alt Hacker NewsI know everyone says this is political but it actually seems like a textbook designation. Anthropic wanted to have rules on how the military used AI, the military said no and therefore doesn't want anthropic used anywhere in their supply line.
This is like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike orders, now the military needs to have a special box of pens that don't have stipulations attached. With AI usage it would be the same thing except applied to entire product chains. It seems like it would just add more complexity to operations.
You can agree with the rules anthropic wanted, but having rules set by a private company at all that apply to the military does seem fair for the military to object to.
>The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized and necessary
Though they'd probably put the DoD on the cybersecurity whitelist today, the very idea of the claude whitelists for certain functionality already exists and is being used by them today.
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I think the better analogy is an insane nuclear power plant manager deciding it wants to buy pens to use as neutron-flux regulator rods — because after all, a pen is functionally a pencil and a pencil is made of graphite.
Then the pen manufacturer hears about this and says “Our pens are not made of graphite and are not suitable to be used in nuclear reactors”, to which the reactor owner says “it’s fine, they fit in the graphite rod holes, and we’re just using until the next generation of pens come out which will do an even better job”, and then the pen manufacturer says “I’m not going to sell you any pens until you agree that they will be used only writing.”
I think you're confused. When the White House decided to stop having federal agencies buy paper straws [1], they didn't designate paper straws a supply chain risk, they just stopped buying them. The term has a very specific meaning which would not apply in the pen scenario.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/endi...
Anthropic did not change the terms. Those were the terms the US Government signed. It was not secret, it was explicit identified and accepted as a term.
The analogy would be: “A customer agreed to a contract, and after running into a clause of the contract they no longer wanted to follow…canceled the contract unilaterally…which also violated the contract.”
“the military said no and therefore doesn't want anthropic used anywhere in their supply line”
It’s clearly a punitive measure and has nothing to do with national security.
If a supplier uses Anthropic to develop a product, how does that pose a risk to the DoD or national security? The DoD can specify that a third party system can’t rely on Anthropic for DoD use without designating the company a supply risk. It was very clear that the administration was punishing the company for saying “no”.
> This is like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike order
I am pretty receptive to the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument, but we are taking a big leap from pen to llms/artificial intelligence. I am sympathetic to some of your other points, but I simply must reject this analogy.
Non-sense. Pentagon has many many uses of AI besides autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, which Anthropic doesn't restrict. ie: intelligence analysis, target selection, payroll, inventory, research, supply chain and logistics, medical, bureaucracy, ...
I didn't understand what you said or your analogy, sorry maybe I'm stupid. Would you be able to explain this differently? Maybe something implied was omitted and I didn't follow that.
Wouldn't that make any product with a licensing agreement a supply chain risk?
A much closer analogy than the pen one is a SAAS company having an EULA. As annoying as EULAs are I don’t think it counts as being malicious or subversive if you are very open and clear with your prospective customers what that EULA contains?
> Anthropic wanted to have rules on how the military used AI
No, they want to have rules on how the military used Anthropic AI.
Military would still be free to use OpenAI for the nasty stuff
The reason it appears corrupt is that OpenAI has the exact same restrictions (https://openai.com/index/our-agreement-with-the-department-o...) but was not declared a supply chain risk. If two vendors have the same restrictions and they only designate one, then the designation must be arbitrary and/or capricious.
Edit: I was wrong, the statement I linked is extremely dishonest and I was misled. The contract language lower down makes it clear that there are no "red lines", and OpenAI products can in fact be used for mass domestic surveillance, autonomous weapons, and social credit systems as long as they are considered legal.
I think this was discussed ad nauseum last time so I am wondering if somehow this has changed but the biggest part of the issue last time was the retaliation. You seem to suggest that this was due to the government not wanting restrictions on their actions. I feel this severely downplays how unusual this designation is considering, like Anthropic says, this has not been applied to domestic companies.
Why couldn't excluding Anthropic be done a different mechanism than a supply chain risk. Why wouldn't this be a standard part of an agreement or a request and simply refuse to renew or cancel a contract rather than being designated a supply chain risk. If some third party contractor for an unrelated non military reason wanted to use Claude as part of their process, it seems perfectly allowable.
If this was a remotely standard way of operation, why did a fair amount of corporate America sign briefs concerned with the retaliatory aspect.
Parts of the action seemed wholly retaliatory as well since Pentagon officials certainly used it as a threat. Why can't a US company have views contrary to the policies of the US government? Certainly the US government is free to not do business with them, but this designation affects everybody doing any kind of indirect business with the US government which is a rather long chain. If this becomes a legitimate mechanism, how might we distinguish caring about a secure supply chain and simply wiping out a company that disagreed with a pro war attitude? If a machining shop had a policy against manufacturing weapons at all, could they be blocked from making server racks for Microsoft or perhaps light fixtures for the Department of Labor? There are plenty of areas that are, again, non military? I don't think it's credible to claim that Anthropic will deliberately sabotage operations.
This would be like Boeing refusing to let the DoD fly a military 737 at over 800MPH, and they designate them a supply chain risk because they really really want to make the plane go past 800MPH.
It would be pretty surprising to allow a private company to control the military's use in realtime.
Nothing can stand in the way of America's forever wars, genocide, and automated killing, including performative objections by a prominent tech company.
I suppose we're supposed to be satisfied that the letter of the law supports this steamroller? Because that's what matters?
The legal apparatus is one of the tools the death machine uses to get what it wants.
I don't get it, did the US government and military stop using Claude? I thought they were using it to choose objectives to bomb?
> but it actually seems like a textbook designation
How can it be a textbook designation when designating a US company as a supply chain risk is unprecedented? So many actions under the Trump administration are unprecedented it starts to feel like the norm.
No other administration (Republican or Democrat) would do this. The DoD didn’t have a problem using Anthropic’s models during the raid on Venezuela and early on in the war with Iran.
Anthropic says to the former Fox News host it doesn’t want its models used for domestic surveillance or in kill situations without a human in the loop; all of a sudden they're a supply chain risk?
Seems obviously political.
You could use the same logic to defend the military declaring that Anthropic is full of pedophiles and therefore they cannot use their products as it would be contributing to pedophilia.
Anthropic offered a contract, with certain conditions, as do all contracts everywhere; that's their purpose. The military did not want to agree to those conditions. If they had stopped there, and refused to sign the contract, all would be good. (It's actually worse, they did sign such a contract, and then decided they wanted the contract to say something different than it actually did. "Pray I don't alter it any further.")
> >The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized [emphasis mine]
That is speculation, and you can't call it a "textbook designation" without discussing whether there's a basis for that "reasonable fear". Again, that argument also works for declaring you have a reasonable fear that giving money to Anthropic will support pedophilia. We do not know the specifics, but I at least have heard of zero evidence that Anthropic would sabotage something they signed a legal contract for, and yet I have an abundance of evidence that this administration will use whatever contortions are necessary to pressure and punish those who interfere with it getting what it wants. It all hinges on the word "reasonable", and based on the evidence that is public, this specific fear seems more ridiculous than reasonable to me.
If the government somehow had a way to force Anthropic to sign a contract that it did not want to sign, then this fear might become more reasonable. The twist is that this supply chain risk designation is exactly that. If Anthropic now capitulated, the accusation of supply chain risk (eg from Anthropic employees acting alone) would be justified. So the only way Anthropic can reasonably be considered a supply chain risk is because it is accused of being a supply chain risk.
This is a textbook example, yes, but it's a textbook example of corruption and judicial capture.
> Though they'd probably put the DoD on the cybersecurity whitelist today, the very idea of the claude whitelists for certain functionality already exists and is being used by them today.
And if they signed a contract permitting fully autonomous killbots, then using the whitelist mechanism would be a contract violation. I have some degree of faith that we'd know if such a contract were signed, because half the staff would quit. (As opposed to half the Google staff quitting after signing such a contract, which has been proven to be an incorrect expectation -- such a contract was signed, and I've heard of exactly one person quitting over it. There may be more, I don't know.)
i agree. by nature a lease is more risky than the military having its own model.
however anthropic also believes it is some kind of entity unto itself so it is not at all reliable.
except it's also stipulating that the paper supplier upon which the orders are signed also cant use anthropic. or the table maker. even though the AI helping make sleeker paper and tables has nothing to do with deciding what to bomb (analogy breaking down lol)
and trump admin originally went WAY further.
they originally said the pen, paper, table etc suppliers cant use anthropic even for products and subsidiaries that have nothing to do with their govt work; far beyond the supply chain of the pen (bomb). Mega Corp Pepsi Co Taco Bell Inc. LLC -> Staples > Pen Co. Sure pen co might be reasonabale. But telling taco bell they cant have claude help expand the baja-blast-radius is way too far. that would be just like secondary sanctions.
iirc there are 2 court cases. one ruled the original order was too broad and i think that still stands? so at least it's narrowed slightly to just the immediate supply chain?
but ianal
> textbook designation.
Hardly. I invite you to [read the opinion][1], particularly the great pains the majority spends on wrangling the definition of the word "manipulate."
Basically, [FASCSA][2] says to denote a company is a "supply chain risk," the govt has to meet the law's rigorous definition of what a "significant" risk actually is. That definition contains a catch-all "or otherwise manipulate the function" of the thing at hand (in this case, Claude) at the very end.
The govt's whole argument is "Well Anthropic has admitted that it can technically "manipulate" the response, therefore its a significant risk, therefore we designate it as such."
The dissent gives an analogy:
> A library might post a sign saying, “Do not shout, loudly talk on the phone, play music, or otherwise disturb others.” The common understanding would be that the rule bans bringing a boom-box into the reading room with the volume turned on high but not listening to music with headphones set at a modest sound level—even though both constitute “playing music.”
It is as if the govt argued "ah ah, Anthropic played music on their headphones, they broke the rules! We therefore have the authority to ban them" and the majority insanely agrees. It is clear to anyone with basic reading comprehension that the "manipulate" clause is supposed to continue the idea of malicious or subversive manipulation that the whole section entails. The hand-waving the majority uses gives the whole game away.
[1]: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=000001a0-d91e-d276-aff6-f97f3...
> The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized and necessary
I.e. Anthrophic cannot be trusted to honour a contract.
Who'd have guessed?
Using Claude for working on the refrigerators at the commissary is not a supply chain risk. You're just making stuff up.
Anthropic's red lines were 'no fully autonomous AI kill chains' and 'no domestic mass surveillance'. Those are clearly not national-security or DoD functions in the first place, so why would they be in any way objectionable?
Antropic: "We don't want our AIs to be used by the Army to do yucky Army things!"
Army: "OK, we will make sure not to use your AIs"
Antropic: "How dare you! We are suing! We intended for you to keep using it but do only what we want!"
Army: "..."
> I know everyone says this is political but it actually seems like a textbook designation
It literally is a textbook definition, signed into US law:
“Supply chain risk,” means the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of a covered system so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise degrade the function, use, or operation of such system (see 10 U.S.C. 3252).
To add onto what another commenter said, the pen analogy would be more like the manufacturer designing pens that stopped working when used to sign strike orders they disagreed with.