alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
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The writeup here[1] was pretty clear to me.
> *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...
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.
I don't believe they can change the name to Department of War without an actor Congress. It remains the DoD.
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
Contract law will certainly be a casualty once Rule of Law has completely been broken. I don’t understand why the business sector isn’t pushing back more. Surely they must all know that the legal legal context itself, within which they all operate, is at mortal risk and that Business as Usual will vanish once autocratic capture is complete.
My main takeaway from all of this is that Hegseth seems deeply unfit for his job. First there was the Signal leak and now this.
Look, Anthropic is not going to be designated a supply chain risk. 80% of the Fortune 500 have contracts with them. Probably a similar percentage of defense contractors. Amazon is a defense contractor for example. They'd have to remove Claude from their AWS offerings. Everyone running Claude on AWS, boom gone. The level of disruption to the US economy would be off the charts, and for what? Why? Because Hegseth had a bad day? Because he's a sore loser?
If he's decided he doesn't like the DoW's contract then he can cancel it, fine. To try and exact revenge on the best American frontier model along with 80% of the Fortune 500 in the process, to go out of his way to harm hundreds or perhaps thousands of American firms, defies all reason. This is behavior you would expect any adult would understand as petty and foolish, let alone one who's made it to the highest ranks of government.
So I think it's just not going to happen, Trump's statement on the matter notably didn't mention a supply chain risk designation. This suggests to me that Hegseth went off half cocked. The guy is a liability for Trump at this point, I'm guessing he won't last much longer.
It's the Department of Defense.
[1] "only an act of Congress can formally change the name of a federal department." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14347
(edited to add the url I omitted)
| then they went back and said no, you need to remove those safeguards to which Anthropic is (rightly so) saying no.
So one thing to call out here is that the assumption that DoW is working on specifically these use cases is not bullet proof. They simply may not want to share with anthropic exactly what they are working on for natsec issues. /we can't tell you/ could violate the terms.
It is also dumb that DoW accepted these terms in the first place.
Is this matter about publicly available model or private model? For publicly available model like opus 4.6, bad actors can do whatever they want and Anthropic won't know. If this is only about private custom model, designating public model as supply chain risk doesn't make sense as others can use it.
Contracts typically have escape clauses, especially for govt work.
They will just have to recompete!
You nailed it.
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?
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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.
The administration's approach to contracts, agreements, treaties and so on could be summed up as 'I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.'
The basic problem in our polity is that we've collectively transferred the guilty pleasure of aligning a charismatic villain in fiction to doing the same in real life. The top echelons of our government are occupied by celebrities and influencers whose expertise is in performance rather than policy. For years now they've leaned into the aesthetics of being bad guys, performative cruelty, committing fictional atrocities, and so forth. Some MAGA influencers have even adopted the Imperial iconography from Star Wars as a means of differentiating themselves from liberal/democratic adoption of the 'rebel' iconography. So you have have influencers like conservative entrepreneur Alex Muse who styles his online presence as an Imperial stormtrooper. As Poe's law observes, at some point the ironic/sarcastic frame becomes obsolete and you get political proxies and members of the administration arguing for actual infringements of civil liberties, war crimes, violations of the Constitution and so on.