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I think the bigger insanity here is the labeling of a supply chain risk. It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one th

I think the bigger insanity here is the labeling of a supply chain risk. It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic. It's another when it actively attempts to isolate Anthropic for political reasons.

timr 7mo ago
> It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic. This is literally the mechanism by which the DoD does what you're suggesting. Generally speaking, the DoD has to do procurement via competitive bidding. They can't just arbitrarily exclude vendors from a bid, and playing a game of "mother may I use Anthropic?" for every potential government contract is hugely inefficient (and possibly illegal). So they have a pre-defined mechanism to exclude vendors for pre-defined reasons. Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate.
- inkysigma 7mo ago
  I'm not completely familiar with bidding procedures but don't bidding procedures usually have requirements? Why not just list a requirement of unrestricted usage? Or state, we require models to be available for AI murder drones or whatever. Anthropic then can't bid and there's no need to designate them a supply chain risk.
  - skeledrew 7mo ago
    > Anthropic then can't bid Thing is that very much want access to Anthropic's models. They're top quality. So that definitely want Anthropic to bid. AND give them unrestricted access.
    - 9dev 7mo ago
      And yet Anthropic is free to choose who to do business with, including the government. There are countless companies who have exclusions for certain applications, but that does not make them a supply chain risk.
- tshaddox 7mo ago
  That doesn’t sound right. Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website.
  - timr 7mo ago
    > Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website. Yes, this is the part where I acknowledge that it might be overreach in my original comment, but it's not nearly as extreme or obvious as the debate rhetoric is implying. There are various exclusion rules. This particular rule was (speculating here!) probably chosen because a) the evocative name (sigh), and b) because it allows broader exclusion, in that "supply chain risks" are something you wouldn't want allowed in at any level of procurement, for obvious reasons. Calling canned tomatoes a supply chain risk would be pretty absurd (unless, I don't know...they were found to be farmed by North Korea or something), but I can certainly see an argument for software, and in particular, generative AI products. I bet some people here would be celebrating if Microsoft were labeled a supply chain risk due to a long history of bugs, for example.
    - fooster 7mo ago
      MIGHT be overreach to call this a supply chain risk?!? That is absolutely ludicrous.
      - timr 7mo ago
        To quote one of the greatest movies of all time: That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
  - snickerbockers 7mo ago
    Let me put it this way: DoD needs a new drone and they want some gimmicky AI bullshit. They contract the drone from Lockheed. Lockheed is not allowed to source the gimmicky AI bullshit from Anthropic because they have been declared a supply-chain risk on the basis that they have publicly stated their intention to produce products which will refuse certain orders from the military.
- dyslexit 7mo ago
  You're making it sound like this is commonly practiced and a standard procedure for the DoD, yet according to Anthropic, >Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action—one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company. Some very brief googling also confirmed this for me too. >Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate. This statement misses the point. The political punishment to disallow all US agencies and gov contractors from using Anthropic for _any _ purpose, not just domestic spying, IS the retaliation, and is the very thing that's concerning. Calling it "DoD vendor exclusion list" or whatever other placating phrase or term doesn't change the action.
  - snickerbockers 7mo ago
    >an unprecedented action it's also unprecedented for a contractor to suddenly announce their products will, from now on, be able to refuse to function based on the product's evaluation of what it perceives to be an ethical dilemma. Just because silicon valley gets away with bullying the consumer market with mandatory automatic updates and constantly-morphing EULAs doesn't mean they're entitled to take that attitude with them when they try to join the military industrial complex. Actually they shouldn't even be entitled to take that attitude to the consumer market but sadly that battle was lost a long time ago. >for _any _ purpose they're allowed to use it for any purpose not related to a government contract.
    - jbritton 7mo ago
      It’s not clear to me that the AI itself will refuse. You could build a system where AI is asked if an image matches a pattern. The true/false is fed to a different system to fire a missile. Building such a system would violate the contract, but doesn’t prevent such a thing from being built if you don’t mind breaking a contract.
    - scarmig 7mo ago
      > it's also unprecedented for a contractor to suddenly announce their products will, from now on, be able to refuse to function based on the product's evaluation of what it perceives to be an ethical dilemma That is a deeply deceptive description of what happened. Anthropic was clear from the beginning of the contract the limitations of Claude; the military reneged; and beyond cancelling the contract with Anthropic (fair enough), they are retaliating in an attempt to destroy its businesses, by threatening any other company that does business with Anthropic.
ef2efe 7mo ago
Its a government department signalling who's boss.
ted_dunning 7mo ago
It means that all companies contracting with the government have to certify that they don't use Anthropic products at all. Not just in the products being offered to the government. This is a massive body slam. This means that Nvidia, every server vendor, IBM, AWS, Azure, Microsoft and everybody else has to certify that they don't do business directly or indirectly using Anthropic products.
- ipaddr 7mo ago
  Microsoft, Azure, AWS, Nvidia and IBM all have deals with other providers for AI. That itself doesn't turn the needle.
  - Nevermark 7mo ago
    I think the point is that would be catastrophic for Anthropic.
    - ekianjo 7mo ago
      Who cares about Anthropic? That's the guys who are pushing for regulations to prevent people from using local models. The earlier they are gone the better
      - etchalon 7mo ago
        "First they came for Anthropic, and I said nothing because fuck those guys I guess."
        fauigerzigerk 7mo ago
        First they came for Anthropic in spite of the fact that Anthropic tried so hard to make them come for local models first.
      - iFreilicht 7mo ago
        Are they? I couldn't find any info about this and my past perception has been that Anthropic has a stronger moral codex than other AI companies, so I would be genuinely interested in where you got this information from.
snickerbockers 7mo ago
> It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic. But that's what the supply-chain risk is for? I'm legitimately struggling to understand this viewpoint of yours wherein they are entitled to refuse to directly purchase Anthropic products but they're not entitled to refuse to indirectly purchase Anthropic products via subcontractors.
- tyre 7mo ago
  Supply chain risk is not meant for this. The government isn't banning Anthropic because using it harms national security. They are banning it in retribution for Anthropic taking a stand. It's the same as Trump claiming emergency powers to apply tariffs, when the "emergency" he claimed was basically "global trade exists." Yes, the government can choose to purchase or not. No, supply chain risk is absolutely not correct here.
  - snickerbockers 7mo ago
    It doesn't harm national security, but only so long as it's not in the supply-chain. They can't have Lockheed putting Anthropic's products into a fighter jet when Anthropic has already said their products will be able to refuse to carry out certain orders by their own autonomous judgement.
    - praxulus 7mo ago
      The government can refuse to buy a fighter jet that runs software they don't want. Is it really reasonable to refuse to buy a fighter jet because somebody at Lockheed who works on a completely unrelated project uses claude to write emails?
    - 9dev 7mo ago
      I’m not sure if you deliberately choose to not understand the problem. It’s not just that Lockheed can’t put Anthropic AI in a fighter jet cockpit, it’s that a random software engineer working at Lockheed on their internal accounting system is no longer allowed to use Claude Code, for no reason at all. A supply chain risk is using Huawei network equipment for military communications. This is just spiteful retaliation because a company refuses to throw its values overboard when the government says so.

timr 7mo ago

> It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic. This is literally the mechanism by which the DoD does what you're suggesting. Generally speaking, the DoD has to do procurement via competitive bidding. They can't just arbitrarily exclude vendors from a bid, and playing a game of "mother may I use Anthropic?" for every potential government contract is hugely inefficient (and possibly illegal). So they have a pre-defined mechanism to exclude vendors for pre-defined reasons. Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate.

inkysigma 7mo ago
I'm not completely familiar with bidding procedures but don't bidding procedures usually have requirements? Why not just list a requirement of unrestricted usage? Or state, we require models to be available for AI murder drones or whatever. Anthropic then can't bid and there's no need to designate them a supply chain risk.
- skeledrew 7mo ago
  > Anthropic then can't bid Thing is that very much want access to Anthropic's models. They're top quality. So that definitely want Anthropic to bid. AND give them unrestricted access.
  - 9dev 7mo ago
    And yet Anthropic is free to choose who to do business with, including the government. There are countless companies who have exclusions for certain applications, but that does not make them a supply chain risk.
tshaddox 7mo ago
That doesn’t sound right. Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website.
- timr 7mo ago
  > Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website. Yes, this is the part where I acknowledge that it might be overreach in my original comment, but it's not nearly as extreme or obvious as the debate rhetoric is implying. There are various exclusion rules. This particular rule was (speculating here!) probably chosen because a) the evocative name (sigh), and b) because it allows broader exclusion, in that "supply chain risks" are something you wouldn't want allowed in at any level of procurement, for obvious reasons. Calling canned tomatoes a supply chain risk would be pretty absurd (unless, I don't know...they were found to be farmed by North Korea or something), but I can certainly see an argument for software, and in particular, generative AI products. I bet some people here would be celebrating if Microsoft were labeled a supply chain risk due to a long history of bugs, for example.
  - fooster 7mo ago
    MIGHT be overreach to call this a supply chain risk?!? That is absolutely ludicrous.
    - timr 7mo ago
      To quote one of the greatest movies of all time: That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
- snickerbockers 7mo ago
  Let me put it this way: DoD needs a new drone and they want some gimmicky AI bullshit. They contract the drone from Lockheed. Lockheed is not allowed to source the gimmicky AI bullshit from Anthropic because they have been declared a supply-chain risk on the basis that they have publicly stated their intention to produce products which will refuse certain orders from the military.
dyslexit 7mo ago
You're making it sound like this is commonly practiced and a standard procedure for the DoD, yet according to Anthropic, >Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action—one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company. Some very brief googling also confirmed this for me too. >Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate. This statement misses the point. The political punishment to disallow all US agencies and gov contractors from using Anthropic for _any _ purpose, not just domestic spying, IS the retaliation, and is the very thing that's concerning. Calling it "DoD vendor exclusion list" or whatever other placating phrase or term doesn't change the action.
- snickerbockers 7mo ago
  >an unprecedented action it's also unprecedented for a contractor to suddenly announce their products will, from now on, be able to refuse to function based on the product's evaluation of what it perceives to be an ethical dilemma. Just because silicon valley gets away with bullying the consumer market with mandatory automatic updates and constantly-morphing EULAs doesn't mean they're entitled to take that attitude with them when they try to join the military industrial complex. Actually they shouldn't even be entitled to take that attitude to the consumer market but sadly that battle was lost a long time ago. >for _any _ purpose they're allowed to use it for any purpose not related to a government contract.
  - jbritton 7mo ago
    It’s not clear to me that the AI itself will refuse. You could build a system where AI is asked if an image matches a pattern. The true/false is fed to a different system to fire a missile. Building such a system would violate the contract, but doesn’t prevent such a thing from being built if you don’t mind breaking a contract.
  - scarmig 7mo ago
    > it's also unprecedented for a contractor to suddenly announce their products will, from now on, be able to refuse to function based on the product's evaluation of what it perceives to be an ethical dilemma That is a deeply deceptive description of what happened. Anthropic was clear from the beginning of the contract the limitations of Claude; the military reneged; and beyond cancelling the contract with Anthropic (fair enough), they are retaliating in an attempt to destroy its businesses, by threatening any other company that does business with Anthropic.

ef2efe 7mo ago

Its a government department signalling who's boss.

ted_dunning 7mo ago

It means that all companies contracting with the government have to certify that they don't use Anthropic products at all. Not just in the products being offered to the government. This is a massive body slam. This means that Nvidia, every server vendor, IBM, AWS, Azure, Microsoft and everybody else has to certify that they don't do business directly or indirectly using Anthropic products.

ipaddr 7mo ago
Microsoft, Azure, AWS, Nvidia and IBM all have deals with other providers for AI. That itself doesn't turn the needle.
- Nevermark 7mo ago
  I think the point is that would be catastrophic for Anthropic.
  - ekianjo 7mo ago
    Who cares about Anthropic? That's the guys who are pushing for regulations to prevent people from using local models. The earlier they are gone the better
    - etchalon 7mo ago
      "First they came for Anthropic, and I said nothing because fuck those guys I guess."
      - fauigerzigerk 7mo ago
        First they came for Anthropic in spite of the fact that Anthropic tried so hard to make them come for local models first.
    - iFreilicht 7mo ago
      Are they? I couldn't find any info about this and my past perception has been that Anthropic has a stronger moral codex than other AI companies, so I would be genuinely interested in where you got this information from.

snickerbockers 7mo ago

> It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic. But that's what the supply-chain risk is for? I'm legitimately struggling to understand this viewpoint of yours wherein they are entitled to refuse to directly purchase Anthropic products but they're not entitled to refuse to indirectly purchase Anthropic products via subcontractors.

tyre 7mo ago
Supply chain risk is not meant for this. The government isn't banning Anthropic because using it harms national security. They are banning it in retribution for Anthropic taking a stand. It's the same as Trump claiming emergency powers to apply tariffs, when the "emergency" he claimed was basically "global trade exists." Yes, the government can choose to purchase or not. No, supply chain risk is absolutely not correct here.
- snickerbockers 7mo ago
  It doesn't harm national security, but only so long as it's not in the supply-chain. They can't have Lockheed putting Anthropic's products into a fighter jet when Anthropic has already said their products will be able to refuse to carry out certain orders by their own autonomous judgement.
  - praxulus 7mo ago
    The government can refuse to buy a fighter jet that runs software they don't want. Is it really reasonable to refuse to buy a fighter jet because somebody at Lockheed who works on a completely unrelated project uses claude to write emails?
  - 9dev 7mo ago
    I’m not sure if you deliberately choose to not understand the problem. It’s not just that Lockheed can’t put Anthropic AI in a fighter jet cockpit, it’s that a random software engineer working at Lockheed on their internal accounting system is no longer allowed to use Claude Code, for no reason at all. A supply chain risk is using Huawei network equipment for military communications. This is just spiteful retaliation because a company refuses to throw its values overboard when the government says so.