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The previous power plant manager had, of course, already signed a contract agreeing to those terms; the power plant is subsequently under new management and upset about being bound by this contract, so they designate that none of their suppliers of parts and fuel are allowed to have any commercial dealings with the pen manufacturer or use these pens for any purpose, even writing.

This is the most accurate parallel as far as I can tell. I've not seen any evidence that Anthropic deliberately built automated systems or escape hatches that literally prevent the US Government from using Claude to do these things. Other than the basic AI Safety mechanisms in place for everyone/general use. It's almost the reverse, where they explicitly don't want to strip away guardrails that say things like "don't kill people".

The intent and framing matters a lot here. Refusal to remove safety features is a LOT different than deliberately building mechanisms to sabotage would-be operations.

Selling a pen labeled "this pen will refuse to sign certain orders" is not sabotage or malicious and is thus not a supply chain risk. The DoD is free to not buy from Anthropic, but designating them as a supply chain risk is incorrect, as well as arguably arbitrary and capricious given their public criticism of Anthropic's beliefs.

The pen example makes sense if the intermediary were to ship the pen as part of the final product but not if the pen is simply used to draft designs of the final product. It seems that this designation would prohibit using the pen anywhere in the process which doesn't really make sense.

That's not at all what this is. Anthropic was very clear up-front what they would and wouldn't allow. They were not going to "subvert" anything. "Degrade function" in this context means that there is a risk that ongoing changes to the covered system will cause problems for the government. That wouldn't have been the case here; it would have been clear from the start what the military would and wouldn't be allowed to do with it, and that wouldn't change.

> so as to surveil

How does Android and iPhone meet the grade given apps have pretty consistently leaked locations, base layouts etc?

Who is the adversary in this case?

It is not the textbook definition, because what Anthropic is doing is not sabotage, malicious, or subversive. Those are the key words in the definition. They are just refusing to add a feature to the military's specification. So their bid falls short of requirements.

??? What are you talking about. Anthropic isn't an adversary and they're not required to sell for purposes they don't want to. It's not sabotage and it's not malicious.

This is a designation reserved for terrorists and the link.

It's not a great analagy; it's more like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike orders, who then only ships pens with cameras and solenoids so that the point stays retracted until the camera verifies that the paper doesn't include a drone strike orders.

And then declared the other side a supply chain risk, claiming it is a potential vector for a national adversary to break in and cause unwanted bad things to happen unrelated to this contract.

It seems like absurdly bad faith starting at breaking the contract (over "you have to follow the law", no less!) and then to retaliate after that with trying to destroy the company's reputation and ability to do business. The boot licking going on here justifying the government operating in bad faith is both disappointing and short sighted. I didn't think the leopards would eat MY face!

Anthropic took the position that our military’s decision making power should be subordinate to Anthropic’s constraints.

Any dependency on a company that thinks they have that moral authority and has the technical means to enforce it is absolutely a risk to the supply chain.

If you want to blame someone or something for this, we should start with Dario and “effective altruism”.

"the government wants to use our tool to murder people", and declaring that company that says "no" into a "supply chain risk" is absolutely retaliatory and an attempt by the government to influence the behavior of the company.

The moral and ethical scale of the issue makes this far different than someone buying a pen.

Ridiculous hypothetical for analogy purposes, but, imagine if Anthropic had developed a new type of rifle that the military was considering using, which had a black-box AI system that could prevent the trigger being pulled when aimed at certain targets. The military says, ok that's cool, as long as we can be in control of that decision-making process. Anthropic says, no, we know better than you and better than the law what kind of targets should and should not be shot with our rifles. The military would then respond “lol, lmao even” and then deem them to be a supply chain risk and adopt another rifle instead.

We cannot subordinate our military’s decision making power — in any arena — to a private company.

Our military must also not be dependent on a private company that believes it has the moral prerogative to control our military’s decisions, and would have the technical capability to do so.

Right but the military wants to be able to use a tool they are paying for in all cases, not just ones the manufacturer thinks they should.

If I sold steel to the Pentagon but then tried to say they they couldn't use it for ships and tanks but they are free to use for warehouses they would react the same way as they are doing now.

Edit add: What is targeting? What is surveillance?

If someone in the intelligence analysis department uses AI to generate a report, then someone else uses that report for targeting did they just break the terms? Where is that line?

Much easier for the Pentagon to say no.

No, of course not, because life isn't black and white. Just those with licensing agreements that conflict with the militaries mission, where the product could be manipulated to hinder the mission. Most manufacturers would jump at the chance to rewrite their licensing agreements specifically for the military just to get a government contract.

Yes, in fact the military has a system in place to make sure that they only that they only use alternate suppliers and on Anthropic AI, They do this by placing a designation on Anthropic AI that it is a risk to the supply chain, which forces purchasers to use other suppliers.

>OpenAI has the exact same restrictions

No it doesn't. Specifically OpenAI had a "all lawful purposes" clause (which plausibly includes the existing mass surveillance apparatus), but Anthropic did not.

I thought the difference is that clearly written rules or SLAs are acceptable and can even be negotiated before signing a contract, but having a person, in this case Amodei himself, manually approve DOJ's usage case by case with his own moral judgement after a contract is signed is not okay.

Do you think OpenAI's terms for the DoD are published on a website? Pretty sure when Anthropic got zapped, OpenAI sent DoD a memo 500ms later saying they wouldn't restrict use.

Look at it pragmatically. What does the DoD use every single procurement for? Hint: military use.

Were they the same restrictions though?

OpenAI just said no surveillance of U.S. persons.

Anthropic could have gone further; I think it's likely they did.

>Anthropic opposing the US government

Is it not possible that this would change the risk profile of depending on them. It makes sense to work with people who support you than oppose you for things which are critical.

It's not you, the analogy they used was wrong, idiotic, and unnecessary.

>Anthropic says to the former Fox News host it doesn’t want its models used for domestic surveillance...

Lol, do as we say not as we do!

>In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a “pre-crime” approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen.

https://prospect.org/2026/09/09/anthropic-artificial-intelli...

To your first question, yes. To your second question, no. They used Grok for that, and it picked out a school to target.

In almost any case I am inclined to trust entity not trump or trumps government. So is true in this case, where they pissed their pants at anthropic simply making a proposal and decided to use overwhelming government force against it. I will leave you to decide who you consider more trustworthy, Trump or Anthropic.

Do you think a private company should be able to accumulate enough wealth and power to dictate policy to the US federal government?

They weren't against military use of their AI. They were against using it to kill American citizens without oversight or mass surveil Americans.

...I suggest you read about what actually happened:

Anthropic: "We'll sell you access to our AI as long as you don't use it for war crimes or mass surveillance."

DoD: "Ok, deal."

...time passes...

DoD: "Wait, no, we want to be able to use it for war crimes too."

Anthropic: "Too late, you agreed already, and we won't sign a contract for that. You can keep using it for everything we agreed to."

DoD: "Change the terms or we will destroy your business."

Anthropic: "No."

DoD then signs contracts with OpenAI and Google that permit them to commit war crimes and mass surveillance as long as they get legal cover, and proceeds to apply as much leverage as it can to destroy Anthropic's business.

----

And for the record, Anthropic agreed to all "yucky Army things" usage that was an extension of past yucky Army things, they just did not agree to a new class of yucky Army things: namely, fully autonomous killbots. Even there, it was only "not yet, it's not ready". Your whole comment is a gross mischaracterization.

I quit using ChatGPT entirely over this incident, and that's not because I find Anthropic's position to be saintly. They agreed to a contract where the DoD could and in practice is using their AI for committing war crimes.

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

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

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

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

It was clearly retaliatory and because of that unlawful.

A few things I can remember them doing are net neutrality, banning non-compete agreements for employees, a DMCA exception for allowing 3rd party repairs to McDonald's ice cream machines, and blocking the Albertsons/Kroger merger.

"Because the modern Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party"

And Republicans did it because.... They're anticorporation?

> the modern Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party

I suspect this is changing. The DSA branch especially wants all contracts with Palantir eliminated.

Dodd-Frank? CFPB?

> Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party. They haven't really had any hard hitting legislation nor legal regulation/rulings on corporations in easily the last 30 years.

Sarbanes-Oxley? Dodd-Frank? ACA? Now I'm sure you (like, every other living human) has a ton of nitpicks and criticism of bills like that. But they're real and they passed and they're largely-to-wholely partisan creations of the Democratic policy apparatus (SOX looked very bipartisan and was passed under Bush, but the actual bill was written mostly by democratic staffers).

I mean, fine, you'd like different regulation. But they're responsible for basically all the corporate regulation active in the US regime.

Bothsidesism is a very poor tool for this particular argument. Work with your allies, please.

I thought the Democrats were the party of big government and regulations whereas the Republicans were for reducing regulations?

I would argue the democrats are more a process oriented party. They wouldn’t pull this shit because they care about process - so much so that they wouldn’t even consider half the stuff that’s going on now as it circumvents process.

You got that exactly backward. Modern republicans are the ones that get the most in corporate PAC money, at the high end it's like 60/40% split... the majority to the GOP. Also, the fact that modern republicans brought Citizens United and just earlier this year NRSC v. FEC.

You really can't make a valid case to say the dems are the corporate dominated party. ffs, they are the only ones even attempting to put common sense regulations on the financial industry, something Trump called "bad for business" when he undid antitrust legislature that got passed under Biden.

I worry that they don't expect to leave power because they're acting like they will never be held accountable.

None of them really believe our economic or political systems will be recognizable by 2029. Everyone's playing for position in the short takeoff.

Whose fault is that?

Not just Anthropic, but practically speaking, the leading foundational model labs like Anthropic and OpenAI are burning through enormous amounts of money, and will need to pay that money back. If they are designated as supply chain risks, or controlled technologies, their ability to achieve that ROI is severely constrained.

They are not turning a profit, and aside from enterprise token billing, every other offering they have is a loss leader. In order to flip that around they need to drive down the cost of inference significantly, either through massive compute improvements, more efficient or lower cost models, and either one lowers the barrier to entry for local and/or private cloud inference for open models. The moat established by the expertise in model training is effectively dissolving as they approach recursive self improvement because any mechanism that prevents model distillation effectively reduces the quality and utility of the models, so each improved model makes their competitors better by default if they want to realize those gains.

The reason for the pivot to control and regulation seems to be more about erecting an artificial moat in their market, and having these technologies controlled or highlighted as supply chain risks will continue to drive investments in alternatives, especially in other countries where data sovereignty and domestic tech has become a priority given the last decade of the US dominated tech industry.

I don't think that AI is going to go away, but I think the future of AI in the next several years looks alot like massive overfunded foundational model providers collapsing, their employees launching dozens or hundreds of direct competitors, and the leading hyperscalers buying up datacenter capacity the way they bought up dark fiber 20 years ago.

Maybe it's the companies that flank the US president at events in an attempt to gain favor? Or the companies that own private prisons that lobby for immoral policies on policing?

Oil and gas and the GOP are one and the same.

Dems still subsidize O&G but they have other constituents they need to pay lip service to.

Banking and finance own both parties.

I don't see a need to come up with a complete definition at this point. Let's start with cancelling all SpaceX and Palantir contracts and see how we're feeling; that may be enough to keep corporations in line.

You mean the president than literally ran on "lock her up"? That's the victim here?

Stop trying to both sides this.

I think the blue team has been in a cold civil war since 2016. They can't come to terms with their progressive hegemony ending, but also can't pivot to a new politics because elections are too close to risk a mass preference cascade needed to revitalize the party.

I think the red team is only now starting to come to similar terms, and will increasingly do so as the blue team continues to maximally exercises power against their opponents instead of revitalize the tarnished reputation of instituions.

Around 2030, the US will need to spend 100% of it's tax revenue to service the debt, and California will need to a federal bailout or risk either default or wiping out their state pensions. I believe the coming financial disaster will likely be the catalyst that quiets the 'nothing ever happens' crowd, and both teams will need to reset their politics to the new world, distinctly different than the post-WW2 open society liberal consensus.

A similar phenomenon is happening in Europe.

They are suggesting that a Democratic President could label Palantir a supply chain risk.

If:

1. The designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk is politically motivated

2. We collectively accept that is okay for the US President to bar all defense vendors and contractors from working with an American company for political reasons.

What defense related company(ies) would a Democratic President have political reasons to ban?

It has been reported that Palantir and its founder have a history of political contributions to the Republican party.

Instead of Republican presidents driving left leaning companies out of defense and Democratic presidents driving right leaning companies out of defense, it would be better if neither party used supply chain risk as a political weapon.

Yep, it’s obvious, in-your-face corruption

SCR explicitly refers to sabotage. Where is Anthropic sabotaging the US government?

DOW wanted to change the contract after the fact. Anthropic refused. That is not sabotage.

>> These are just very different things.OAI "hacking" anything isn't OAI telling the US Gov what they can and cannot do with their product.

OAI hacking the chinese government will definitely raise alarms in DC and will be bad for national security. Just because the country that was hacked (australia) is a weaker one doesn't mean the underlying action is not troubling.

Not the OP, but personally I'd say both: unequal enforcement by the administration, and an incorrect and politically motivated decision by the court.

Greg Brockman donated something like a million dollars to a MAGA super PAC. Check his wiki page

Isn't every subscription costing them money, still?

If the president favors one party over another with no clear benefit to the voters, that is very indicative of corruption. If his organization is also getting donations from said party, it is even more certain to be corruption.

You argue that the courts are not corrupt, hence there is no corruption. Without considering the president.

Not at corruption yet? The entire us government is corrupt now not sure what you are going on about

Then the Pentagon shouldn't sign a contract with them. (Or in this case, they shouldn't try and fail to renegotiate the terms of an already signed contract, and then retaliate in order to get their way.)

I'm wondering how much was to push towards supporting Israel during the college campus protests and any future (at the time) conflict with Iran and it's proxies post October 7th like a lot of other Jewish million/billionaires such as Bill Ackman that typically supported Democrats or liberal causes. Brockman doesn't seem to have anything publicly stating he's Jewish but "Brockman" has English/German/Jewish origins and his mother's maiden name was Feldman.

Didn't Musk contribute ~10x that in '24?

Like such national champions like Airbus and Volkswagen right?

This kind of partisanship is corruption. The legal system is being corrupted to serve political ideologies.

Thats 100% corruption

(Hmm did you edit your reply?)

They all gave $1M to the inauguration, among other things, that's how. The corruption is out in the open.

Showers of gold

We already know thanks to Snowden, or did you completely ignore the dump on how the IC hooks into the American tech sector?

Keep your perv glasses at home weirdo

>As I understand it cane down to one point: Anthropic wanted the ability to review actions that would have an effect on human life.

This is not at all what happened. The existing contract that Anthropic had with the government had two red lines: No autonomous weapons (i.e., do not build Skynet with Claude), and no mass domestic surveillance.

Anthropic did not, and does not want, any case-by-case veto power over the US Military's use of their AI models. The red lines were negotiated ahead of time.

Militaries have a lot of experience, and an exceptionally poor track record.

I don’t remember the last war that didn’t have credible evidence of war crimes occurring. Were bombing civilian infrastructure in Iran, Iraq had Abu Ghraib among all the Collateral Damage stuff, the Highway of Death in the Gulf was probably a war crime, Vietnam had My Lai, WWII was the advent of carpet bombing civilian infrastructure. I can’t think of any for Korea, but I also know very little so that doesn’t say much.

We still haven’t charged anyone for the second strike on that fishing boat in South America, and I haven’t heard a single rationale for why that’s not a war crime other than “fog of war”.

The US doesn’t even really have a meaningful system for finding and prosecuting these, because we aren’t signatories for the ICC and have a bill saying we’ll invade if they charge one of our service members with a war crime. We aren’t basically the furthest thing from having any experience prosecuting war crimes. I can probably count on my fingers the number of cases we’ve tried. We rarely charge our own service members, and we usually kill foreign combatants rather than capture and charge them.

Yes, that's exactly why they used AI to blow up a school murdering a load of kids.

That kind of extensive experience.

Anthropic did the morally right thing and are being punished for it. The case in point justifies their position.

As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

You raise an interesting point. Although wouldn’t Anthropic be the best experts on when a model would be most applicable or likely to falter?

I guess my opinion would really depend on the exact wording and details of the arrangement. Lots of people jumping in with strong stances based on pretty limited details.

120 Iranian schoolgirls would have loved to hear this lecture.

> As I understand it cane down to one point: Anthropic wanted the ability to review actions that would have an effect on human life.

This is false. Anthropic wanted assurance that its technology would not be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance.

Frankly I would trust Anthropic much more than the US military with human lives.

you understand wildly incorrectly; please go and do some research.

Is that a problem? Are there any special rules (genuinely curious) that allow the military to hijack the management of a private firm?

Every private citizen or corporation gets to do business (or not) with the military on their own terms. This is the difference between totalitarianism and a free country.

Anthropic’s position is also known as “having terms of service”.

To be clear the existing, signed ToS terms that Trump balked at were:

1. No mass surveillance of US civilians - illegal but we have all read the Snowden papers.

2. Fully unmanned kill chains on autonomous weapons - Anthropic have even stated they will support this eventually, they just didn’t think their models were ready and didn’t want the obvious, inevitable blowback.

The DoD is within its rights to cancel the contract if it doesn’t like the terms that it previously signed.

> This also means that no companies that work with th DoD can use anthropic models for any purpose.

No, it does not mean that. I don't know why people have been making this claim. If you work for a company, let's call it X, and your work is not DOD related, let's say you work on a social media service, then X has no reason (from this designation) to prevent you from using Anthropic, it will not impact their defense contracts at all.

Dario wanted to sell a $200 million chat bot to the US military and also dictate how it could be used. The government said no. And because of that Claude also cannot be deployed to the GenAI.mil AI infrastructure. This means that any sensitive work for the DoD that uses Claude will go through Anthropic's infrastructure, not the US military-hosted backend.

So yes obviously defense contractors are forbidden to use it.

Every government on Earth has legislation that allows it to force companies (and citizens) to do its bidding under certain circumstances. That’s pretty much the definition of a government.

yes, but anthropic really is an exception.

it is a bizarre company which also inherits the authoritarian infrastructure of cloud services.

that is: remote control of the software, spying on customers, etc.

> The subject at hand is an attempt to use national security regulatory power to coerce Anthropic into selling a product it doesn't want to sell.

It would be naive to think that a private company could deny the government access to any tech if they want it for military or surveillance etc usage. In this case the government isn't forcing Anthropic to do it, they have alternatives and are perhaps making an example of Anthropic for refusing.

You could even make a case that the "supply chain risk" designation DOES make sense. If Anthropic are opposed to certain uses of their software, then doesn't that potentially impact companies that are part of the supply chain as well?

How is this coersion?

Is it coersion when people refuse to buy anything but free range chicken eggs?

DoD just refuses to buy a product. Anthropic just lost a customer because their product didn't fit the requirements of the customer.

Less chance for her to mix it up with a steak sauce.

Am I misunderstanding this entire ordeal, or are Anthropic's policies not precisely what the DOD agreed to in its initial contract with Anthropic? Did the DOD not then seek to change the contract terms, to which Anthropic refused?

If I sell the DOD a service with contracted terms X/Y/Z, the DOD agrees, then later asks me to drop Z, and I refuse, how would that warrant the legal definition of a supply chain risk? How is the appropriate response for the DOD not to simply find another service provider?

You've misinterpreted the situation so severely.

The DoW tried to change a contract they had signed. Anthropic refused. That doesn't make them a supply chain risk (the wording of which implies "likely to sabotage" the government).

People who trusted Grok because other people told them Grok was trustworthy.

He is literally calling Claude "evil" in another comment. Probably for the "reasons" outlined here. I am at a complete loss for words really.

I think any user of Opus 5 would - it was literally a terrorist. Thank god they retired it for 5.5 superseding it!!

I never claimed they would and don't you think anyone who calls themselves a "Claude user" would be biased?

or anyone who ever used `git blame` and knew what it did

lmao trying to imagine the scenario GP envisions as they "typed" together their comment