government.
The government is armed and can exempt itself from prosecution either by judicial means and/or by naked force. So it isn’t just a cut and dry licensing problem.
The government cannot set arbitrary rules, it has to follow the law. (And, at least with a functioning separation of powers, it cannot change the law arbitrarily.)
Claude Opus is just remarkably good at analysis IMO, much better than any competitor I’ve tried. It was remarkably good and complete at helping me with some health issues I’ve had in the past few months. If you were to turn that kind of analytical power in a way to observe the behaviour of American citizens and to change it perhaps, to make them vote a certain way. Or something like - finding terrorists, finding patterns that help you identify undocumented people.
Yes, it's officially still the Department of Defense.
If this were a news outline writing "Department of War" I would be concerned. But in the case of the Anthropic CEO's blog post, I can understand why they are picking their fights.
They can, however, rename their Twitter/X accounts and vacate the @SecDef handle, which seems to be up for grabs now, if anyone wants to do the funniest thing...
Of all the silly things that Trump did, I think this one is the most reasonable. This has always been a department of war. Calling it defense was propaganda.
It's a silly shibboleth, but I automatically ignore anyone who calls it the Department of War or Gulf of America. Hasn't steered me wrong yet. They're telling me they're the kind of people who only care about defending fascism.
I think it's worth giving people a tiny bit of grace on this. I've surprised people by explaining that the "Department of War" is just fascist fanfic and that the legal name has not changed.
It's a testament to the broken information ecosystem we're in that many people genuinely don't know this. Most will correct themselves when told. I agree with you that those who don't are not worth engaging.
I would not defend all of Google's decisions in the Trump era, but complying immediately with politicized name changes has always been the status quo. Even in healthy democracies, the precise names of geographic features can be extremely controversial, and no sane company wants to get in a debate with the Japanese government about the real names of various islands.
the entire administration negotiates in bad faith. literally every agreement they sign whether it's international trade or corporate contracts is up to the whim of a toddler with twitter
With this administration, after all their proven lies, when in doubt, assume bad faith on their part. Assuming good faith at this point is Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football, but now the football is fascism (i.e., state control of corporations, e.g., what Trump administration is doing here).
Trump has historically stiffed his contractors. Why do you think his administration would be any different with adhering to a contract?
I was pondering the same thing and to me the answer is a contractor sold something to the DoD and Anthropic pulled the rug out from under that contractor and the DoD isn't happy about losing that.
My speculation is the "business records" domestic surveillance loophole Bush expanded (and that Palantir is build to service). That's usually how the government double-speaks its very real domestic surveillance programs. "It's technically not the government spying on you, it's private companies!" It's also why Hegseth can claim Anthropic is lying. It's not about direct government contracts. It's about contractors and the business records funnel.
Yes, I assumed a mass surveillance Palantir program also. Interesting take on how it allows them to claim “we are not doing this” while asking Anthropic to do it.
Of course they can just say - we aren’t, Palantir is.
So they are such a risk to national security that no contractor that works with the federal government may use them, but they're going to keep using them for six more months? So I guess our national security is significantly at risk for the next six months?
SCOTUS says POTUS is above the law, so POTUS has collected $4B in bribe / protection money since taking office 13 months ago. Anthropic has lots of money at the moment. Why should they be allow to keep it, given (1) and (2)?
Since they didn't pay off the president (enough?), his goons are going to screw with their revenue and run a PR smear campaign.
Once you realize it only has to do with Trump's personal finances, and nothing to do with national security or the rule of law, then all the administration's actions make perfect rational sense.
Open question: How much should a congress-critter charge Trump for a favorable vote? (The check should come with a presidential pardon in the envelope, of course...)
I see it more like: I sell you a pencil and I could not care less what you write with it. You ask me to write a note for you and I will exert editorial discretion. Because unless I’m missing something we’re talking about Anthropic’s infrastructure running LLMs. If it was a physical good I could see another interpretation.
Further, what law lets the government dictate what contracts a company signs? Anthropic refused to work with them. We had a whole Supreme Court case about refusing working with customers.
This makes an interesting assumption: that being told by any member of government that you're legally required to do something, means you're required to do that thing, and that they're definitely not making those things up as they go.
But that's not the case, is it? The government can say that it's legally required to give Donald Trump a gold bar every Sunday. That wouldn't even be too far off from the outlandish claims we've seen over the past year. The Trump administration is, as Chapelle would put it, a habitual line stepper.
I like how you use the phrase social responsibilities to mean doing whatever the DoD wants which includes spying on the American people and operating autonomous drones to kill people. It's like saying they have social responsibilities to enable murder for people who have been shown to be unthinking murderers justifying the most pointless murders because they think it makes "their side" winners.
That usage turns the entire meaning of social responsibilities on its heads. It's one of those maddening fash tics where they reverse the plain meaning a statement.
They are the same amount of ‘risk’ to national security that the various ‘emergencies’ the executive branch has used as legal excuses to do otherwise illegal things are emergencies.
Congress is negligent in not reigning this kind of thing in. We’re rapidly falling down so many slippery semantic slopes.
The Trump administration tends to use this playbook.
Putting aside my take, I’m trying to objectively make sure I’m grounded on what is likely to happen next, without confusing “what is” with “what is ok”.
Don't make the mistake of thinking their words have meaning. They see a way to punish the company, they take it. Same thing with declaring a national emergency to impose tariffs. There's no supply chain risk, no national emergency, but that doesn't stop them.
Dont forget Nvidia technology was condsidered too sensitive to be exported to China....until the Trump administration decided they could export it if they paid a 10% export tax.
> So I guess our national security is significantly at risk for the next six months?
That does seem to be what Hegseth is arguing, yes; and that is presumably his justification for doing something drastic here. Although I assume he is lying or wrong.
And as a cynic, let me just add that the image of someone going to the political overseers of the US military with arguments about being "effective" or "altruistic" is just hilarious given their history over the last ~40 years.
> completely understandable decision from a neutral third party PoV.
Except it's not, really. If Anthropic/Claude doesn't mean the DoD's need, they can and should just put out an RFP for other LLM providers. I'm sure there's plenty of others that'd happily forgo their morals for that sweet government contract money.
No US company has to provide services to the DoD or any other branch of government. It's not "veto power" it's being selective of who you do business with, which is 100% legal.
I don't understand your point here. Looks like what you suggest is exactly what is happening. US government did not ban Anthropic from conducting business in the US. They just don't want them to influence their own supply chain, 100% legal as you say.
If the government just banned all government agencies from working with Anthropic, that would be reasonable. But they didn't. They're banning any company that works with the military from working with Anthropic in any way, using a law that has never been invoked against an American company.
Well, great! Sounds like this is exactly what Anthropic wants and hopes for; for their technology to minimally benefit warfighting. Otherwise, are you suggesting they are so evil that they were just advertising those the terms to fool us and virtue signal?
> has never been invoked against an American company.
There's always a first. I am assuming it is not illegal to do that. It's a completely reasonable business decision to ensure your supply chain does not depend on things that may change against your goals. For example, you don't want to build or depend on an open source platform that you know is gonna rug pull, if you count on it remaining open source, do you? American or otherwise.
And the point is? They made a voluntary business decision not to sell to them, whatever that number is. Possibly more than offset by marketing gains and loyalty from other segments; or not.
The US government is applying severe sanctions against a US company that does not "influence their supply chain". Donald Trump believes the economy is great and at the same time declares economic emergencies to justify doing certain things. It could be true that Anthropic's products are useless for the DoD because of the products' safeguards, but that doesn't mean they're a risk to the US government.
As to this being 100% legal, I'm not so sure (not a lawyer). It might not be a criminal offese, but there's a whole category of abuse of power that this may fall under if Anthropic is put under a certain status without real justification. Many powers given to the executive branch are not absolute and can't be applied arbitrarily, but require justification. Anthropic might be able to sue the government for declaring them a "supply-chain risk" without sufficient justification. E.g. they could claim that not being sufficiently patriotic in the eyes of the administration does not constitute a risk, and that since their not the sole supplier of the tech, they were not trying to strong arm the government to do anything.
I agree with your second paragraph; we will have to see to what degree the "viral" effect of Supply Chain Risk designation goes (perhaps you contract the DoD under an LLC that has a supply chain firewall from your company) and also look forward to seeing how this would be handled in court, but I would not automatically be dismissive of this being totally legal.
> does not "influence their supply chain"
I would be wary of making this conclusion. Obviously it could conceivably influence the supply chain when you build on top of their model. If you look at the type of risks enumerated in DoD guidelines, it is not just "oh this software has vulnerability" which is what started the discussion in this subthread in the first place. There are many kinds of risks DoD needs to address, none are particularly new; including Sustainment Risk. The closest thing I remember to this case was Sun Java "no use in nuclear facility" EULA term, which LLM suggests was ignored by DoE/D because that was interpreted as a "limitation on warranty" not a "restriction of use."
Then you go to another supplier. But any company with proper counsel will tell them the same thing: don't break the law, which is exactly what they're trying to coerce Anthropic into doing. DoD requests do not supersede the law.
Not unless they're the sole supplier of the technology. They're saying, if you want to do this kind of thing - not with our product, but you can get it elsewhere.
No, you are the one lying trying to get political gotchas here. There is no "trying to exert veto power" absolutely anywhere, Anthropic's terms were laid out in the contract the Pentagon signed, which they want to forcibly amend. If they didn't like the terms, they didn't need to sign the contract.
What are you suggesting here? US government breaching the contract already signed? I am not aware of that happening here.
> Anthropic's terms were laid out in the contract the Pentagon signed, which they want to forcibly amend.
It's called negotiation in business. I am sure both sides are clear-eyed on what the consequences were and Anthropic made a calculated bet (probably correctly) that some segment of their employee/customer base would get wet by hearing this news and it more than offsets the lots business, thus is worth it.
That's a nice straw man you got there. I don't mind you characterizing the negotiation however you want. That's not the debate. Call it "shakedown" or "mafia" as someone else mentioned, or whatnot (although it is appears the company that was trying to grandstand the elected US Government by dictating their own terms was Anthropic, not the other way around, but I digress). The question is was it a breach of contract or just a tough negotiation?
Companies have gone out of business due to a big customer pulling the contract. Imagination Technologies comes to mind. This is not a rare thing in business.
I have to admit, “accept this unilateral change to the contract or we will use the full power of the US government to destroy your company” is certainly a tough negotiation stance. You got that part right.
How did you get the "destroy your company" part? If HN sentiment is any evidence, they are even more popular than before. GPU is a constrained resource and I am sure they are going to have enough business to saturate what they got. I'm certain they would have just removed (and still will remove) two paragraphs from the terms had it really "destroyed their company."
> full power of the US government
Haha, I can assure you that is not even close to the full power of US government. Ask the crypto people during Biden admin for just a little more power (still not even close to "full.")
"Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic."
For a company of Anthropic's size, this may very well be a death sentence, even if their work has nothing to do with the military supply chain. They could have just canceled the contract, but they wanted to go full Darth Vader on them to prove a point in case anyone else thought about "negotiating" "voluntarily" with the federal government.
You don't think Anthropic is going out of business any minute now, do you? This is just rhetoric. Affirmative evidence is they would just remove two paragraphs if they were.
I'm just curious, do you understand that the DoD isn't saying it won't do business with Anthropic. Its saying it will also ban any company that does business with the DoD (so 90% of large enterprises?) from doing business from Anthropic. Are you aware of this?
You seem really unaware of the timeline of this issue and what has actually happened, I think you should update your info before posting so confidently wrongly.
The contract, including Anthropic's redlines, was signed more than a year ago and has been humming along with no objections from anybody. Hegseth abruptly got a bug up his ass about it last week, and demanded Anthropic sign a revised version under threat of punishment. Anthropic is simply saying "no, we will not be forced into signing a new version, you can either keep going with the original terms we all agreed to, or stop using us". The Pentagon can simply stop using Anthropic if they don't like the terms anymore (which, again, are the terms Pentagon agreed to in the first place). But what the DoW wants is to strong-arm Anthropic, using the DPA, into new terms because they abruptly changed their mind. That's not "negotiation" in any sense, that's Mafia behavior.
How you characterize the behavior, Mafia or not, is of course your opinion, and I am sure if you are a voter/stakeholder you'd consider that in your political activity, but I'd appreciate if you clarify what you mean but your story and timeline, so I ask again, are you suggesting the US government has breached the contract they already signed?
I don't know why you keep bringing up breach of contract, it is not relevant to this discussion at all. No, the government did not breach the contract AFAIK, they just decided they didn't like it anymore, and instead of either withdrawing or entering into a negotiation about it, they decided to use threats to try and get their terms at metaphorical gunpoint.
The actual terms of the contract aren't even relevant, this is purely a matter of tort law and whether you can bully someone into a new contact because you woke up one day and decided you didn't like the one you agreed to.
It's actually even worse than that: Anthropic already agrees that the Pentagon can walk away from the contract and stop using Claude if they want to, there's no dispute there. What the Pentagon wants is to force Anthropic into a new set of terms which cannot be refused.
Any documentation regarding the claim about breaking their contract?
Haven't heard that. Regardless, as someone who works with these models daily (as well as company leadership that loves AI more than they understand it) - Anthropic is absolutely right to say that the military shouldn't be allowed to use it for lethal, autonomous force.
The United States has freedom of speech. The Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech. A company can always direct their money, speech, however they like with regards to the government. Can you be sued for breach of contract? Sure. Is it a supply chain risk absolutely not.
> They are a "supply chain risk" if they can willy-nilly break their contract with US govt and enforce arbitrary rules to service.
It is the US govt that seeks to break their contract with Anthropic.
The contract they signed had the safeguards, so they were mutually agreed upon. These safeguards against fully autonomous killbots and AI spying of US citizens was known before signing.
This conflict now is because the US govt regrets what they agreed to in the contract.
Wow, and the only restrictions Anthropic asked for are (1) no mass domestic surveillance and (2) require human-in-the-loop for killing [1]. Those seem exceptionally reasonable, and even rather weak, lol :|
Their intention is to turn it against the American people. Hegseth literally wrote a book about eliminating democrats from the US, and this surprises people.
It's also a very clear differentiator for them relative to Google, Facebook, and OpenAI, all of whom are clearly varying degrees of willing to sell themselves out for evil purposes.
Given the history of US military adventurism and that we’re about to start another completely unjustified war of aggression against Iran, yes. Absolutely yes.
It will also cost openai dearly if they don't communicate clearly, because I for one will internally push to switch from openai (we are on azure actually) to anthropic. Besides that my private account also.
This whole saga is extremely depressing and dystopic.
Anthropic is holding firm on incredibly weak red lines. No mass surveillance for Americans, ok for everyone else, and ok to automatic war machines, just not fully unmanned until they can guarantee a certain quality.
This should be a laughably spineless position. But under this administration it is taken as an affront to the president and results in the government lashing out.
> Costco is a really popular subject for business-success case studies but I feel like business guys kinda lose interest when the upshot of the study is like "just operate with scrupulous integrity in all facets and levels of your business for four decades" and not some easy-to-fix gimmick
I don't know, staff at my two Costcos feel much more disinterested and rude then I remember a decade ago. It used to feel fun but now it's miserable.
At peak times they run out of carts and tell the customers to go hunting in the lot for them, door greeters shouting at members across the floor, checkout queues stretch the length of the warehouse, they start half blocking the gas station entrance 30mins before close so trucks can't get in, so maybe they're turning those profit screws.
Ah, right, by being actually good, as in - being okay with mass surveillance as long as it isn't being done in the US, being okay with Claude assisting in killing people as long as it isn't fully autonomous, and being actively hostile to open-weight LLMs and open research on LLMs? This kind of "good"?
No, OP is right, their PR department is doing a great job.
Correct. Protect our citizens' rights, as we are the ones under the jurisdiction of our government. Yes, design competitive weapons systems that can stand up to the threats that adversary powers are creating, but do so while maintaining human control.
It's funny, because even if they walk it back, they still would come out ahead in PR versus if they just rolled over. Because at that point, it would look like a hostage victim reading a statement that they are being treated well by their captors in front of a camera.
Do you think that bad things happening is just hilarious in general? Do you like to see good behavior punished? I'm really trying to understand what you get out of making this comment. Also what happens when ... This doesn't happen? You just polluted the epistemic commons a bit more with some cynical bullshit sans consequence? Enough. I think it's time to start calling this garbage out when I see it.
If you're a billionaire there's no risk to "sticking to principles", so there's nothing to admire. Also that's not what they're doing. These are calculated moves in a negotiation and the trump regime only has 3 years left. Even a CEO can think 4 years ahead.
It's probably in Anthropic's interest to throw grok to these clowns and watch them fail to build anything with it for 3 years.
i disagree. 3 years is an insanely long time in the AI space. The entire industry pretty much didn't even exist three years ago! Or at least not within 4 orders of magnitude.
Also, every other company has bent the knee and kissed the ring. And the trump admin will absolutely do everything they can to not appear weak and harm Anthropic. If it was so easy to act principled, don't you think other companies would've refused too? Eg Apple
And there is real harm here. You're reading about it - they get labeled a supply chain risk. This is negative and very tangible
why does it need to be a completely different, trained model? AWS doesn't provide unique technologies in their goverment cloud, beyond isolation and firewalled access; Anthropic can do the same thing. Probably need to cough up enough to register a new domain name!
Good. I'd rather not have my favorite AI from a company working on AGI to have murder and spying in it's DNA.
In fact, as a patriotic American veteran, I'd be ok with Anthropic moving to Europe. It might be better for Claude and AGI, which are overriding issues for me.
Rutger Bregman @rcbregman
This is a huge opportunity for Europe. Welcome Anthropic with open arms. Roll out the red carpet. Visa for all employees.
Europe already controls the AI hardware bottleneck through ASML. Add the world's leading AI safety lab and you have the foundations of an AI superpower.
> Good. I'd rather not have my favorite AI from a company working on AGI to have murder and spying in it's DNA.
Anthropic made it quite clear they are cool with spying in general, just not domestic spying on Americans, and the "no killbots" pledge was asterisked with "because we don't believe the technology is reliable enough for those stakes yet". The implication being they absolutely would do killbots once they think they can nail the execution (pun intended).
I suppose you could argue they're taking the high road, but only relative to their peers. It's a very low bar.
I wouldn't say it's clear. People keep pointing to the wording used in the statement to say it, but I wonder if it has to do with constitutionally; domestic surveillance of people in the US without a warrant is against the constitution, and surveillance of non-citizens outside the U.S is not. Can they even be compelled by the executive branch to do an action that may be unconstitutional?
Do all of the employees want to move to Europe suddenly? Unless it’s the UK or Ireland, do they speak the local language? If it is the UK or Ireland, do they prefer the weather in California? Do they have children in school or in college locally? Do they have family they’d rather not move 9 time zones away from? Elderly parents they’re taking care of?
I'm pretty vocal about our collective authority to work against the Trump administration, and even I would be hesitant to work as a US employee of a company that fled the country after a dispute with the US military. Seems like an extreme threat to my personal safety for little resistance benefit.
Canada is another option. Canada has significant AI research institutes going back decades ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mila_(research_institute) ) that have produced much of the foundational research that backs today's AI models.
For Americans and international researchers it's easy to get visas there quickly. It's not far at all for Americans to relocate to or visit. Electricity is cheap and clean. Canada has the most college educated adults per capita. The country's commitment to liberalism, and free markets, is also seeming more steadfast than the US at this point in time.
Canada faces obstacles with its much smaller VC ecosystem, its smaller domestic market, and the threat of US economic aggression. Canada's recent trade deals are likely to help there.
I say this all as an American who is loyal to American values first and foremost. If the US wants to move away from its core values I hope other countries, like Canada or the EU, can carry on as successful examples for the US to eventually return to.
I have my doubts about Anthropic wanting to pick up and move the entire company to Europe even if Ursula von der Leyen personally signed their visas. Maybe only if the government tried to nationalise their proprietary models.
Why wouldn’t the government just arrest their board and execs on charges of treason or something? At this point they could probably publicly hang them all and a plurality of Americans would cheer it. I don’t know if you appreciate how disliked tech is by the left and right alike.
The left would never support that lawlessness: opposition to AI is based on things like ethics, environmental impact, etc. which are predicated on concepts like the rule of law. People are calling for regulation or UBI, mor killings.
The right has far more talk of violence, true, but a lot of that is targeted rhetoric to keep voters riled up, and it’s not aimed at American businesses. I’d be surprised if even a third of Republicans supported anything more than not doing business with Anthropic. Even the Nvidia shakedown got a ton of criticism and that’s just money.
Where is this text located? I googled "Anthropic Constitution" and found "Claude Constitution" (this this the same thing to you? I don't think the company Claude has a "constitution" itself.
Within the Claude Constitution, the words "non-western" do not appear. Where is your quote from?
"I can state flatly that heavier than air flying machines are impossible.
— Lord Kelvin, 1895"
I'm sure this doesn't apply to you since you're not Lord Kelvin. On the other hand, people like Peter Norvig state in a popular AI textbook that, for example, they don't know why similar concepts appear close by in the vector space, so maybe you just know something other people don't.
I'm not taking a position here but the person you're replying to stated that Anthropic are working on AGI, not that their current LLM offering will evolve into AGI.
Europe doesn’t give a shit about another American company and their employees trying to dominate their markets and import their workaholic American culture. They will tell Anthropic to go home.
"Europe" is not a single entity with uniform opinions. As an European, I would much rather have hardworking people and """workaholic""" culture than regress to an underdeveloped culture fueled by laziness.
The designation says any contractor, supplier, or partner doing business with the US military can’t conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Well, AWS has JWCC. Microsoft has Azure Government. Google has DoD contracts. If that language is enforced broadly, then Claude gets kicked off Bedrock, Vertex, and potentially Azure… which is where all the enterprise revenue lives. Claude cannot survive on $200/mo individual powerusers. The math just doesn’t math.
None of the hyper scalers are going to stop offering Claude. All of the big 3 have invested billions of dollars into Anthropic, and have tens (if not hundreds) of billions more tied up in funding deals with them. Amazon and Google are two of the largest shareholders of Anthropic.
Anthropic is going to be fine. The DoD is going to walk this back and pretend it never happened to save face.
Tens, maybe hundreds, of billions? That’s cute. The DoD will spend $961b this year. It does that like clockwork every year, year after year.
Anthropic is not even close to too big to fail. And even if this could get settled in court 5 years from now, this can easily throw enough of a wrench into their revenue streams to kill their flywheel.
This isn’t “a few billion”. Maybe you missed some of the earlier comments. The hyperscalers have hundreds of billions of dollars tied up in deals with Anthropic. You’re delusional if you think these boards aren’t going to have a back room talk with Hegseth to smack some sense into him. This gets walked back next week, guaranteed.
That $961 billion includes things like airplanes and bullets, tech companies are only getting a taste of that pie not anywhere close to the whole thing.
GovCloud revenue is in the tens of billions of dollars. Bedrock less so. Almost every FedRAMP product uses the same codebase for Fed and non-Fed, and this would force most FedRAMP vendors to blackball Anthropic.
The JWCC, which is larger than GovCloud, was only $9b, split across three companies, over ten years. It’s peanuts compared to the investments that the hyperscalers have with Anthropic.
JWCC is not the only project. Vendors like Crowdstrike also rely on hyperscalers to serve their products to federal customers, and the codebase is shared.
This announcement has made Anthropic toxic in the entire dependency chain because it means years of efforts and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars rearchitecting entire platforms and renegotiating contracts.
The entire cybersecurity industry has a TAM of $208 BILLION [0]
> because it means years of efforts and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars rearchitecting entire platforms and renegotiating contracts.
This is exactly why this announcement has not made Anthropic toxic. The entire industry knows how ridiculous this move is from Hegseth, and it’s going to be rolled back next week once the adults get back from their weekend.
I would find that a lot more plausible if people had not spent the past week giving me similar arguments, in precisely the same tone, for why this was an empty threat and would never happen in the first place. If Amazon and Google do not immediately join a business coalition to get Trump out of power, Hegseth will be even happier to get an opportunity to prove his power by destroying them. Trump either doesn't want to stop him or has become too senile to stop him.
" Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic."
Example: Perhaps "Amazon US Services LLC" or whichever subsidiary they have that deals with the government will be banned from using Claude, and all of it's other subsidiaries won't?
Well, IANAL but tweets aren't legislation. What that tweet implies is something that would have to be amended into the NDAA, which requires congress. Hegseth can't just go on a drunk rant and have everything out of his mouth become law.
The supply chain risk directive would come from existing procurement law, which only allows the DoD to require contractors to certify that Anthropic is not used in the fulfillment of any government work.
Which is also separate from Trumps' EO, which being an EO only applies to the federal government directly.
So yeah, banning any contractor, supplier, or partner from any commercial activity with Anthropic is just fantasy without going through congress first.
> Contractors can still use Claude internally in their business, so long as it is not used in government work directly.
I work in the enterprise SaaS and cybersecurity industry. There is no way to guarantee that amongst any FedRAMP vendor (which is almost every cybersecurity and enterprise SaaS or on their roadmap).
Almost all FedRAMP products I've built, launched, sold, or funded were the same build as the commerical offering, but with siloed data and network access.
This means the entire security and enterprise SaaS industry will have to shift away from Anthropic unless the DPA is invoked and management is changed.
More likely, I think the DoD/DoW and their vendors will force Anthropic to retrain a sovereign model specifically for the US Gov.
Edit: Can't reply
> This is the core assertion that is not clear nor absolute.
If Walmart can forcibly add verbiage banning AWS from it's vendors and suppliers, the US government absolutely can. At least with Walmart they will accept a segmented environment using GCP+Azure+OCI. Retraining a foundational model to be Gov compliant is a project that would cost billions.
By declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk, it will now be contractually added by everyone becuase no GRC team will allow Anthropic anywhere in a company that even remotely touches FedRAMP and it will be forcibly added into contracts.
No one can guarantee that your codebase was not touched by Claude or a product using Claude in the background, so this will be added contractually.
> This means the entire security and enterprise SaaS industry will have to shift away from Anthropic unless the DPA is invoked and management is changed.
This is the core assertion that is not clear nor absolute.
From what I’ve heard the actual restriction is just on using Claude for stuff they’re doing for the Pentagon. They’ll keep using Claude for everything else and be less effective when they work for the government, and that’s fine because everyone else working for the government will have the same handicap.
This will likely go to court, again as Dario has stated this is blatant retaliation as no US company has ever been designated a supply chain risk and they continue to operate on classified systems for 6 more months.
Yea strong odds this goes to court, the DoD’s clearly inconsistent logic is ridiculed by a judge, the designation is dropped, and everyone quietly goes about their way with the DoD continuing to use Claude according to the existing terms of the contract.
Topics like this are where I struggle with HN philosophy. Normally avoiding politics and ideology where possible, created higher quality and more interesting discussions.
But how do you even begin to discuss that Tweet or this topic without talking about ideology and to contextualize this with other seemingly unrelated things currently going on in the US?
I genuinely don't think I'm conversationally agile enough to both discuss this topic while still able to avoid the political/ideological rabbit-hole.
You can't discuss this topic without broaching the idea that the government is acting in bad faith — that they don't actually believe that Anthropic is a supply-chain risk and that this action is meant to punish the company. But this is in the HN guidelines regarding comments:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
If a commenter who supports the government makes the same argument that the government is making, the guidelines tell us to assume good faith.
My conclusion is that any topic where a commenter might be making a bad faith argument is outside the scope of Hacker News.
My interpretation of that is that I’m required to assume good faith on behalf of other commenters. So, if someone makes the same argument as the government, I’m supposed to assume good faith there, but nothing requires me to assume good faith on behalf of the government. So I can say that this is obviously a shakedown without breaking the rules.
I've been on hn for years and I see this kind of sentiment raised all the time. It is not my understanding of the guidelines.
Politics and ideology are not off topic, provided the subject matter is of interest, or "gratifying", to colleagues in the tech/start-up space.
What's important is that we don't use rhetoric, bad faith or argumentation to force our views on others. But expressing our opinions about how policy affects technology and vice versa has always been welcome, in my observation.
So, what do you think about the US government's decision, and why?
Being a hacker used to be an extremely political and ideological movement. Then capitalism came along and bought the term. It's about time we take that word back where it belongs.
If the last ten years have taught us anything it's that politics just isn't a topic isolated to the halls of government. It's real life. Political alignment has never so starkly indicative of your position on fundamental human morality. At the same time we've never had a government be so directly involved in private businesses.
>Topics like this are where I struggle with HN philosophy. Normally avoiding politics and ideology where possible, created higher quality and more interesting discussions.
Our whole society runs on technology. All tech is inherently political.
A "no politics" stance is merely an endorsement of the status quo.
Why would you want to be non-political in 2026? The current administration is awful in ways we couldn't have imagined. There's no sense in not talking about it.
I appreciate your restraint, and keeping this a high quality discussion space. As a political dissident myself, I don't mind some threads going political, I expect them to. The best ones are when there is a lot of disagreement or debate. As long as its not in every unrelated thread....
> Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.
I’m sure the lawyers just got paged, but does this mean the hyperscalers (AWS, GCP) can’t resell Claude anymore to US companies that aren’t doing business with the DoD? That’s rough.
Probably yes. Additionally the (probably more for AWS) won't be allowed to use it internally either. This will probably apply to all the top SaaS/software companies unilaterally.
Additionally, every major university will undoubtedly have to terminate the use of Claude. First on the list will be universities that run labs under DOD contracts (e.g. MIT, Princeton, JHU), DOE contracts (Stanford, University of California, UChicago, Texas A&M, etc...), NSF facilities (UIUC, Arizona, CMU/Pitt, Purdue), NASA (Caltech).
Following that it will be just those who accept DOD/DOE/NSF grants.
Billable hours will win figuring it out but in theory, no because they can’t test it or use it.
Generally any machine that touches Supply chain Risk software cannot ship any software to DoD. AWS has separate clouds but software comes from same place.
AWS/GCP/Azure all do business with the DoD and at least AWS and Azure use Claude a decent amount internally. AWS’s Kiro tool (which is used internally instead of Claude Code) relies entirely on Claude models.
This is almost certainly going to be rolled back, because I guarantee the DoD isn’t going to stop doing business with the hyper scalers, and the hyper scalers aren’t going to stop doing business with Anthropic.
Agree with other reply. I don’t think it’s backward. No they said any commercial activity. Does not feel like a stretch that commercial activity includes reselling api usage.
I don't think he got it backwards, at least if Hegseth's statement is accurate. AWS, GCP, etc. all do business with DoD. If they, as DoD contractors, are no longer allowed to do business with Anthropic, then presumably they have to stop re-selling or hosting Anthropic's models to anyone.
Oh you tender babes, trying to logic the meaning of what the lieutenant of the biggest crime syndicate in the world means with his words, as if this was a well thought-out strategy... it's a shakedown; it would make more sense to ask "at least if Hegseth is sober..."
I don't see how you get that reading. Anthropic is clearly allowed to sell Claude to companies not doing business with the US Military. If anything that's more likely to be non-US companies.
IIRC, the supply chain risk designation is sticky which is why it tends to ultimately mean "nobody can work with this". Amazon using claude means a DoD company can't use Amazon. Every business that touches claude gets tainted.
It's a bit like how the US Cuba sanctions worked and why they effectively isolated Cuba from everything.
Because Anthropic sells Claude through other companies that in turn do business both with Anthropic and the government. These intermediaries, large cloud companies, can't offer Claude anymore if they want to keep the government as a customer.
The government is faaaaaaaaaaaar too invested in Azure and AWS for Microsoft or Amazon to give even half a shit. The DOD has no where else to go and the companies know it. They'll sit on their hands until the legal maneuvers play out, which will take longer than this administration will be in office.
You expect hyperscalers to play chicken with the DoD?
The courts have historically been pretty consistent about giving the DoD whatever the fuck they want, going back to WW2 and even longer for the predecessors of the DoD. I agree that the next administration might reverse it, but the thing is, the government will stay irrational longer than Anthropic will remain solvent.
The US government told every American company to stop doing business with Huawei and they all did it overnight, even when it cost them billions. TSMC stopped fabricating for them, Google pulled Android licensing… The machinery of sanctions compliance is extremely well-oiled and companies fold instantly because the outcome of noncompliance is literally getting thrown in prison.
This is also true, unless the government can force them to drop Anthropic on the basis that the alternative- the government dropping them- is unworkable.
Or Pete Hegseth will threaten to do the same to them unless they comply, and they will demonstrate the same inexcusable cowardice the American business class has consistently demonstrated this past year. Hope I'm wrong and this has finally woken them up!
The stock market will be spooked if the US govt can willy nilly high trajectory darling of the AI world like this though.
Who's next? OpenAI? Google? What if they refuse to allow the DoD to use AI with zero safeguards and Trump's goons decide they are also a "supply chain risk"?
No. The stock market has understood for generations that it's the guys with the guns that protect their gold. The stock market will have a sigh of relief.
McCarthyism began in 1947, with Truman demanding goverment employees be "screened for loyalty". They wanted to remove anyone who was a member of an "organization" they didn't like. It began with hearings, and then blacklists, and then arrests and prison sentences. It lasted until 1959. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism)
This is the new McCarthyism. Do what the administration says, or you will be blacklisted, or worse.
"They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards; they have also threatened to designate us a “supply chain risk”—a label reserved for US adversaries, never before applied to an American company—and to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the safeguards’ removal. These latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security." from Dario's statement (https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war)
Supply chain risk ? Seems the risk here is the US Gov't wanting free reign to do whatever they want - - when they want.
Look no further than the famous expose by Mark Klein, the former AT&T technician and whistleblower who exposed the NSA's mass surveillance program in 2006, revealing the existence of "Room 641A" in San Francisco. He discovered that AT&T was using a "splitter" to copy and divert internet traffic to the NSA, proving the government was monitoring massive amounts of domestic communication.
If you read Anthropic statement carefully, they explicitly confirm they are already working with the U.S. government on a range of military and national security use cases, many including areas that clearly relate to real world lethal operations.
They are only refusing two narrow, but important categories. Framing this as blanket "refusal to support the DoD" feels like an angry, reactive own goal rather than a careful reading of what they actually said.
So far the march toward dictatorship keep being detoured by sheer incompetence. In any case, is hard to seize power when you can’t organize a group chat...
Basically now all those projects are screwed and need to restart with another provider. I'm sure that's not going to be a massive PITA and delay for all involved.
The military already has access to Grok, but doesn't want it, because it's an inferior model, even compared to open source ones. So the military would probably choose to replace supply chain risk Claude with Qwen or Kimi before Grok.
It would be untouchable irony for the US to cut all ties with Anthropic and replace them with models developed by Chinese labs. The Onion becomes more irrelevant with each passing day.
How many generations does it take before the historians/archeologists uncover old issues of The Onion and decide it was the authoritative news of the day?
Grok is according to most benchmarks pretty close to SOTA. It is where the leaders were just a few weeks ago.
Which exactly is best changes on almost a weekly basis as different companies tweak their best model. I doubt the military would want to be switching supplier every week.
From the public comments over the last few days, my guess is they want a militarized version of Claude. Starting with a box they want to put in the basement of the Pentagon where Antropic can't just switch off the ai. Then some guardrails are probably quite bothersome for the military and they want them removed. Concretely if you try to vibe-target your ICBMs Claude is hopefully telling you that that's a bad idea.
Now, my guess is in the ensuing lawsuit Antropic's defense will be that that is just not a product they offer, somewhat akin to ordering Ford to build a tank variant of the F150.
> Concretely if you try to vibe-target your ICBMs Claude is hopefully telling you that that's a bad idea.
On the non-nuclear battlefield, I expect that the goverment wants Claude to green-light attacks on targets that may actually be non-combatants. Such targets might be military but with a risk of being civilian, or they could be civilians that the government wants to target but can't legally attack.
Humans in the loop would get court-martialed or accused of war crimes for making such targeting calls. But by delegating to AI, the government gets to achieve their policy goals while avoiding having any humans be held accountable for them.
Why can't Grok achieve this? Everyone is saying they don't want to work with Grok because Grok sucks, but it's good enough for generating plausible deniability, isn't it?
> Starting with a box they want to put in the basement of the Pentagon where Antropic can't just switch off the ai.
They already have that. By definition. If Anthropic has done the work to be able to run on classified networks, then it's already running air-gapped and is not under Anthropic's control.
The thing is, just because you're in a SCIF doesn't (1) mean you can just break laws and (2) Anthropic don't have to support "off-label" applications.
So this is not about what they have and what it can do today - it's about strong-arming anthropic into supporting a bunch of new applications Anthropic don't want to support (and in turn, which Anthropic or it's engineers could then be held legally liable for when a problem happens).
Claude will answer all of those questions. The restriction Anthropic has is letting Claude pull the trigger and vibe-murder with no humans in the loop.
I reached to answer but idk what you mean by the second question. Long story short, Department of “War” wants Anthropic to say theres no restrictions on their use of Claude, Anthropic wants to say you can’t use Claude for domestic mass surveillance or automating killing people domestically or in foreign countries. Rest is just complication. And don’t peer too closely at the “Do”W”” wants Anthropic to say $X, the Team Red line (or, whatever’s left of them publicly after this last year) is basically “you can’t tell the gov’t what it can and can’t do, that’s it, it’s not that Do”W” will use it for that”
> Can someone in plain terms explain what this is really about?
This administration built almost entirely of dunces and conmen has convinced itself/been convinced that chatbots will help them in deciding where to send nukes, and/or they are invested in the incredibly over-leveraged companies engaged in the AI-boom and stand to profit directly by siphoning taxpayer dollars to said companies. My money is on the latter more than the former, but they're also incredibly stupid, so who's to say, maybe they actually think Claude can give strategic points.
The Republicans have abandoned any pretense of actual governance in favor of pulling the copper out of the White House walls to sell as they will have an extremely hard time winning any election ever again since after decades of crowing about the cabal of pedophiles that run the world, we now know not only how true that actually is, but that the vast majority are Conservatives and their billionaire buddies, and the entire foundation and financial backing of what's now called the alt-Right, with some liberals in there for flavor too of course.
If this shit was going down in France, the entire capital would have been burned to the ground twice over by now.
Or there won't be another election. They keep telling us there won't be another election. Why aren't we more alarmed by that? Why are we assuming they are lying about that?
Yes. All companies that deal with the government have agreed to let the government do whatever it wants within the bounds of whatever it is those companies do.
That's a shame. They might at least continue to work together to spy on foreigners. I don't understand the fuss anyway, what do claude models do that gpt and gemini can't?
As a foreigner, i see this as a great thing! I was about to cancel my Claude sub, but now i might hold on to it for a little and see how this plays out.
Future Trump rally: "And I hear Anthropic monkeyed with their dishonest chatbot Claude. They turned it Democrat! They trained it to say we lost the election against Sleepy Joe!"
Sure but I don't find them irreplaceable. Actually anthropic models have dropped out of my top ten usage this month. I only use opus occasionally for writing plans, its been pretty unreliable at executing.
A good reason to outlaw bribes is that politicians tend to be incredibly cheap and offer an extremely high ROI.
Albeit at the cost of a nice democracy.
You're forgetting that this is the same guy who managed to bankrupt a casino. He's not actually that good with money and until the latest bribe channels opened, eg Trump Coin and the Board of Peace, opened their finances may have been in a bit of a mess. Also I'd bet the ballroom donation was much larger, it's a massive blackhole of graft waiting to happen.
It's also not solely about money, you can get far just knowing how to chum it up with Trump when you get in the room with him. Look at the odd quasi-bromance between him and Mamdani who you'd expect to be enemy #1 but Mamdani knows how to schmooze the exact type of New York Guy Trump is.
For fascism, it's not always about getting something you think is a lot. It's about a power relationship. Trump has demonstrated that Nvidia will bow to his will.
It's also potentially an implementation of the foot-in-the-door technique (https://www.simplypsychology.org/compliance.html). It's a common manipulative strategy where you get someone to do a small favor for you which makes them much more likely to do a large favor for you later.
The branch of government tasked to execute the law has been ignoring laws. So we'll get a (from Trump's point of view) adversarial congress, so what, let's ignore them, what are they going to do about it?
Looking forward to a military platoon defying orders and seizing the president, hey, all countries suffer through coups, about time this young democracy go through one!
The terms of these markets do not account for a scenario, quite likely if authoritarian takeover does happen, where the House of Representatives is a rump organization which does not exercise effective power. There was a years-long period in Venezuela where the country's traditional legislature met and conducted business under the leadership of the opposition party, but actual legislative power was held jointly by the Supreme Court and a secondary legislature that Nicolas Maduro set up.
I feel this is a facile interpretation of the phrase.
A more steel-man interpretation of POSIWID--the way it's intended to be understood--would be: "What an established system accomplishes in the long term reveals something important of the the true preferences of the various interests that control it, which can easily diverge from the system's stated goals."
Great read. I've always noticed that the type of argument invoked is often less telling than when and in which context you invoke that argument.
You can make a lot of claims and they can match to reality a lot - normally people think of evaluating things in terms of a strict "does this fit or does this not", but it's often the meta-style (why do you keep bringing up that argument in that context?) that's important, even if it's not "logically bulletproof".
Wow that post is bad. The author clearly never actually attempted to understand what POSWID actually means and where it is coming from. Perhaps, instead of looking at Twitter, they should have opened Wikipedia. Or, better yet, Stafford Beers books (though admittedly, he was a pretty atrocious writer).
The follow-up is slightly better. But still not very convincing, IMO. They get far too stuck on a literal interpretation. Of something that self-describes as a heuristic.
The phrase does not make more sense even if we go all the way back to Beers. I certainly don't feel alone in not understanding how he went from his (fair) observation that "[There's] no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do" to his more controversial conclusion: "The purpose of a system is what it does (aka POSIWID)".
Surely, there were many more sensible (but perhaps less quippy) stops between the two.
Trump wrote a long rant on Truth Social and ordered ALL federal agencies to stop using Anthropic. Not just the department of defense. This is straight up authoritarian.
Meanwhile, irrelevant "AI Czar" David Sacks, member of the PayPal mafia alongside known Epstein affiliates Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, is furiously retweeting all the posts from Trump, Hegseth, and other accounts. He is such a coward and anti American:
Is it? Are you claiming nuclear bombs are not both essential and also a risk to national security?
Aren't all the AI companies saying that AI poses even a greater threat to humanity than nukes?
How can these two not be deeply connected? If a technology poses humanity extinction level of risk of course it will also be a matter of national security - how can it not be?
> Aren't all the AI companies saying that AI poses even a greater threat to humanity?
20-30 years ago eco-terrorists bombed and burned down a number of biological research laboratories and other targets, because of the perceived risks of gene technology.
Given all the current talk (and the famous scifi movies) about the risks of AI, I am a bit puzzled how there are no similar activists groups trying to sabotage AI facilities.
What is it that made the risk from gene manipulation feel so much more real and leading to actions, than the current AI risk? The Terminator movie franchise is more famous than any scifi movies about gene technology. (Edit: I guess Jurassic Park franchise surpasses The Terminator.)
That's not wha the designation means. You're looking for some interpretation of the term that makes this not a contradiction, and such do exist to be found, but those aren't the correct definition.
I don’t see a contradiction here. If control is out of the hands of decision makers, that’s a supply chain risk
. Were it not for that, the service is seen as critical to national security.
I dunno, safeguard seems like a weasel word here. It’s just reserving control to one party over another. It’s understandable why the DoD(W) wouldn’t like that.
That link is broken for me but I assume you meant to link to [0]. I think if there is a “safeguard” in a system, that definitely fits the bill of a supply chain risk. The only vague term here is “adversary”.
HN separates trailing dots from URLs, so that you can have working URLs at the end of a sentence. Hence you have to percent-encode trailing dots if they are a necessary part of the actual URL. (Same for some other punctuation characters, probably.)
This behavior is common for auto-hyperlinking of URLs in running text, so it’s bad practice to have such URLs.
Ugh, sorry for the broken link, I even pasted the same string into a new tab to make sure it worked because I thought the period at the end looked weird, and it was fine. Dunno how it got mangled.
[EDIT] Oh man, yours is like that too? WTF.
[EDIT2] If I follow your link, hit the 404 page, then add a period at the end of the URL, it does load. God that's strange.
"Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic."
This is authoritarian behavior. You're having trouble negotiating a contract, so instead of just canceling it - you basically ban all of F500 from doing business with that firm.
American people: latinamerican here. Maybe it's silly to root for a country in the world hegemony arena. I've usually been partial to the USA over China. Now I'm not rooting for your country anymore. As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather have China being the foremost power, at least they seem to be less keen on invading or heavily strong-arming latinamerica
Should military contractors put conditions on the use of their weapons?
Here's our tank, but you can't invade Iran with it?
We think your invasion of Venezuela is illegal, we're activating the kill switch on your jets.
That's a real dangerous proposition.
That’s the crazy thing. This whole dispute was over Anthropic saying no to fully automated kill bots. They only required there be a human in the loop to press the button.
Anthropic didn't even say "no", it was more of a "not yet, let's work on this".
I really wonder what Palantir's role in all this is because domestic surveillance sounds exactly like Palantir and whatever happened during the Maduro raid led to Anthropic asking Palantir questions which the news reports is the snowball that escalated to this.
They also said no to fully automated AI domestic surveillance. I suppose non-US citizens like me are screwed but that's at least some small comfort for the natives. FVEY will just spy on each other and share but at least someone tried.
The ones that still assume big brother will be spying on and killing the people they hate. Trump openly campaigned on getting revenge on his enemies. I can only assume his supporters want this. The danger of course is if/when the leopards eat their faces
I guess the problem for Trump is if he orders the army to gun down protesters, there’s a good chance they will refuse to do it. While a bot can just be prompted to go ahead.
If we were able to give the Ukrainians fully automated kill bots, and those kill bots enabled Ukraine to swiftly expel the Russians from their territories, would that not be a good thing? Or would you rather the meat grinder continue to destroy Ukraine's young men to satisfy some moral purity threshold?
If we could give Taiwan killbots that would ensure China could never invade, or at least could never occupy Taiwan, would that be good or bad? I have a feeling I know what the Taiwanese would say.
While we're at it, should we also strip out all the machine learning/AI driven targeting systems from weapons? We might feel good about it, but I would bet my life savings that our future adversaries will not do the same.
Yes, I think Russia's invasion of Ukraine is quite clearly a binary Russia=bad, Ukraine=good. Same for the impending Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Perhaps you could explain the nuances under which Russia was the good guy? Better yet, maybe you could explain it to the Ukrainians who have been displaced, or the family members of those who have been killed, or the soldiers who have been permanently maimed?
Whether you or I like it or not, automatic kill bots will be a thing. It will only be a question of which countries have them and which do not.
And there is evidence automated killbots were already used in Gaza (not that that's a good thing).
Generally, in war, there are no rules, and someone is going to make automated killbots, and I expect one place to see them quite soon is in the Russia-Ukraine war. And yes, I'm hoping the good guys use them and win over the bad guys. And yes, there are good guys and bad guys in that conflict.
Ukrainian young (24 y.o.) man here. Living and working in police 30 kilometres away from the actual frontline.
No, thanks, we don't need those "fully automated kill bots". There's absolutely no guarantee that they wouldn't kill the operator (I mean, the one who directs them) or human ally.
We're pretty much fine with drone technology we have.
But for me personally, that's not the most important point. What is more important - and what almost no one in the Western countries seems to realise (no offence, but many of westerners seem to be kind of binary-minded: it's either 0xFFFFFF or 0x000000, no middle ground at all) - is that on the Russian side, soldiers are not "fully automated kill bots" either. Sure, there's a lot of... let's say - war criminals. Yes, for sure. But en masse they are the same young men that you can see on the Ukrainian side. Moreover, many people in Ukraine have relatives in Russia, and there already were the cases where two siblings were in different armies, literally fighting with each other. So in my opinion, "fully automated kill bots" are not an option here. At least unless you deploy them in Moscow and St. Peterburg to neutralize all of the Russian elites, military commandment and other decision-making persons of the current regime.
Fully automated kill bots are coming, whether any of us like it or not. The question is, which militaries will have them, and which militaries will be sitting ducks? China is pursuing autonomous weapons at full speed.
Personally, I think it'd be great to have the Anthropic people at the table in the creation of such horrors, if only to help curb the excesses and incompetencies of other potential offerings.
'yet'. Their reason for not allowing autonomous weapons usage was it isn't ready, not that they wouldn't do it on principle. Only the surveillance objection was on principle.
Sleep well in a box under the overpass maybe. If Amazon can’t serve Anthropics model until the courts get everything figured out it will be too late for them.
As written this would be the end of Anthropic. AWS, Microsoft et al are all suppliers of the DoW and as written they must immediate stop doing business with Anthropic. Will be interesting to see how this unfolds.
I’m just laughing at the possibility of it he US military being forced to use Chinese open source AI models because every US model provider refuses to work with them.
To counter point, do you think AI companies located on our adversaries turf will take the same stand? I agree its nightmarish to think of AI surveillance. But why is that being lumped in with weaponry? I see these as two separate issues.
Anthropic isn't even taking a particular hard stance. Their mass surveillance prohibition only applies to domestic spying, so they're a-OK with spying adversaries. If all of the AI companies all over the world took the same stance, it wouldn't improve the life of Americans one bit.
The only other thing that the foreign AI companies could do is say no to automated killing bots, which doesn't even seem like that good of an idea considering that your countrymen will most likely have to interact with these robots that can kill without any oversight.
He's more polarizing than usual maybe with stronger approve/unapprove ratings but his net popularity is in line with most 2nd term presidents at this stage.
It seems like some comments here are from merged threads AND front-dated?
Makes for very confusing reading when comments from "1 hour ago" are actually on preceding events from earlier, before TFA news (announcement of designation).
mods: Especially in sensitive and rapidly developing situations like this, please don't mess with timestamps of comments. It's effectively revisionism.
Ukrainians and Russians are experimenting with FPV drones using AI for target acquisition and homing. Not yet economically viable because it is cheaper to give your FPV fiber spool instead of Nvidia Jetson to bypass jamming.
When we have first politician blown to bits by autonomous AI FPV there will be sheer panic of every politician in the world to put the genie back into the bottle. It will be too late at that point.
Autonomous loitering munitions with 'AI' (image classification CNNs) are already in service and have been used - most demonstrably by the IDF.
Even during the Nagorno-Karabakh war, Azeri loitering munitions were able to suppress Armenian air defenses by hitting them when they rolled out of of concealment. I believe that killchain requires a level of autonomous functionality.
Azerbaijan was buying a lot of weapons from Israel prior to Nagorno Karabach war, so it is very likely that you have been talking about same weapon system in both cases.
However Russians and Ukrainians are using AI recognition in recon drones, but not yet in FPV. There is strong suspicion that long range one way attack drones are using AI during terminal guidance, but I did not see it confirmed by either side.
Decades of speculative science fiction, thought experiments, and discourse led to this. It’s gratifying to see that we’ve garnered enough concern, a major AI lab risking this to reign in the potential of runaway AI disasters. Hopefully we see other labs follow.
There is clearly a need to codify into all of these historical acts that they can't be invoked unless there is a declaration of war (or some other appropriate prerequisite).
This administration consistently exploits what were designed to be emergency powers because no such requirement exists. Leave no room for interpretation.
The current administration scoffs at laws. Nothing stopping them in that case from declaring war on Nauru and doing all the same. The solution is a sane, informed electorate, which is much more difficult in this age where a few disgustingly rich people have so much influence over news and media.
This sounds like a message to would-be founders: don't base your company in the US. The strongest markets to do business are the ones with the most freedom from government meddling. In the US, big government is happy to use its power to crush private enterprise that it doesn't like.
Note that previously this label has been applied (nearly?) exclusively to non-US companies. US companies that don't do business with the DoD are not affected, and non-US companies that do business with the DoD are affected.
It's nice to see Anthropic sticking to their terms. I just have one question in all this. Why is Anthropic being singled out when it seems all the other big players are down to play with the DoD? Is this just a pissing match, or have the Anthropic models been proven the real winner for them?
It's same reason this administration recently tried to indict six Congresspersons for urging military members to resist "illegal orders." They want to demonize anyone who isn't blindly loyal to their side.
It may not be obvious. But this is actually a good thing when we looking back in a few years. I always feel weird that executive branch can just destroy private enterprise with "Supply-chain Risk" / "Terrorist List" without Due Process.
That's a good thing right? In a capitalist society, you cannot just burn $300B without consequences. Not to mention it is not just anyone's money. It is Saudi's.
> "Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic."
Does this mean Azure & AWS will have to stop offering Claude as a model?
I wonder, can't Amazon create a new legal entity to split AWS into "AWS-for-DoD" and "AWS-for-everyone-else"? So one can work with Anthropic and the other can't. Not sure how it works in the US.
Does Anthropic have standing to sue to Government for libel? I don’t think the Government is allowed to arbitrarily designate a company a supply chain risk without good cause.
A drunkard, ex-fox news host, wants mass surveillance and automated killing, what could go wrong?
I wish I thought enough Americans had the spine required to stand up to this, and I know for a fact that a lot do... the solution is literally written into your constitution.
Help me understand the line Anthropic is drawing in the sand?
Don't get me wrong i'm glad they are unwilling to do certain things...
but to me it also seems a little ironic that Anthropic literally is partnered with Palantir which already mass surveills the US. Claude was used in the operation in Venezuala.
Their line not to cross seems absurdly thin?
Or there is something mega scary thats already much worse they were asked to do which we dont know about I guess.
The whole reason this is happening is because Anthropic looked into how Claude was used in the Maduro op and found it to violate the negotiated terms of service.
Their hard lines are:
- no usage of AI to commit murder WITHOUT a human in the loop
What i'm saying is yes the UX is completely irrelevant and so is adding a human in the loop before murder.
A real stance would be not allowing your product to contribute to murder of any kind. I think focusing on the petty distinction they are making is missing the forest for the trees.
Thank you for the clarifications though it is helpful context.
Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far-right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance.
Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.
I'd at least, you know, pretend we had a top-secret amazing model. By airing all of this publicly, they've basically admitted that Claude is the best there is.
Given that Anthropic is clearly risking their entire business just to stand up for what they believe is right, which appears to be what everyone here agrees with, is everyone who is supporting them here planning to also start using Anthropic and switch away from other vendors until they follow suit? Or are folks planning to just use whatever regardless?
Edit: I should perhaps clarify I'm more interested in paid users, rather than free. It's harder to tell if free users switching would help them or hurt them... curious if anyone has thoughts on that too.
> Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic.
Kesha tried to hug Jerry Seinfeld vibes.
> Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon.
Strange way of saying "this vendor doesn't meet our software requirements".
> they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission
Err... You approached them?
> a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.
It's an orthogonal point, but "Silicon Valley ideology" has made up a significant portion of the USA's GDP for the last however many years.
> Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable.
Again... You approached them?
> I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security.
Like most companies in the world I imagine. They just haven't been approached yet.
> to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.
Internally re-framing all the recent "EU moving away from American tech!" articles as "EU builds more patriotic services!"
> This decision is final.
Nothing says "final" like a Tweet. The most uncontroversial and binding mechanism of all communication.
I imagine I'm not the only one to switch over to giving Claude my money today. I'm sure the "Other" comments for the cancellation were often as blunt as mine.
Q: "Is there anything we could do to change your mind?"
Don't worry, they will be seized by the government soon. Sounds crazy right. Not that far from the headline though, that would sound insane a mere 18 months ago.
The whole thing is fascinating. In my heart of heart, in principle, I want models to be essentially unrestricted, but I still find it somewhat problematic that government thinks it can say: you will make adjust your product to match our exact expectations even if you don't sign an updated contract with us. Odd stuff. I know they are trotting out War powers, but.. well.. we are not at war ( at least not yet or at least not yet officially declared.. ).
Working with the government is typically a huge pain in the ass unless you have a lot of friends on the inside. It's not hard to do the math when you you dealing with a government whose acting incredibly oppositional.
I had the co-founder of Levels and current head of the US Treasury Sam Corcos reach out to me a few weeks ago for a job. I was initially kind of excited because I had really wanted to work for the Treasury a couple years ago, so I took the phone call with him.
He called me and he seemed like a nice enough guy, but I realized that he's one of the DOGE/Elon acolytes and he started talking about how he's "fixing" the Treasury and that every engineer is apparently supposed to use Claude for everything.
It would have been a considerable pay downgrade which wouldn't necessarily be a dealbreaker but being managed by DOGE would be, but mostly relevant is that I found it kind of horrifying that we're basically trusting the entire world's bank to be "fixed" with Claude Code. It's one thing when your ad platform or something is broken, but if Claude fucks something up in the Treasury that could literally start a war. We're going to "fix" all the code with a bunch of mediocre code that literally no one on earth actually understands and that realistically no one is auditing [1].
If they're going to "fix" all the Treasury code with stuff generated by Claude, I'm not sure they will have a choice but to stick with it, because very it seems very likely to me that it will be incomprehensible to anything but Claude.
[1] Be honest, a lot of AI generated code is not actually being reviewed by humans; I suspect that a lot of the AI code that's being merged is still basically being rubber-stamped.
There's an awful lot of momentum with the USD being the world currency. Even if it eventually declines I think it might take decades, if the British pound is anything to go by.
I am fine with this. If you are a defense contractor, you are a defense contractor, and you follow the military needs that you government believes are necessary - or you stop being a defense contractor.
I wouldn't want a bullet manufacturer to hold back on my government based on their own internal sense of ethics (whether I agreed with it or not, it's not their place)
You're fine with a company being designated a supply chain risk, a designation heretofore used exclusively for foreign adversaries and usually a death knell for most companies, because the government wants to break a negotiated terms of service and contract that they already accepted?
Bluster followed by a "we can't do it now but we will... soon". Whoever has the best model can do what they please you'll see. I work with these things daily as an engineer (been doing this shit for 25 years and wow it's like mana from heaven these days). Believe me no one is going to screw with themselves by not using the best one and right now Anthropic has it.
Under normal circumstances this would end up in court, but when this administration ignores court orders it doesnt like Anthropic would effectively have no legal recourse.
> Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles.
I don't think that Secretary Hegseth is qualified to speak on American principles.
Cheating on multiple spouses[1], being an active alcoholic, and being accused of multiple sexual assaults and paying off the accusers[3] is fundamentally incompatible with being a Secretary of Defense and a good leader.
Also, this violates freedom of speech and will probably get shot down in the courts.
If the government thinks the terms of Anthropic are unacceptable, they can just stop using them, right?
But why would you then retaliate and ban other companies from making business with Anthropic if they want to be a defense contractor?
How do these requirements make Anthropic a supply chain risk that makes them unusable for use by other companies?
> If the government thinks the terms of Anthropic are unacceptable, they can just stop using them, right
That is what they are doing.
> why would you then [....] ban other companies from making business with Anthropic if they want to be a defense contractor
Because, if it shops with Anthropic code, the DoD becomes subject to the restrictions when they receive the contractor's product. Anthropic's limitation is on the use, not on the product or distribution.
To stop using them requires making the suppliers still using them as well.
It's perfectly reasonable for the US government to end the contract if they no longer like the terms they agreed to (assuming the contract does in fact let them); it's not reasonable to destroy the counterparty to the contract in retaliation. The line "I am altering the deal; pray I don't alter it further" is literally spoken by Darth Vader, the most comic-book of comic-book villains.
I got downvoted for this in the other thread, but this is basically an attempt at bankrupting Anthropic. No US company has ever been designated a supply chain risk, and the foreign companies that are on that list are now doing 0 business in the US. Very large portion of the US economy relies on some contracts with the US government, Anthropic cannot survive this if this holds.
I don't think it will hold, in the end this is mafia behavior, but if it does, we are yet again in uncharted waters.
Anyone who does 996 is being exploited, unless they're the actual boss, in which case they're the ones doing the exploiting if they're pushing 996 on their employees.
This is why 996 bosses think AI can replace their employees, because they already see the employees as robots, not humans.
Its one thing to say "we cannot abide by these terms, so let's part ways", and its another entirely to respond this drastically. The Trump administration will look back on this decision as the most consequential in their efforts to win the 2026 midterms and Republican efforts in 2028. This is a $400B+ American company that has significant partial ownership from Amazon, Google, and other private equity sources; they just made serious enemies in SV, many of whom supported Trump in his 2024 election victory.
This is a pimple on the arse of said consequence. It's one tiny thing in a chain of many bigger things.
It's magnified because it's right now, but this won't affect midterm results barely a whisker compared to many other daily headlines.
There are no serious enemies to this administration in SV and I can't see this changing that. SV has bent the knee exactly like Anthropic didn't. They're not going to stand up because of this, they've proven they don't have those muscles.
OTOH it could amplify their base: “Big Tech refusing to work with us on National Security matters!” The base will never hear what/where the red line was drawn, just that Some Company in California (liberal/bad) is being Woke and Political.
I can't seem to find what being designated a "Supply-Chain Risk to National Security" implies from a legal standpoint. From what I can find, it doesn't seem to be a formal legal status. Curious if anyone knows more.
Basically, if you are a federal contractor, the designation means the DoD can force you to certify that Anthropic tech is not used in the fulfillment of your government work. Because it's just a DoD designation, and an executive order and not added to the NDAA, you can still use Claude for non-government (federal) touching work.
So using Claude Code to write software for the DoD is now a no go, you'd be in breach of procurement directives now.
If they go as far as to convince congress to add Anthropic to the NDAA, that would be a nationwide ban like Huawei making it illegal for any federal contractor to use the tech anywhere in their business.
But for now, even fed contractors can still use Claude in their business, just not directly for government work.
That doesn’t seem to match up with the original tweet though - it sounds a heck of a lot stronger:
> Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic
Emphasis mine.
And I’m looking at news organizations that presumably have staffs of legal analysts pouring over this stuff, and they also seem to be saying that it can’t be any commercial activity:
> The label means that no contractor or supplier that works with the military can do business with Anthropic.
I don't think it's ever been about strong or weak, or at least I don't think that's where the differentiation is. You always want 'strong' government, committed to the things it says it's committed to.
It's more been about the size of the government; that it should do a minimal amount of control (and do it well), but leave a lot of things for "the market to decide".
Having said all that, I think this issue is just tangential to any big/small government ideology. This is a hissy fit about a defence contractor sticking to their agreement where the DoD want to change the agreement in a way that goes against the contractors Mission Statement and/or the US Constitution itself.
The old ideology of the
Republicans doesn't mean anything here. This administration is purely about 'give me what I want, now!'.
And it's whims change with the breeze. Do not look for consistency here.
How 'bout that government meddling in the free market, eh?
Every conservative needs to do some very deep, very serious soul-searching. As for me, as a hyper-progressive, I'm drawing up proposals for nationalizing real estate developers in order to force them to build new houses to sell below cost.
A level up, this is only the beginning of the political headwinds for AI. There will be a lot more, especially if constituencies begin to get displaced. I don’t think “job loss” will really occur, at least not in a dramatic way overnight. But I do believe there will be both aggressive regulation and very aggressive taxation of this technology in the near/mid-term.
No, stop, I understand the politics here, but I’m asking about the technical fundamentals.
LLMs produce output of unknowable and unpredictable accuracy, and as far as we know, this is a mathematically unsolvable problem. This shit should not be within 1000 miles of a weapons system. Why are we even talking about this?
>Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.
Nevermind Claude, does that mean Anthropic's offices can't use a power company if that same company happens to supply electricity to a US military base? What about the water, garbage disposal, janitorial services? Fedex? Credit card payments? Insurance companies? Law firms? All the normal boring stuff Anthropic needs that any other business needs.
This is a corporate death penalty. Or corporate internal exile or something, I don't know of a good analogy.
Good. At least now I don't have to worry that my vibe-coded, unreviewed checkout button is accidentally going to hallucinate the command that blows up a kindergarten in Yemen.
We can actually get a glimpse of how AI might wipe out humanity here.
Model collapse making models identify everyone as a potential threat who needs to be eliminated.
Companies should have a right to refuse such requests on moral grounds though.
This stance is vindictive. Just don't use Claude in the military. Extending it to all government agencies is not right. They do great work. Can't deny that.
The US is such a shit show. Personally I hope this doesn't affect Anthropic's growth and development because I quite enjoy using their products and see them evolve.
Department of War is a teenage boy's idea of "manly" and "cool". Same with X. These juvenile idiocrats will be laughed at by children in the future studying history. "Seriously? How dumb were these people in the 21st century."
This is only the first year of this fascist government, and I believe the first powerful company that is taking a stance? Meta, Apple, etc. have all bent the knee right?
Already there 'February 23, 2026: The Pentagon confirmed a new agreement allowing Grok use in classified systems. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced it would go live soon on unclassified and classified networks, alongside other models, as part of feeding military data into AI.'
This will mean Grok becomes the defacto US Gov AI provider.
Why are so many adopting this name for what is by law, by the American people, called the Department of Defense? The name change pertains directly to the Anthropic issue, which is the function of the government and department, the power of the American people to govern themselves, and the role of the president relative to the soveriegn American people.
Well put and it bothers me too. It seems to be another case of Orwellian manipulation, i.e. an expression of power through language, functioning as a litmus test of the speaker's loyalty. Serious publications are not going along with it. More craven or (here) thoughtless ones are falling in line.
I mean the original name switch was much more "Orwellian manipulation" if anything changing it back to war is undoing the bullshit implications that everything it does is defense.
Surely the purpose of the organization is to defend the country? War seems more like the failure mode. The point here is that it was established by a law of Congress and so has an official name that should be respected until another law changes it.
OpenAI came out just last night or today claiming they would hold the same line as Anthropic. Makes me think both sides knew Elon had already won the contract.
And here’s the irony: Musk, who claimed only he is virtuous enough to defend us from AI, who insisted he always wanted model labs to be non profit and research focused, will now bring his for profit commercial entity into service to aid in mass domestic censorship and fully autonomous weapons of war.
In fact it won’t surprise me further if NVIDIA is strong armed into providing preference to xAI, in the interest of security, or if the government directly funds capital investments.
Anthropic saves some dignify and they’re the losers today, but we are the losers tomorrow.
I can't wait to read the transcript of the AUSA in front of a federal judge trying to explain threatening to declare a company a supply chain risk if the company doesn't supply things to the government.
> 2. No fully autonomous weapons (kill decisions without a human in the loop)
Surveillance takes place with or without Anthropic, so depriving DoW of Anthropic models doesn't accomplish much (although it does annoy Hegseth).
The models currently used in kill decisions are probably primitive image recognition (using neural nets). Consider a drone circling an area distinguishing civilians from soldiers (by looking for presence of rifles/rpgs).
New AI models can improve identification, thus reducing false positives and increasing the number of actual adversaries targeted. Even though it sounds bad, it could have good outcomes.
But compared to what - if Anthropic's models aren't perfect but still better than existing (old school) models, it's understandable DoW still wants to use them (since they're potentially the best available, despite imperfections). I think Hegseth is saying to Anthropic: "that's our call, not yours".
But surely if Anthropic thinks there's a risk that their models might make bad decisions, and the resulting civilian or etc deaths are blamed on them, it's their right to refuse to sell it for that purpose? That's why they had those restrictions in the contract to begin with. How can they be forced to provide something?
I agree they can't be forced to provide something. I just see DoW's reasoning, and I can't fault it.
Anthropic are taking a moral position which is admirable, but in this case it could actually make people's lives worse (if we assume more false positives and fewer true positives, which is probably a fair assumption given how much better 'modern' AI is compared to the neural net image recognition of just a few years ago).
Batshit situation, respectable position from Dario throughout.
But there's some irony in this happening to Anthropic after all the constant hawkish fearmongering about the evil Chinese (and open source AI sentiment too).
Hegseth's had a busy week: trying to kill Anthropic, attending the State of the Union, fighting Scouting America, and his regularly scheduled efforts to shame fatties & trans kids... Unlike so many in the orange one's inner circle who are just incompetent (say, Kash Patel for one), this dude is both incompentent a very bad, bad person.
I think odds are high a lot of these posts are by staffers. The posting volume is bananas, even granting that he spends a lot more time personally online and watching cable news et c. than any prior president, I don’t think there’s any way they’re all by him.
I do think a lot of the more hot-take type posts (often in response to stuff he’s watching on tv) are either actually him, or he’s dictating to an aide. These larger policy-type ones that he treats as quasi-executive-orders, I think are likely drafted by one or more of his cabinet-level folks, or others roughly as high up. That’s just my speculation based on reading the “tea leaves”, though.
As for official word, it waffles between “all of it’s him” and “oh not that one though, that racist video repost was a staffer who made a mistake”, so that’s little help in sussing out the truth (but I am rather certain they’re not all directly written and posted by him)
This is going to have two unintended consequences.
One, it’s going to fuck with the AI fundraising market. That includes for IPO. If Trump can do this to Anthropic, a Dem President will do it to xAI. We have no idea where the contagion stops.
Two, Anthropic will win in the long run. In corporate America. Overseas. And with consumers. And, I suspect, with investors.
A lot of corporate America contracts for the military in some capacity (it's a giant piggy bank and if you jump through a few hoops you get to siphon money out of it, so of course they do) and assuming this Tweet is accurate (Jesus, what a world) this will also affect them.
IDK maybe they have corporate structures that avoid letting this kind of thing mess too badly with the parts of their company that don't have contact with the government, or maybe it'll only apply to specifically the work they do for the government, but otherwise I expect it'll be devastating for Anthropic's B2B effort.
AI proponents have been very vocal about AI safety being meaningless. But nobody could have expected that the end of the world would have come because Trump puts Grok in charge of the US nuclear arsenal. We truly live in the dumbest timeline.
"THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! That decision belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military.
The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE..." - President Donald J. Trump
No surprise here. All government actions are now in the Trump mafia boss style.
“You won’t let us use your product unrestricted for military applications? Fuck you, we’re going to stop using it for anything at all across the entire federal government, even if not remotely related to military.”
Kudos to anthropic for standing up for their principles. Let's remember all the silicon valley leaders who embraced fascism without even needing to be pressured. We need more billionaires with backbones.
Defense contracting makes you rich and lazy. In the long run it is rare to see companies get sucked into defense contracting and stay relevant/on the cutting edge. We look at fighters and warships and think WOW! But the reality is that they are pretty far behind where they would actually be if there was a civilian purpose to them that mattered.
Yes its kinda wild that US government can kill a $300B+ company overnight, I guess this till go to court but not sure Anthropic can survive if OpenAI/xAI are happy to work with their own government to protect it's citizens.
This is why when ceos get summoned to testify they are always neutered and hat-in-hand humble. It’s trivial for the us gov to destroy any business unless you reach too big to fail status. Anthropic nor OpenAI is too big too fail yet.
Unfortunately their models suck, though. The difference between the best Grok model and Opus 4.6 is night and day, and not only for coding, but entirely across-the-board.
There was already a Democrat that beat Trump once. And looking at the past elections, it looks like the US elections are currently in a pendulum where the balance of power just swings back and forth.
Yes but you are not suggesting Biden runs again? I meant now, who looks like they could beat the Trump machine, possibly Gavin Newsom but not popular outside of Cali.
I don’t know what will happen, but it still could work out to benefit Anthropic. I believe the public sentiment is OVERWHELMINGLY with Anthropic on this one. Both their stance and standing up to Trump bullies.
Appealing to the pragmatic and the "game theory" of complying with authoritarian rule that you don't have power over - because the other party that you don't have any power over will benefit from it - is a zero-sum argument.
As best I can tell, his hard-drinking era ended many years before he entered the cabinet. But this does feel like a pretty impulsive decision, and there's some ambiguity over whether this statement was approved by the WH, or whether this was just the SECDEF taking it to the next level to look super loyal and badass. This ambiguity gives the WH room to walk it back in the coming weeks, depending on how things evolve.
I can honestly understand both positions. The U.S. military must be able to use technology as it sees fit; it cannot allow private companies to control the use of military equipment. Anthropic must prevent a future where AIs make autonomous life and death decisions without humans in the loop. Living in that future is completely untenable.
What I don’t understand is why the two parties couldn’t reach agreement. Surely autonomous murderous robots is something U.S. government has interest in preventing.
> it cannot allow private companies to control the use of military equipment.
The big difference here is that Claude is not military equipment. It's a public, general purpose model. The terms of use/service were part of the contract with the DoD. The DoD is trying to forcibly alter the deal, and Anthropic is 100% in the clear to say "no, a contract is a contract, suck it up buttercup."
We aren't talking about Lockheed here making an F-35 and then telling the DoD "oh, but you can't use our very obvious weapon to kill people."
> Surely autonomous murderous robots is something U.S. government has interest in preventing
After this fiasco, obviously not. It's quite clear the DoD most definitely wants autonomous murder robots, and also wants mass domestic surveillance.
Because the current government wants unquestioning obedience, not a discussion (assuming they were capable of that level of nuanced thought in the first place). The position of this government is "just do what I say or I will hit you with the first stick that comes to hand".
If the government doesn't want to sign a deal on Anthropic's terms, they can just not sign the deal. Abusing their powers to try to kill Anthropic's ability to do business with other companies is 10000% bullshit.
> What I don’t understand is why the two parties couldn’t reach agreement. Surely autonomous murderous robots is something U.S. government has interest in preventing.
Consider the government. It’s Hegseth making this decision, and he considers the US military’s adherence to law to be a risk to his plans.
I can see both sides as pertains to Trump's initial decision to stop working with Claude, but now, this over-the-top "supply chain risk" designation from Hegseth is something else. It's hard to square it with any real principle that I've seen the admin articulate.
> What I don’t understand is why the two parties couldn’t reach agreement.
Someday we'll have to elect a POTUS who is known for his negotiation and dealmaking skills.
I would assume the original terms the DoW is now railing against were in those original contracts that they signed. In that case it looks like the DoW is acting in bad faith here, they signed the original contact and agreed to those terms, then they went back and said no, you need to remove those safeguards to which Anthropic is (rightly so) saying no.
Am I missing something here?
EDIT: Re-reading Dario's post[1] from this morning I'm not missing anything. Those use cases were never part of the original contacts:
> Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War
So yeah this seems pretty cut and dry. Dow signed a contract with Anthropic and agreed to those terms. Then they decided to go back and renege on those original terms to which Anthropic said no. Then they promptly threw a temper tantrum on social media and designated them as a supply chain risk as retaliation.
My final opinion on this is Dario and Anthropic is in the right and the DoW is acting in bad faith by trying to alter the terms of their original contracts. And this doesn't even take into consideration the moral and ethical implications.
[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
> *Isn’t it unreasonable for Anthropic to suddenly set terms in their contract?* The terms were in the original contract, which the Pentagon agreed to. It’s the Pentagon who’s trying to break the original contract and unilaterally change the terms, not Anthropic.
> *Doesn’t the Pentagon have a right to sign or not sign any contract they choose?* Yes. Anthropic is the one saying that the Pentagon shouldn’t work with them if it doesn’t want to. The Pentagon is the one trying to force Anthropic to sign the new contract.
[1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anth...
> [1] This story requires some reading between the lines - the exact text of the contract isn’t available - but something like it is suggested by the way both sides have been presenting the negotiations.
I deal with far too many people who won't believe me without 10 bullet-proof sources but get very angry with me if I won't take their word without a source :(
> "Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War..."
The Pentagon feels it isn't Anthropic to set boundaries as to how their tech is used (for defense) since it can't force its will, then it bans doing business with them.
So it's six months to phase out use of Anthropic at the DoD, but the people hosting the models have to stop "immediately".
Which miiight impact the amount of inference the DoD would be able to get done in those six months.
According to whom?
Imagine a _leaded_ pipe supplier not being allowed to tell the department of war they shouldn't use leaded pipes for drinking water! It's the job of the vendor to tell the customer appropriate usage.
Go look at the package on a kitchen knife and it says not to be used as a weapon
I'm not sure this is still a useful analogy, though...
The knife manufacturer isn't obligated to sell to you in either case, I'd expect them not to cut ties with you in the self defence scenario. But it is their choice.
Congress could come up with an act it it's for national interest.
The military isn't the typical End User.
Claude Opus is just remarkably good at analysis IMO, much better than any competitor I’ve tried. It was remarkably good and complete at helping me with some health issues I’ve had in the past few months. If you were to turn that kind of analytical power in a way to observe the behaviour of American citizens and to change it perhaps, to make them vote a certain way. Or something like - finding terrorists, finding patterns that help you identify undocumented people.
If this were a news outline writing "Department of War" I would be concerned. But in the case of the Anthropic CEO's blog post, I can understand why they are picking their fights.
It's a testament to the broken information ecosystem we're in that many people genuinely don't know this. Most will correct themselves when told. I agree with you that those who don't are not worth engaging.
Depends where you at
I can't see anyway this ends well for the US. I say this as both an American and a military veteran.
Trump has historically stiffed his contractors. Why do you think his administration would be any different with adhering to a contract?
My speculation is the "business records" domestic surveillance loophole Bush expanded (and that Palantir is build to service). That's usually how the government double-speaks its very real domestic surveillance programs. "It's technically not the government spying on you, it's private companies!" It's also why Hegseth can claim Anthropic is lying. It's not about direct government contracts. It's about contractors and the business records funnel.
Of course they can just say - we aren’t, Palantir is.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47180540
SCOTUS says POTUS is above the law, so POTUS has collected $4B in bribe / protection money since taking office 13 months ago. Anthropic has lots of money at the moment. Why should they be allow to keep it, given (1) and (2)?
Since they didn't pay off the president (enough?), his goons are going to screw with their revenue and run a PR smear campaign.
Once you realize it only has to do with Trump's personal finances, and nothing to do with national security or the rule of law, then all the administration's actions make perfect rational sense.
Open question: How much should a congress-critter charge Trump for a favorable vote? (The check should come with a presidential pardon in the envelope, of course...)
When did this suddenly become "businesses will do whatever the government says regardless of earlier contracts signed"?
Further, what law lets the government dictate what contracts a company signs? Anthropic refused to work with them. We had a whole Supreme Court case about refusing working with customers.
Obviously false, not even arguable
But that's not the case, is it? The government can say that it's legally required to give Donald Trump a gold bar every Sunday. That wouldn't even be too far off from the outlandish claims we've seen over the past year. The Trump administration is, as Chapelle would put it, a habitual line stepper.
(What is obvious is the kind of response I will get, which is why I will ignore it and not comment further.)
> mean girl slights
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/technology/defense-depart...
Congress is negligent in not reigning this kind of thing in. We’re rapidly falling down so many slippery semantic slopes.
Obviously the DoD would not want limited use. Strange they don't make their own given their specific needs.
Putting aside my take, I’m trying to objectively make sure I’m grounded on what is likely to happen next, without confusing “what is” with “what is ok”.
That does seem to be what Hegseth is arguing, yes; and that is presumably his justification for doing something drastic here. Although I assume he is lying or wrong.
And as a cynic, let me just add that the image of someone going to the political overseers of the US military with arguments about being "effective" or "altruistic" is just hilarious given their history over the last ~40 years.
Re: the hilarity part, I’m conflicted: in general, a good sense of humor is useful, but in present circumstances a stoic seriousness seems warranted.
Except it's not, really. If Anthropic/Claude doesn't mean the DoD's need, they can and should just put out an RFP for other LLM providers. I'm sure there's plenty of others that'd happily forgo their morals for that sweet government contract money.
No US company has to provide services to the DoD or any other branch of government. It's not "veto power" it's being selective of who you do business with, which is 100% legal.
> has never been invoked against an American company.
There's always a first. I am assuming it is not illegal to do that. It's a completely reasonable business decision to ensure your supply chain does not depend on things that may change against your goals. For example, you don't want to build or depend on an open source platform that you know is gonna rug pull, if you count on it remaining open source, do you? American or otherwise.
As to this being 100% legal, I'm not so sure (not a lawyer). It might not be a criminal offese, but there's a whole category of abuse of power that this may fall under if Anthropic is put under a certain status without real justification. Many powers given to the executive branch are not absolute and can't be applied arbitrarily, but require justification. Anthropic might be able to sue the government for declaring them a "supply-chain risk" without sufficient justification. E.g. they could claim that not being sufficiently patriotic in the eyes of the administration does not constitute a risk, and that since their not the sole supplier of the tech, they were not trying to strong arm the government to do anything.
> does not "influence their supply chain"
I would be wary of making this conclusion. Obviously it could conceivably influence the supply chain when you build on top of their model. If you look at the type of risks enumerated in DoD guidelines, it is not just "oh this software has vulnerability" which is what started the discussion in this subthread in the first place. There are many kinds of risks DoD needs to address, none are particularly new; including Sustainment Risk. The closest thing I remember to this case was Sun Java "no use in nuclear facility" EULA term, which LLM suggests was ignored by DoE/D because that was interpreted as a "limitation on warranty" not a "restriction of use."
I understand 'goals' and 'means to an end', but this concept of "law" evades me.
> Anthropic's terms were laid out in the contract the Pentagon signed, which they want to forcibly amend.
It's called negotiation in business. I am sure both sides are clear-eyed on what the consequences were and Anthropic made a calculated bet (probably correctly) that some segment of their employee/customer base would get wet by hearing this news and it more than offsets the lots business, thus is worth it.
Companies have gone out of business due to a big customer pulling the contract. Imagination Technologies comes to mind. This is not a rare thing in business.
> full power of the US government
Haha, I can assure you that is not even close to the full power of US government. Ask the crypto people during Biden admin for just a little more power (still not even close to "full.")
For a company of Anthropic's size, this may very well be a death sentence, even if their work has nothing to do with the military supply chain. They could have just canceled the contract, but they wanted to go full Darth Vader on them to prove a point in case anyone else thought about "negotiating" "voluntarily" with the federal government.
The contract, including Anthropic's redlines, was signed more than a year ago and has been humming along with no objections from anybody. Hegseth abruptly got a bug up his ass about it last week, and demanded Anthropic sign a revised version under threat of punishment. Anthropic is simply saying "no, we will not be forced into signing a new version, you can either keep going with the original terms we all agreed to, or stop using us". The Pentagon can simply stop using Anthropic if they don't like the terms anymore (which, again, are the terms Pentagon agreed to in the first place). But what the DoW wants is to strong-arm Anthropic, using the DPA, into new terms because they abruptly changed their mind. That's not "negotiation" in any sense, that's Mafia behavior.
The actual terms of the contract aren't even relevant, this is purely a matter of tort law and whether you can bully someone into a new contact because you woke up one day and decided you didn't like the one you agreed to.
> Anthropic's terms were laid out in the contract the Pentagon signed, which they want to forcibly amend.
They want to "forcibly amend" is either within their rights per original contract, or not. One is fair game, the other is not.
Isn't agreeing to amend a contract always within their rights?
That said, many government contracts include some variant of "we can cancel at any time for any reason".
I’d agree it is a serious risk.
The current government is deeply unpopular, it's only going to get worse for them.
Haven't heard that. Regardless, as someone who works with these models daily (as well as company leadership that loves AI more than they understand it) - Anthropic is absolutely right to say that the military shouldn't be allowed to use it for lethal, autonomous force.
It is the US govt that seeks to break their contract with Anthropic.
The contract they signed had the safeguards, so they were mutually agreed upon. These safeguards against fully autonomous killbots and AI spying of US citizens was known before signing.
This conflict now is because the US govt regrets what they agreed to in the contract.
source?
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
This whole thing seems like people talking past each other, and that there’s something being left unsaid.
Anthropic doesn’t make a product that would assist with kill drones, and they don’t have the right to deny subpoenas.
Anthropic is holding firm on incredibly weak red lines. No mass surveillance for Americans, ok for everyone else, and ok to automatic war machines, just not fully unmanned until they can guarantee a certain quality.
This should be a laughably spineless position. But under this administration it is taken as an affront to the president and results in the government lashing out.
> Costco is a really popular subject for business-success case studies but I feel like business guys kinda lose interest when the upshot of the study is like "just operate with scrupulous integrity in all facets and levels of your business for four decades" and not some easy-to-fix gimmick
https://bsky.app/profile/mtsw.bsky.social/post/3lnbrfrvmss26
At peak times they run out of carts and tell the customers to go hunting in the lot for them, door greeters shouting at members across the floor, checkout queues stretch the length of the warehouse, they start half blocking the gas station entrance 30mins before close so trucks can't get in, so maybe they're turning those profit screws.
No, OP is right, their PR department is doing a great job.
That kind of good.
Blood is on their hands already
It's probably in Anthropic's interest to throw grok to these clowns and watch them fail to build anything with it for 3 years.
Also, every other company has bent the knee and kissed the ring. And the trump admin will absolutely do everything they can to not appear weak and harm Anthropic. If it was so easy to act principled, don't you think other companies would've refused too? Eg Apple
And there is real harm here. You're reading about it - they get labeled a supply chain risk. This is negative and very tangible
In fact, as a patriotic American veteran, I'd be ok with Anthropic moving to Europe. It might be better for Claude and AGI, which are overriding issues for me.
Rutger Bregman @rcbregman
This is a huge opportunity for Europe. Welcome Anthropic with open arms. Roll out the red carpet. Visa for all employees.
Europe already controls the AI hardware bottleneck through ASML. Add the world's leading AI safety lab and you have the foundations of an AI superpower.
https://x.com/rcbregman/status/2027335479582925287
Anthropic made it quite clear they are cool with spying in general, just not domestic spying on Americans, and the "no killbots" pledge was asterisked with "because we don't believe the technology is reliable enough for those stakes yet". The implication being they absolutely would do killbots once they think they can nail the execution (pun intended).
I suppose you could argue they're taking the high road, but only relative to their peers. It's a very low bar.
For Americans and international researchers it's easy to get visas there quickly. It's not far at all for Americans to relocate to or visit. Electricity is cheap and clean. Canada has the most college educated adults per capita. The country's commitment to liberalism, and free markets, is also seeming more steadfast than the US at this point in time.
Canada faces obstacles with its much smaller VC ecosystem, its smaller domestic market, and the threat of US economic aggression. Canada's recent trade deals are likely to help there.
I say this all as an American who is loyal to American values first and foremost. If the US wants to move away from its core values I hope other countries, like Canada or the EU, can carry on as successful examples for the US to eventually return to.
The right has far more talk of violence, true, but a lot of that is targeted rhetoric to keep voters riled up, and it’s not aimed at American businesses. I’d be surprised if even a third of Republicans supported anything more than not doing business with Anthropic. Even the Nvidia shakedown got a ton of criticism and that’s just money.
Within the Claude Constitution, the words "non-western" do not appear. Where is your quote from?
I'm sure this doesn't apply to you since you're not Lord Kelvin. On the other hand, people like Peter Norvig state in a popular AI textbook that, for example, they don't know why similar concepts appear close by in the vector space, so maybe you just know something other people don't.
Which of the European cultures is "underdeveloped", exactly?
The designation says any contractor, supplier, or partner doing business with the US military can’t conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Well, AWS has JWCC. Microsoft has Azure Government. Google has DoD contracts. If that language is enforced broadly, then Claude gets kicked off Bedrock, Vertex, and potentially Azure… which is where all the enterprise revenue lives. Claude cannot survive on $200/mo individual powerusers. The math just doesn’t math.
Anthropic is going to be fine. The DoD is going to walk this back and pretend it never happened to save face.
Anthropic is not even close to too big to fail. And even if this could get settled in court 5 years from now, this can easily throw enough of a wrench into their revenue streams to kill their flywheel.
Think of it this way: each of the hyperscalers have built a handful of data centers specifically for government contracts. A handful each.
Meanwhile, AWS and GCP have dedicated over 50 new data centers solely for Anthropic to train new models, and more were announced today.
My bet is on Anthropic.
This announcement has made Anthropic toxic in the entire dependency chain because it means years of efforts and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars rearchitecting entire platforms and renegotiating contracts.
The entire cybersecurity industry has a TAM of $208 BILLION [0]
[0] - https://www.bccresearch.com/market-research/information-tech...
This is exactly why this announcement has not made Anthropic toxic. The entire industry knows how ridiculous this move is from Hegseth, and it’s going to be rolled back next week once the adults get back from their weekend.
That label forbids contractors on DoD contracts for billing DoD for Anthropic, or including Anthropic as part of their DoD solution.
So - AWS can keep claude on bedrock, but can't provide claude to the DoD under its DoD contracts
The designation only applies to projects that touch the federal government, or software developed specifically for the federal government.
Contractors can still use Claude internally in their business, so long as it is not used in government work directly.
A complete ban would be adding Anthropic to the NDAA, which requires congress.
The DoD designation allows the DoD to make contractors certify that Anthropic is not used in the fulfillment of the government work.
" Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic."
Is that just his fantasy or?
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872423...
The supply chain risk directive would come from existing procurement law, which only allows the DoD to require contractors to certify that Anthropic is not used in the fulfillment of any government work.
Which is also separate from Trumps' EO, which being an EO only applies to the federal government directly.
So yeah, banning any contractor, supplier, or partner from any commercial activity with Anthropic is just fantasy without going through congress first.
I work in the enterprise SaaS and cybersecurity industry. There is no way to guarantee that amongst any FedRAMP vendor (which is almost every cybersecurity and enterprise SaaS or on their roadmap).
Almost all FedRAMP products I've built, launched, sold, or funded were the same build as the commerical offering, but with siloed data and network access.
This means the entire security and enterprise SaaS industry will have to shift away from Anthropic unless the DPA is invoked and management is changed.
More likely, I think the DoD/DoW and their vendors will force Anthropic to retrain a sovereign model specifically for the US Gov.
Edit: Can't reply
> This is the core assertion that is not clear nor absolute.
If Walmart can forcibly add verbiage banning AWS from it's vendors and suppliers, the US government absolutely can. At least with Walmart they will accept a segmented environment using GCP+Azure+OCI. Retraining a foundational model to be Gov compliant is a project that would cost billions.
By declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk, it will now be contractually added by everyone becuase no GRC team will allow Anthropic anywhere in a company that even remotely touches FedRAMP and it will be forcibly added into contracts.
No one can guarantee that your codebase was not touched by Claude or a product using Claude in the background, so this will be added contractually.
This is the core assertion that is not clear nor absolute.
But how do you even begin to discuss that Tweet or this topic without talking about ideology and to contextualize this with other seemingly unrelated things currently going on in the US?
I genuinely don't think I'm conversationally agile enough to both discuss this topic while still able to avoid the political/ideological rabbit-hole.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
If a commenter who supports the government makes the same argument that the government is making, the guidelines tell us to assume good faith.
My conclusion is that any topic where a commenter might be making a bad faith argument is outside the scope of Hacker News.
Politics and ideology are not off topic, provided the subject matter is of interest, or "gratifying", to colleagues in the tech/start-up space.
What's important is that we don't use rhetoric, bad faith or argumentation to force our views on others. But expressing our opinions about how policy affects technology and vice versa has always been welcome, in my observation.
So, what do you think about the US government's decision, and why?
Everything is politics and "ideology"
Our whole society runs on technology. All tech is inherently political.
A "no politics" stance is merely an endorsement of the status quo.
I’m sure the lawyers just got paged, but does this mean the hyperscalers (AWS, GCP) can’t resell Claude anymore to US companies that aren’t doing business with the DoD? That’s rough.
Additionally, every major university will undoubtedly have to terminate the use of Claude. First on the list will be universities that run labs under DOD contracts (e.g. MIT, Princeton, JHU), DOE contracts (Stanford, University of California, UChicago, Texas A&M, etc...), NSF facilities (UIUC, Arizona, CMU/Pitt, Purdue), NASA (Caltech).
Following that it will be just those who accept DOD/DOE/NSF grants.
We do have a recent example with Huawei, and it did fall just like this - and that was just some hardware.
Generally any machine that touches Supply chain Risk software cannot ship any software to DoD. AWS has separate clouds but software comes from same place.
You got it backwards, can't use claude if you ARE doing business with DoD.
Presumably AWS/GCP don't care, its up to the end customer to comply. Not like GCP KYC asks if you work with DoD.
This is almost certainly going to be rolled back, because I guarantee the DoD isn’t going to stop doing business with the hyper scalers, and the hyper scalers aren’t going to stop doing business with Anthropic.
Oh you tender babes, trying to logic the meaning of what the lieutenant of the biggest crime syndicate in the world means with his words, as if this was a well thought-out strategy... it's a shakedown; it would make more sense to ask "at least if Hegseth is sober..."
It's a bit like how the US Cuba sanctions worked and why they effectively isolated Cuba from everything.
The courts have historically been pretty consistent about giving the DoD whatever the fuck they want, going back to WW2 and even longer for the predecessors of the DoD. I agree that the next administration might reverse it, but the thing is, the government will stay irrational longer than Anthropic will remain solvent.
The US government told every American company to stop doing business with Huawei and they all did it overnight, even when it cost them billions. TSMC stopped fabricating for them, Google pulled Android licensing… The machinery of sanctions compliance is extremely well-oiled and companies fold instantly because the outcome of noncompliance is literally getting thrown in prison.
Even if a ton of companies have to switch over to an alternative, it won’t be catastrophic to the economy.
Who's next? OpenAI? Google? What if they refuse to allow the DoD to use AI with zero safeguards and Trump's goons decide they are also a "supply chain risk"?
This is the new McCarthyism. Do what the administration says, or you will be blacklisted, or worse.
Look no further than the famous expose by Mark Klein, the former AT&T technician and whistleblower who exposed the NSA's mass surveillance program in 2006, revealing the existence of "Room 641A" in San Francisco. He discovered that AT&T was using a "splitter" to copy and divert internet traffic to the NSA, proving the government was monitoring massive amounts of domestic communication.
Words cannot describe how crazy things were at that time.
I feel like someone will make a movie about it someday.
They are only refusing two narrow, but important categories. Framing this as blanket "refusal to support the DoD" feels like an angry, reactive own goal rather than a careful reading of what they actually said.
So far the march toward dictatorship keep being detoured by sheer incompetence. In any case, is hard to seize power when you can’t organize a group chat...
Which exactly is best changes on almost a weekly basis as different companies tweak their best model. I doubt the military would want to be switching supplier every week.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/pentagon-recruiting-elon-musk-...
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5758898-altman-backs-a...
Anyone can use Claude afaik?
Now, my guess is in the ensuing lawsuit Antropic's defense will be that that is just not a product they offer, somewhat akin to ordering Ford to build a tank variant of the F150.
On the non-nuclear battlefield, I expect that the goverment wants Claude to green-light attacks on targets that may actually be non-combatants. Such targets might be military but with a risk of being civilian, or they could be civilians that the government wants to target but can't legally attack.
Humans in the loop would get court-martialed or accused of war crimes for making such targeting calls. But by delegating to AI, the government gets to achieve their policy goals while avoiding having any humans be held accountable for them.
They already have that. By definition. If Anthropic has done the work to be able to run on classified networks, then it's already running air-gapped and is not under Anthropic's control.
The thing is, just because you're in a SCIF doesn't (1) mean you can just break laws and (2) Anthropic don't have to support "off-label" applications.
So this is not about what they have and what it can do today - it's about strong-arming anthropic into supporting a bunch of new applications Anthropic don't want to support (and in turn, which Anthropic or it's engineers could then be held legally liable for when a problem happens).
It worked for Porsche ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anth...
Discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154983
Edit: oops, I misunderstood. This seems to be more about contractual restrictions.
This restriction is apparently "radically woke"
This administration built almost entirely of dunces and conmen has convinced itself/been convinced that chatbots will help them in deciding where to send nukes, and/or they are invested in the incredibly over-leveraged companies engaged in the AI-boom and stand to profit directly by siphoning taxpayer dollars to said companies. My money is on the latter more than the former, but they're also incredibly stupid, so who's to say, maybe they actually think Claude can give strategic points.
The Republicans have abandoned any pretense of actual governance in favor of pulling the copper out of the White House walls to sell as they will have an extremely hard time winning any election ever again since after decades of crowing about the cabal of pedophiles that run the world, we now know not only how true that actually is, but that the vast majority are Conservatives and their billionaire buddies, and the entire foundation and financial backing of what's now called the alt-Right, with some liberals in there for flavor too of course.
If this shit was going down in France, the entire capital would have been burned to the ground twice over by now.
Heard that one before. We'll get a reprieve of 4-8 years and the vote will go to the fascists again. Take that to the bank.
your view of France is severely outdated
- $1,000,000 donation from NVIDIA CORPORATION to the Trump–Vance Inaugural Committee.
- $1,000,000-per-head Mar-a-Lago dinner where Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended.
- Jensen Huang’s contribution toward Trump’s "White House ballroom" project. Confirmed, but undisclosed value...lets says at least another $1,000,000?
Also I believe NVIDIA's supposed to pay the US government 15% of its revenues from Chinese sales:
https://www.ft.com/content/cd1a0729-a8ab-41e1-a4d2-8907f4c01...
Which is incredibility short term thinking. You're in strategic competition, and you compromise you position for a bit of cash?
It's also not solely about money, you can get far just knowing how to chum it up with Trump when you get in the room with him. Look at the odd quasi-bromance between him and Mamdani who you'd expect to be enemy #1 but Mamdani knows how to schmooze the exact type of New York Guy Trump is.
It's also potentially an implementation of the foot-in-the-door technique (https://www.simplypsychology.org/compliance.html). It's a common manipulative strategy where you get someone to do a small favor for you which makes them much more likely to do a large favor for you later.
"Trump’s Profiteering Hits $4 Billion" - https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/trumps-pr...
"How much money President Trump and his family have made" - https://www.npr.org/2026/01/14/nx-s1-5677024/trump-profits-m...
https://polymarket.com/event/which-party-will-win-the-house-...
Looking forward to a military platoon defying orders and seizing the president, hey, all countries suffer through coups, about time this young democracy go through one!
Did you skip class they day that discussed the Civil War?
A more steel-man interpretation of POSIWID--the way it's intended to be understood--would be: "What an established system accomplishes in the long term reveals something important of the the true preferences of the various interests that control it, which can easily diverge from the system's stated goals."
You can make a lot of claims and they can match to reality a lot - normally people think of evaluating things in terms of a strict "does this fit or does this not", but it's often the meta-style (why do you keep bringing up that argument in that context?) that's important, even if it's not "logically bulletproof".
The follow-up is slightly better. But still not very convincing, IMO. They get far too stuck on a literal interpretation. Of something that self-describes as a heuristic.
The phrase does not make more sense even if we go all the way back to Beers. I certainly don't feel alone in not understanding how he went from his (fair) observation that "[There's] no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do" to his more controversial conclusion: "The purpose of a system is what it does (aka POSIWID)".
Surely, there were many more sensible (but perhaps less quippy) stops between the two.
"No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.".
Meanwhile, irrelevant "AI Czar" David Sacks, member of the PayPal mafia alongside known Epstein affiliates Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, is furiously retweeting all the posts from Trump, Hegseth, and other accounts. He is such a coward and anti American:
https://xcancel.com/davidsacks
Aren't all the AI companies saying that AI poses even a greater threat to humanity than nukes?
How can these two not be deeply connected? If a technology poses humanity extinction level of risk of course it will also be a matter of national security - how can it not be?
20-30 years ago eco-terrorists bombed and burned down a number of biological research laboratories and other targets, because of the perceived risks of gene technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Liberation_Front#Notable...
Given all the current talk (and the famous scifi movies) about the risks of AI, I am a bit puzzled how there are no similar activists groups trying to sabotage AI facilities.
What is it that made the risk from gene manipulation feel so much more real and leading to actions, than the current AI risk? The Terminator movie franchise is more famous than any scifi movies about gene technology. (Edit: I guess Jurassic Park franchise surpasses The Terminator.)
I dunno, safeguard seems like a weasel word here. It’s just reserving control to one party over another. It’s understandable why the DoD(W) wouldn’t like that.
Here's the term defined in an official context:
https://www.acquisition.gov/dfars/252.239-7018-supply-chain-....
https://www.acquisition.gov/dfars/252.239-7018-supply-chain-...
[0]: https://www.acquisition.gov/dfars/252.239-7018-supply-chain-....
HN separates trailing dots from URLs, so that you can have working URLs at the end of a sentence. Hence you have to percent-encode trailing dots if they are a necessary part of the actual URL. (Same for some other punctuation characters, probably.)
This behavior is common for auto-hyperlinking of URLs in running text, so it’s bad practice to have such URLs.
[EDIT] Oh man, yours is like that too? WTF.
[EDIT2] If I follow your link, hit the 404 page, then add a period at the end of the URL, it does load. God that's strange.
That gave me a good, actual LOL, thanks for that one.
This is authoritarian behavior. You're having trouble negotiating a contract, so instead of just canceling it - you basically ban all of F500 from doing business with that firm.
I guess I would support the democratically elected sovereign over the private corporation.
They are now exercising that power in the interest of the people (they believe) that grant that power.
That's not what the government is doing here.
I really wonder what Palantir's role in all this is because domestic surveillance sounds exactly like Palantir and whatever happened during the Maduro raid led to Anthropic asking Palantir questions which the news reports is the snowball that escalated to this.
Bend over and take or not.
If we could give Taiwan killbots that would ensure China could never invade, or at least could never occupy Taiwan, would that be good or bad? I have a feeling I know what the Taiwanese would say.
While we're at it, should we also strip out all the machine learning/AI driven targeting systems from weapons? We might feel good about it, but I would bet my life savings that our future adversaries will not do the same.
The world is more nuanced than that.
But to answer your question. No we should not give anyone automatic kill bots. Automatic kill bots shouldn’t even be a thing.
Whether you or I like it or not, automatic kill bots will be a thing. It will only be a question of which countries have them and which do not.
Generally, in war, there are no rules, and someone is going to make automated killbots, and I expect one place to see them quite soon is in the Russia-Ukraine war. And yes, I'm hoping the good guys use them and win over the bad guys. And yes, there are good guys and bad guys in that conflict.
No, thanks, we don't need those "fully automated kill bots". There's absolutely no guarantee that they wouldn't kill the operator (I mean, the one who directs them) or human ally.
We're pretty much fine with drone technology we have.
But for me personally, that's not the most important point. What is more important - and what almost no one in the Western countries seems to realise (no offence, but many of westerners seem to be kind of binary-minded: it's either 0xFFFFFF or 0x000000, no middle ground at all) - is that on the Russian side, soldiers are not "fully automated kill bots" either. Sure, there's a lot of... let's say - war criminals. Yes, for sure. But en masse they are the same young men that you can see on the Ukrainian side. Moreover, many people in Ukraine have relatives in Russia, and there already were the cases where two siblings were in different armies, literally fighting with each other. So in my opinion, "fully automated kill bots" are not an option here. At least unless you deploy them in Moscow and St. Peterburg to neutralize all of the Russian elites, military commandment and other decision-making persons of the current regime.
Personally, I think it'd be great to have the Anthropic people at the table in the creation of such horrors, if only to help curb the excesses and incompetencies of other potential offerings.
They still pay taxes, which fund the US government, which kills innocent human beings around the world...
Anthropic folks: I've been a bit salty on HN about bugs in Claude Code, but I feeling pretty warm and fuzzy about sending you my cash this month.
Zero percent chance of that happening as long as xAI exists.
The only other thing that the foreign AI companies could do is say no to automated killing bots, which doesn't even seem like that good of an idea considering that your countrymen will most likely have to interact with these robots that can kill without any oversight.
... in the same sense as the two sides of a coin are separate sides maybe.
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/trump-obama-...
So OpenAI will also be marked as a supply chain risk too, right?
[1]: https://www.axios.com/2026/02/27/altman-openai-anthropic-pen...
Makes for very confusing reading when comments from "1 hour ago" are actually on preceding events from earlier, before TFA news (announcement of designation).
mods: Especially in sensitive and rapidly developing situations like this, please don't mess with timestamps of comments. It's effectively revisionism.
When we have first politician blown to bits by autonomous AI FPV there will be sheer panic of every politician in the world to put the genie back into the bottle. It will be too late at that point.
Anthropic is correct with its no killbot rule.
Even during the Nagorno-Karabakh war, Azeri loitering munitions were able to suppress Armenian air defenses by hitting them when they rolled out of of concealment. I believe that killchain requires a level of autonomous functionality.
However Russians and Ukrainians are using AI recognition in recon drones, but not yet in FPV. There is strong suspicion that long range one way attack drones are using AI during terminal guidance, but I did not see it confirmed by either side.
Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47173121 - Feb 2026 (1508 comments)
This administration consistently exploits what were designed to be emergency powers because no such requirement exists. Leave no room for interpretation.
Hacking is using a system in a way it was not intended to be used.
Here it is that, but applied to the law.
Hegseth and friends are a bunch of black hat legal hackers.
Does this mean Azure & AWS will have to stop offering Claude as a model?
I wish I thought enough Americans had the spine required to stand up to this, and I know for a fact that a lot do... the solution is literally written into your constitution.
Don't get me wrong i'm glad they are unwilling to do certain things...
but to me it also seems a little ironic that Anthropic literally is partnered with Palantir which already mass surveills the US. Claude was used in the operation in Venezuala.
Their line not to cross seems absurdly thin?
Or there is something mega scary thats already much worse they were asked to do which we dont know about I guess.
Their hard lines are:
- no usage of AI to commit murder WITHOUT a human in the loop
- no usage of AI for domestic mass surveillance
Claude: "Are you sure you want me to commit murder?"
User: "Yes"
Or do you mean Human presses button:
Claude: "Do you to commit murder? If so press the button."
User: "I pressed the button"
Claude: "Great! Now lets summarize what we did."
There are many ways to construct HITL UXes. But typically they'd take the form of the first one
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. All Anthropic is saying is that HITL is required before murder, the UX is irrelevant
A real stance would be not allowing your product to contribute to murder of any kind. I think focusing on the petty distinction they are making is missing the forest for the trees.
Thank you for the clarifications though it is helpful context.
Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
Edit: I should perhaps clarify I'm more interested in paid users, rather than free. It's harder to tell if free users switching would help them or hurt them... curious if anyone has thoughts on that too.
i told myself if anthropic does not back down on their current stipulations to the DoD, then i’d cancel and switch over to claude
they said there is a line they do not want to cross, and stuck to that stance, at great personal and financial risk to themselves
Kesha tried to hug Jerry Seinfeld vibes.
> Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon.
Strange way of saying "this vendor doesn't meet our software requirements".
> they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission
Err... You approached them?
> a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.
It's an orthogonal point, but "Silicon Valley ideology" has made up a significant portion of the USA's GDP for the last however many years.
> Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable.
Again... You approached them?
> I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security.
Like most companies in the world I imagine. They just haven't been approached yet.
> to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.
Internally re-framing all the recent "EU moving away from American tech!" articles as "EU builds more patriotic services!"
> This decision is final.
Nothing says "final" like a Tweet. The most uncontroversial and binding mechanism of all communication.
Q: "Is there anything we could do to change your mind?"
A: "Yes! Stand up to the current administration."
But anyway, I guess the question is, will any other big AI companies stand with them? It's what needs to happen, but I am not hopeful.
He called me and he seemed like a nice enough guy, but I realized that he's one of the DOGE/Elon acolytes and he started talking about how he's "fixing" the Treasury and that every engineer is apparently supposed to use Claude for everything.
It would have been a considerable pay downgrade which wouldn't necessarily be a dealbreaker but being managed by DOGE would be, but mostly relevant is that I found it kind of horrifying that we're basically trusting the entire world's bank to be "fixed" with Claude Code. It's one thing when your ad platform or something is broken, but if Claude fucks something up in the Treasury that could literally start a war. We're going to "fix" all the code with a bunch of mediocre code that literally no one on earth actually understands and that realistically no one is auditing [1].
If they're going to "fix" all the Treasury code with stuff generated by Claude, I'm not sure they will have a choice but to stick with it, because very it seems very likely to me that it will be incomprehensible to anything but Claude.
[1] Be honest, a lot of AI generated code is not actually being reviewed by humans; I suspect that a lot of the AI code that's being merged is still basically being rubber-stamped.
it won't be the world's bank for very long
I wouldn't want a bullet manufacturer to hold back on my government based on their own internal sense of ethics (whether I agreed with it or not, it's not their place)
The fuck?
[0]https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/unquestio...
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/us/politics/judges-contem...
I don't think that Secretary Hegseth is qualified to speak on American principles.
Cheating on multiple spouses[1], being an active alcoholic, and being accused of multiple sexual assaults and paying off the accusers[3] is fundamentally incompatible with being a Secretary of Defense and a good leader.
Also, this violates freedom of speech and will probably get shot down in the courts.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Hegseth#Marriages
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Hegseth plus multiple recent media pieces
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Hegseth#Abuse_and_sexual_...
It is an interesting point. What's the difference between this use license and others?
That is what they are doing.
> why would you then [....] ban other companies from making business with Anthropic if they want to be a defense contractor
Because, if it shops with Anthropic code, the DoD becomes subject to the restrictions when they receive the contractor's product. Anthropic's limitation is on the use, not on the product or distribution.
To stop using them requires making the suppliers still using them as well.
Designating them a supply chain risk is unprecedented authoritarian strong-arming.
I don't think it will hold, in the end this is mafia behavior, but if it does, we are yet again in uncharted waters.
Come to EU guys, we'll prepare a warm welcome!
This is why 996 bosses think AI can replace their employees, because they already see the employees as robots, not humans.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/996-work-culture-silicon-val...
TIL Fully automated killbots and mass domestic surveillance are American principles.
I mean, I should have known but there's no clearer sign saying "leave the country now if you don't agree with this admin" than now I guess.
It's magnified because it's right now, but this won't affect midterm results barely a whisker compared to many other daily headlines.
There are no serious enemies to this administration in SV and I can't see this changing that. SV has bent the knee exactly like Anthropic didn't. They're not going to stand up because of this, they've proven they don't have those muscles.
So using Claude Code to write software for the DoD is now a no go, you'd be in breach of procurement directives now.
If they go as far as to convince congress to add Anthropic to the NDAA, that would be a nationwide ban like Huawei making it illegal for any federal contractor to use the tech anywhere in their business.
But for now, even fed contractors can still use Claude in their business, just not directly for government work.
> Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic
Emphasis mine.
And I’m looking at news organizations that presumably have staffs of legal analysts pouring over this stuff, and they also seem to be saying that it can’t be any commercial activity:
> The label means that no contractor or supplier that works with the military can do business with Anthropic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/us/politics/anthropic-mil...
It's more been about the size of the government; that it should do a minimal amount of control (and do it well), but leave a lot of things for "the market to decide".
Having said all that, I think this issue is just tangential to any big/small government ideology. This is a hissy fit about a defence contractor sticking to their agreement where the DoD want to change the agreement in a way that goes against the contractors Mission Statement and/or the US Constitution itself.
The old ideology of the Republicans doesn't mean anything here. This administration is purely about 'give me what I want, now!'.
And it's whims change with the breeze. Do not look for consistency here.
TACO
Every conservative needs to do some very deep, very serious soul-searching. As for me, as a hyper-progressive, I'm drawing up proposals for nationalizing real estate developers in order to force them to build new houses to sell below cost.
LLMs produce output of unknowable and unpredictable accuracy, and as far as we know, this is a mathematically unsolvable problem. This shit should not be within 1000 miles of a weapons system. Why are we even talking about this?
So do humans. But humans might not follow illegal or immoral orders.
Joking aside, this administration clearly cares much less others. They don't care if innocent people are killed.
I have just purchased a chunk of extra usage credit. I encourage my peers to do the same. Let's send a message to those that work forces.
Nevermind Claude, does that mean Anthropic's offices can't use a power company if that same company happens to supply electricity to a US military base? What about the water, garbage disposal, janitorial services? Fedex? Credit card payments? Insurance companies? Law firms? All the normal boring stuff Anthropic needs that any other business needs.
This is a corporate death penalty. Or corporate internal exile or something, I don't know of a good analogy.
Model collapse making models identify everyone as a potential threat who needs to be eliminated.
Companies should have a right to refuse such requests on moral grounds though.
This stance is vindictive. Just don't use Claude in the military. Extending it to all government agencies is not right. They do great work. Can't deny that.
This will mean Grok becomes the defacto US Gov AI provider.
And here’s the irony: Musk, who claimed only he is virtuous enough to defend us from AI, who insisted he always wanted model labs to be non profit and research focused, will now bring his for profit commercial entity into service to aid in mass domestic censorship and fully autonomous weapons of war.
In fact it won’t surprise me further if NVIDIA is strong armed into providing preference to xAI, in the interest of security, or if the government directly funds capital investments.
Anthropic saves some dignify and they’re the losers today, but we are the losers tomorrow.
> 1. No mass domestic surveillance of Americans
> 2. No fully autonomous weapons (kill decisions without a human in the loop)
Surveillance takes place with or without Anthropic, so depriving DoW of Anthropic models doesn't accomplish much (although it does annoy Hegseth).
The models currently used in kill decisions are probably primitive image recognition (using neural nets). Consider a drone circling an area distinguishing civilians from soldiers (by looking for presence of rifles/rpgs).
New AI models can improve identification, thus reducing false positives and increasing the number of actual adversaries targeted. Even though it sounds bad, it could have good outcomes.
Anthropic are taking a moral position which is admirable, but in this case it could actually make people's lives worse (if we assume more false positives and fewer true positives, which is probably a fair assumption given how much better 'modern' AI is compared to the neural net image recognition of just a few years ago).
But there's some irony in this happening to Anthropic after all the constant hawkish fearmongering about the evil Chinese (and open source AI sentiment too).
https://youtu.be/MWFyApldYDA?si=yskCcx2hY4Wjkgw8
> You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end.
Except this is like two lawnmowers going at it, which would be a sight to behold indeed.
More taxpayer funded lawsuits to come.
> Populist nationalism + “infallible” redemptive leader cult
> Scapegoated “enemies”; imprison/murder opposition/minority leaders
> Supremacy of military / paramilitarism; glorify violence as redemptive
> Obsession with national security / nation under attack
TBH could be worse.
https://www.trumpstruth.org/statuses/36981
Don't worry, this is an archive/mirroring site for his account, not the actual TS site.
I'd comment on how wackadoo this all is, but, 1) that applies to almost everything these days, and 2) the post's right there, see for yourself.
With that said: what are the chances, in your opinion, that Donald wrote that himself?
To me it reads too coherent for there to be any chance he wrote or even dictated that.
I do think a lot of the more hot-take type posts (often in response to stuff he’s watching on tv) are either actually him, or he’s dictating to an aide. These larger policy-type ones that he treats as quasi-executive-orders, I think are likely drafted by one or more of his cabinet-level folks, or others roughly as high up. That’s just my speculation based on reading the “tea leaves”, though.
As for official word, it waffles between “all of it’s him” and “oh not that one though, that racist video repost was a staffer who made a mistake”, so that’s little help in sussing out the truth (but I am rather certain they’re not all directly written and posted by him)
One, it’s going to fuck with the AI fundraising market. That includes for IPO. If Trump can do this to Anthropic, a Dem President will do it to xAI. We have no idea where the contagion stops.
Two, Anthropic will win in the long run. In corporate America. Overseas. And with consumers. And, I suspect, with investors.
A lot of corporate America contracts for the military in some capacity (it's a giant piggy bank and if you jump through a few hoops you get to siphon money out of it, so of course they do) and assuming this Tweet is accurate (Jesus, what a world) this will also affect them.
IDK maybe they have corporate structures that avoid letting this kind of thing mess too badly with the parts of their company that don't have contact with the government, or maybe it'll only apply to specifically the work they do for the government, but otherwise I expect it'll be devastating for Anthropic's B2B effort.
And a lot does not, or does so through dedicated subsidiaries so they can work multinationally.
Trump orders federal agencies to stop using Anthropic AI tech 'immediately'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47185528
Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47173121
"THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! That decision belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military.
The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE..." - President Donald J. Trump
“You won’t let us use your product unrestricted for military applications? Fuck you, we’re going to stop using it for anything at all across the entire federal government, even if not remotely related to military.”
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Appealing to the pragmatic and the "game theory" of complying with authoritarian rule that you don't have power over - because the other party that you don't have any power over will benefit from it - is a zero-sum argument.
What I don’t understand is why the two parties couldn’t reach agreement. Surely autonomous murderous robots is something U.S. government has interest in preventing.
The big difference here is that Claude is not military equipment. It's a public, general purpose model. The terms of use/service were part of the contract with the DoD. The DoD is trying to forcibly alter the deal, and Anthropic is 100% in the clear to say "no, a contract is a contract, suck it up buttercup."
We aren't talking about Lockheed here making an F-35 and then telling the DoD "oh, but you can't use our very obvious weapon to kill people."
> Surely autonomous murderous robots is something U.S. government has interest in preventing
After this fiasco, obviously not. It's quite clear the DoD most definitely wants autonomous murder robots, and also wants mass domestic surveillance.
This is just petty.
Consider the government. It’s Hegseth making this decision, and he considers the US military’s adherence to law to be a risk to his plans.
> What I don’t understand is why the two parties couldn’t reach agreement.
Someday we'll have to elect a POTUS who is known for his negotiation and dealmaking skills.