8 ms·

Judge blocks Pentagon effort to 'punish' Anthropic with supply chain risk label

447 points by prawn 7mo ago

bustah 7mo ago
[flagged]
yubainu 7mo ago
[dead]
- nickysielicki 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - etchalon 7mo ago
    No one is forcing the DoD to contract with a company.
    - nickysielicki 7mo ago
      DoD would like to use Palantir. DoD also believes Anthropic is pursuing posttraining in future models that will limit the effectiveness of Palantir tooling, if used by Palantir, for the purposes of DoDs mission. What other legal mechanism do they have to prevent Palantir from specifically not subcontracting out to Anthropic, other than a supply chain risk designation? Note that directly asking Palantir to prefer Google or OpenAI over Anthropic is a violation of procurement law and highly illegal. What other mechanism do they have?
      - dathery 7mo ago
        They can say "sorry Palantir, we will only sign a contract with you if you commit not to use Claude to provide services" and then Palantir is free to decide if they want to accept the terms of the contract or not. This is how business works.
        nickysielicki 7mo ago
        That would be illegal and ripe for corruption. It would also require the DoD to renegotiate the thousands of existing defense contract it has outstanding. That’s the entire reason this law exists, because what you’re suggesting is impractical. The department has to confidentially document its rationale for marking a company as a supply chain risk. It’s in the confidential record of this very court case. That’s the legal way to do this.
        etchalon 7mo ago
        Yes, it turns out our laws make it hard for the government to do a lot of things because making it easy for them to do things leads to some deeply authoritarian bullshit.
        nickysielicki 7mo ago
        What a beautiful/horrifying inversion of logic. The government does it the legal way, through an existing law, and you’re short circuiting and pattern matching to “the government is trying to work around the law”. The DoD is not trying to sneak its way out of behaving legally. On the contrary, they’re doing it the legal way and you’re suggesting that they could just do it the illegal way.
        etchalon 7mo ago
        The DOD is labeling a domestic company a supply chain risk - label generally reserved for hostile foreign powers and their cooperators - because that domestic company didn't agree to its contract terms. Judge Lin's order finds that it do so specifically to harm that company, without due process and without the remedies Congress specifically requested be used when it drafted the law. The DOD was, in essence, using a law illegally. The version of events you present does not seem to be tethered to reality.
        thereticent 7mo ago
        Again, you of undue certainty: the government attempted this potentially legal avenue, and it was adjudicated as impermissible. Meaning what they tried didn't work. Why are you acting like no one else here understands what has happened? Probability dictates that you are almost certainly not the smartest person in the room.
      - brookst 7mo ago
        Why are they entitled to have a mechanism to force a private company to deal in weapons and surveillance?
        nickysielicki 7mo ago
        [flagged]
        etchalon 7mo ago
        No, Anthropic is suing for the right to not be labeled a supply chain risk for a failed contract negotiation. Nothing in their suit, or this ruling, says the DoD has to buy things from them.
        nickysielicki 7mo ago
        Whose supply chain? A supply chain risk to whom? If they are comfortable without being in that supply chain, whoever’s supply chain that is (exercise to the reader), why are they suing?
        thereticent 7mo ago
        You can say this person is an idiot all you want, but the fact of the matter is that if DoD does not want to deal with Anthropic through Palantir, their only legal recourse at this point is to drop Palantir. They shot their shot with this legal gamble to remove Anthropic from the supply chain, and they failed. That's it. Curtains or deal with it.
        nickysielicki 7mo ago
        You really think the world works that way? One judge with two years on the bench makes a determination after two weeks of consideration and the case is closed forever? This injunction doesn’t take effect for a week, precisely so that the Department has time to appeal this to the 9th circuit. And even if the 9th circuit doesn’t stay it, SCOTUS will. This court has stayed district court injunctions against the executive on national security grounds multiple times. They are not going to let a single district judge in San Francisco dictate military procurement during an active war. Obviously. OBVIOUSLY. Lin didn’t drop Palantir from the defense supply chain unilaterally. The world does not work that way. Obviously. She issued a preliminary injunction that will be appealed before it takes effect. The DoD has not “shot their shot.” This lawsuit hasn’t even started yet.
      - dragonwriter 7mo ago
        > DoD would like to use Palantir. DoD also believes Anthropic is pursuing posttraining in future models that will limit the effectiveness of Palantir tooling, if used by Palantir, for the purposes of DoDs mission. > What other legal mechanism do they have to prevent Palantir from specifically not subcontracting out to Anthropic, other than a supply chain risk designation? Even assuming the stated concern was justifiable, and even assuming that there was no alternative mechanism, that does not: (1) Justify them failing to what is explicit required for the supply chain risk designation, (2) Create an exception to the 5th Amendment Due Process Clause, which (for reasons stated in the ruling) merely meeting the facial standards in the statute for the supply chain risk designation does not do when the supplier is (contrary to the motivating justification for the statutory provision) a domestic supplier where the government has no special evidence that it can demonstrate for exigency, (3) Justify the other challenged actions covered by the injunction (like the Hegseth Directive ordering a much broader ban than is imposed by the supply chain risk designation, or the earlier Presidential Directive ordering an even broader ban than the Hegseth Directive.) (4) Really, do anything at all legally, because it is not a principal of US law that the government, if it has a good motive, is free to act outside of the law merely because there is no provision inside the law which meets its desires.
        nickysielicki 7mo ago
        The court hasn’t found anything. A preliminary injunction is a finding of likelihood of success on the merits, not a ruling on the merits. The designation is still in place and will remain in place until the appellate courts weigh in. On the substance: nothing in 3252 limits ‘adversary’ to foreign actors. Congress used ‘foreign adversary’ in other statutes when it meant foreign adversary. It didn’t here. That’s a problem for you. The government’s brief cites three dictionaries defining adversary as ‘an opponent in a contest, conflict, or dispute.’ A vendor that questions active military operations through intermediaries and demands an approval role in the operational decision chain is an opponent in a dispute. That’s the plain text. Originalist judges will see it that way. I don’t really follow what you’re saying in point 1, the supply chain risk rationale is in the confidential record of this court case. There’s no way for us to know what’s in there, but it’s safe to assume the government covered their bases. On point 2, I also don’t understand what you’re saying. They are in court right now. How have they been denied due process? Point 3 is less interesting to me. Twitter posts by Hegseth obviously don’t really hold water. Anthropic should win here. But that’s not really what this case is about or why it’s interesting. Your point 4 assumes the government acted outside the law. I’m not convinced of that. That’s the very question being litigated. The government’s position is that it acted within 3252. One San Francisco district judge disagreed at the preliminary injunction stage. That’s not a final answer. Not even close.
      - zmmmmm 7mo ago
        I think the whole entire point of this is they shouldn't be excluding Anthropic as an entity, they should be excluding all suppliers on equal terms on the basis of whether they satisfy requirements or not. If it is a requirement that they be able to conduct mass domestic surveillance then they should put that into their contract with Palantir, not "You can't use Anthropic". So I agree with you, it ought to be illegal for them to tell a supplier what other suppliers to use. But that is exactly the larger point here in the first place that they should not be doing that at all.
        nickysielicki 7mo ago
        The government cannot conduct massive domestic surveillance in any case, that’s illegal. Other vendors are mature and serious enough to understand that the government is subject to American law and must operate under American law. They’re mature and serious enough to understand that it is the exclusive right of the judicial branch to make determinations around whether the law has been violated or not. They’re mature and serious enough to understand that the DoD has a mandate to pursue its mission to the fullest extent allowable by the law, and it is the sole responsibility of the DoD legal team to determine whether they are operating safely within the bounds of the law. Anthropic is uniquely interested in introducing itself as an external enforcer of US law, a sort of belt-and-suspenders approach, where the Department is not only subject to operate under the constitution and the laws from the legislative branch, but also subject to anthropics interpretation of whether they are operating under the constitution and the laws from the legislative branch. The department of defense does not want to engage in massive domestic surveillance beyond what the law allows them to do. They have signed agreements with OpenAI and other vendors which reiterate that they do not wish to use AI systems for massive domestic surveillance. These terms were unsatisfactory for Anthropic, for whatever reason. The problem is not the terms of the agreement. It’s the people and the way they conduct business. It’s the fact that they’ve expressed a willingness to hold their product (or future products) hostage, at the cost of DoD operational excellence. It’s the fact that they’re training a specific model variant for government usage with extra guardrails and limitations and values. Above all else, it’s the fact that they want to leverage their position as a leading AI company to influence government policy. This is not how a serious reliable partner of the government behaves. The problem from the DoDs perspective is the company itself and the people in charge of it.
  - dathery 7mo ago
    Did you read the order? It directly addresses your comment: > More importantly, as discussed above, no one is entitled to conduct business with the Federal Government, see Perkins, 310 U.S. at 127, and irrespective of the challenged actions, DoW and other federal agencies are free to terminate its contracts and agreements with Anthropic, as Anthropic readily admits. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.465515/gov.uscourts.cand.465515.96.0_3.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
    - nickysielicki 7mo ago
      This entire event came about because Anthropic raised concerns with Palantir and the Department around how Palantir used Claude when the Pentagon used Palantir in the Maduro raids. The pentagon can terminate its direct contract with Anthropic but it does nothing to address the risk that Anthropic poses to the reliability of Palantir’s services, which are (at this point) critical to the way that the Department operates. People keep repeating this lie and I’m sick of it. The direct usage of Claude by the pentagon is not what they’re trying to address, it’s the usage of Claude by Palantir that they’re trying to address. And this is the legal way for them to do that. Again, for the third time in this thread, they MAY NOT ask Palantir off the record to just not use Anthropic. This would be extremely illegal and would give Anthropic standing to sue to the government.
      - SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
        I don't understand how to square your story about what motivated the government against what actually happened. This is the statement that the President of the United States made when announcing that Anthropic would be cut off: > 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 trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY. > Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again! There will be a Six Month phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic’s products, at various levels. Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow. > WE will decide the fate of our Country — NOT some out-of-control, Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Perhaps you've not seen this statement before; there are a number of people who find it inconvenient that US policy is driven by insane social media rants, and prefer to make up more sensible rationales for the same policies. But there's no part of the actual published announcement that discusses the relationship between Palantir and Anthropic.
- inquirerGeneral 7mo ago
  [dead]
- monkpit 7mo ago
  > successfully Time will tell
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
JohnTHaller 7mo ago
Some judicial pushback against authoritarian policies is good to see.
- alexchapman 7mo ago
  Oh I agree.
- alienbaby 7mo ago
  I'd wish more for an impartial, considered judgement
  - sgc 7mo ago
    Which of course would look exactly like judicial pushback against authoritarian policies.
  - KronisLV 7mo ago
    > Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government What issue do you take with that statement or the outcome here? I think Anthropic’s position on what the tech should not be used for was well reasoned. It feels like the govt. flipped out based on their public messaging and this whole ordeal - instead of them themselves being more measured and just choosing not to use Anthropic’s services if they take an issue with it.
  - mpalmer 7mo ago
    I deeply wish for people who say things this cryptic and opinionated to actually speak their mind and back up their positions. Comments like these add little to the discussion.
    - xvector 7mo ago
      They don't speak their minds because they know their opinions are so beyond the pale that they wouldn't be accepted in civil society.
comrade1234 7mo ago
[flagged]
paulpauper 7mo ago
So much for all that alarmism a month ago. Just got to be patient and wait for cooler heads to prevail. Or it goes to show how Anthropic handled it well, by making their case as persuasively and assertively without delay as they had done.
- jonplackett 7mo ago
  It’s all a big PR campaign. They will reveal shortly that they used Claude as their legal team.
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
  I completely disagree with the idea that a court not allowing the Secretary of Defense to bankrupt a company for disagreeing with him means it's wrong to be alarmed that he tried. It remains extraordinarily alarming that the guy who runs the US military thinks anyone who tries to stop him from doing what he'd like is a threat.
  - Waterluvian 7mo ago
    I think the verdict has been in for years now that there is nothing that Americans will mobilize against if it’s only the principles of freedom and liberty on the line. I think it will take being poked with a rather large stick to see some movement. Crippling the economy might be that stick. Unfortunately we all get to suffer their idiocracy.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
      As I've told people in the past, what you have to understand is that the First Amendment gives Americans wide latitude to mobilize in ways which don't code as mobilization. There's a nationwide protest scheduled for Saturday based on the premise that Trump is a tyrant and we the people won't let him do what he wants. But it's legal and common for people to say that; indeed, it's even legal to say (and I do say) that Trump should be overthrown. So what would be "mobilization" in a lot of places is just another weekend.
0x3f 7mo ago
Is the practical outcome much different? I doubt they'll get contracts either way, so the labelling was just a formality. If anything it seems the label was just intended to give a veneer of legitimacy to the admin by using an existing mechanism and terminology, rather than saying "we're going to block your access because we feel like it".
- epolanski 7mo ago
  It's a strong signal that the government cannot strong arm privates.
  - simmerup 7mo ago
    Though of course that would require the government to respect the rule of law
- mmoustafa 7mo ago
  The Supply Chain Risk label requires every single company in the supply chain of a product or service provided to the US Government to either drop Anthropic or get dropped themselves. This is not just suppliers, but also includes suppliers of suppliers all the way down. This is a much larger chunk of the economy (approaching 100%) than the Pentagon/DOW.
  - 0x3f 7mo ago
    Yes, but > I suspect the admin will now just have an informal, not-written-down policy that does exactly the same thing.
    - mmoustafa 7mo ago
      Aaand that would get challenged in court, remember they had to get Congress to create this designation in the first place because it is not de-facto legal for the USG to discriminate between individuals or corporations.
    - root_axis 7mo ago
charcircuit 7mo ago
What's the point of a supply chain risk distinction if you can't mark a company as a risk if they express that they will be a risk?
- 0x3f 7mo ago
  Well, you could also say what's the point of laws when courts can interpret them however they like? There's never a neat answer in such multi-valent systems, is there?
- mexicocitinluez 7mo ago
  What's the point of the Constitution when the government can ignore it at their discretion?
  - dboreham 7mo ago
    Freedom Treater.
- Dylan16807 7mo ago
  Is this question supposed to have anything to do with the situation at hand, where what they did was refuse to perform certain categories of service?
  - charcircuit 7mo ago
    >was refuse to perform certain categories of service? Anthropic wanted to have the power over what the government could or couldn't do. If there was any false positive on something that was supposed to be allowed the government would have to work with Anthropic and get permission from them to do something they are allowed to do. This to me is the risk that Anthropic was giving to the government. If Anthropic expresses that they want this level of power over what the military can do I think that such intention can justify being a risk. That is how it relates to my comment.
    - joe5150 7mo ago
dataflow 7mo ago
I assume the court case [1] is referring to 10 U.S. Code § 3252 [2]? [1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72379655/134/anthropic-pbc-v-us-department-of-war/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72379655/134/anthropic-... [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/3252 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/3252
arrglk34t 7mo ago
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arrglk34t 7mo ago
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arrglk34t 7mo ago
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- amarant 7mo ago
  @dang I'm formally petitioning you to bring down the banhammer upon this obvious troll account
  - arrglk34t 7mo ago
    [flagged]
  - Dylan16807 7mo ago
    If you need a moderator you can send an email, but it's a brand new account posting on one thread so that's not going to do much.
  - gnabgib 7mo ago
    @dang doesn't work.. you've been here long enough. > (..) email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - amarant 7mo ago
      Right, my bad
tim4ock 7mo ago
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AbrahamParangi 7mo ago
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- fwipsy 7mo ago
  Can you be more specific? I see a lot of uninformed takes, but no specific bias. Do you mean downvotes?
  - davidw 7mo ago
    If you turn on the thing that shows 'dead' comments, there is a larger than normal number here.
    - dfabulich 7mo ago
      Indeed, and the dead comments (from new users!) overwhelmingly favor the government position. But, this is a non-story, because those comments were correctly killed precisely so they wouldn't clog up this thread.
      - longislandguido 7mo ago
        Do you think it's more likely a government influence operation, or a single dipshit lazily pasting LLM slop?
        nutjob2 7mo ago
        Could be organic dipshits with little to offer the discussion. That's the most common case in my view. Said dipshits tend have an unnecessarily high degree of self regard.
        SecretDreams 7mo ago
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felixagentai 7mo ago
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jimbob45 7mo ago
Lost in the cacophony is the fact that Anthropic fumbled a strong lifeline while hemorrhaging cash without a business model. It’s fun to look down at OpenAI but they may not get another chance like this again.
- felixgallo 7mo ago
  It's fun to say that Anthropic doesn't have a business model, but clearly they do. Hopefully they can achieve it while maintaining their standards, even if in the eyes of some that's 'fumbling a strong lifeline'.
- MeetingsBrowser 7mo ago
  Claude has had such a massive increase in usage since being labeled a supply chain risk the service has been struggling to scale to meet increase demand. On top of that, the prevailing opinion seemed to be that courts would overrule the supply chain risk designation, allowing the government and its subcontractors to use Claude again. It’s hard to see how they could have navigated this better
- israrkhan 7mo ago
  This government contract was a very small part of anthropic revenue. Almost negligible. Their 2026 revenue is projected to be $14 billion to $20 billion. This contract was $200M over 2 years.
  - brandensilva 7mo ago
    On top of that, Palantir has been designated as a multi year contract and they use Anthropic under the hood.
- bicx 7mo ago
  Anthropic is the leading enterprise LLM provider. All they have to do is keep building a best-performing product, charge what they need, and keep costs as far down as possible. If my company knew there were an LLM 1.5x as good as Opus, they would be willing to pay 3x the cost. If it were being sold by Anthropic, they’d be even more likely to pay, since we could easily keep our same tooling.
mrkstu 7mo ago
The issue of course is that the Judge can't change the knowledge that the head of the executive doesn't want people down the chain using this product, so they won't. Anthropic is a dead letter in government circles until the next Presidential election.
- ajross 7mo ago
  That's something that normal boring suits can and do remedy. Companies sue and win over denied government contracts all the time.
- ncallaway 7mo ago
  Eh, it’s not going to be transitively problematic for Anthropic the way the supply chain risk designation would’ve been. Amazon isn’t going to have to divest from Anthropic because of this. Yes, they probably won’t be able to get a contract with Raytheon, but that wasn’t the main risk of being tagged with the supply chain risk designation.
- bakies 7mo ago
  The type of contract they had was optional anyway. They could have just not done business with Anthropic in the first place. Really I think this has only promoted their platform as being sane and moral.
  - heavyset_go 7mo ago
    > Really I think this has only promoted their platform as being sane and moral. I mean, maybe for people who aren't paying attention to how Claude's actually weaponized[1]? This use case is neither "domestic mass surveillance" nor "autonomous weapons" as humans were in the loop: > Old intelligence and AI? Behind the deadly attack on an Iranian girls’ school that left 175 dead > The targets for Operation Epic Fury were identified with the aid of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Maven Smart System, which folds in data from surveillance and intelligence, among other data points, and can lay out the information on a dashboard to support officials in their decision-making. > Maven, created by Palantir, has been coupled with Anthropic’s Claude, a large language model that can vastly speed up that processing. > Seth Lazar, who leads the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab at Australian National University, said the use of Claude to select military targets “should send chills down the spine of anyone who's been spending the last few months vibe-coding, vibe-researching, vibe-engineering.” Doesn't sound sane and moral to me [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/iran-school-attack-ai-investigation-b2937456.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
mr_00ff00 7mo ago
Had this conversation with a friend, but I think as an America you can be very optimistic about the institutional strength of democracy in the country. People are very pessimistic recently, but if anything, we are seeing that our system works well. A person got into power that a majority voted for, but when he oversteps, the courts and other institutions (even judges and fed reserve chairs he picked!) seem to hold him to the rules. I get the pessimism, but for the most part, I kinda think the system is working.
- cwillu 7mo ago
  The question is not whether the walls can contain the bull until animal control arrives, but whether any china will remain intact.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - setsewerd 7mo ago
    Given the iran situation I think china will be fine. (I'll show myself out)
  - kirubakaran 7mo ago
    The bull comparison is a bit unfair to the bull, who didn't break any china at all in MythBusters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzw2iBmRsjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzw2iBmRsjs
  - pjc50 7mo ago
    It's more like the early bits of Jurassic Park: the T-Rex bashing away at the restraints while everyone assures you that they spared no expense to make it secure.
- mxkopy 7mo ago
  This is one ruling out of many, many of which directly benefit Trump. See Trump vs. United States 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States There’s absolutely 0 reason to be optimistic towards a court stacked explicitly in his favor.
yen223 7mo ago
How many of you had to stop using Claude because of the Pentagon edict?
- gburgett 7mo ago
  We are certainly moving that direction (small defense sub)
- Terretta 7mo ago
  Invert the question: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/06/claudes-consumer-growth-surge-continues-after-pentagon-deal-debacle/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/06/claudes-consumer-growth-su...
- biophysboy 7mo ago
  I had to, and I work in a completely different agency (NIH)
- xvector 7mo ago
  Pushed me towards Claude.
- Seattle3503 7mo ago
  I did, but the govt is one of my companies customers
- mholm 7mo ago
  My org gave us 5 months to transition our personal usage away from Anthropic products. Presumably that's paused now, though they haven't made an announcement. I work with medicare/medicaid, and the supply chain risk was directly cited in the initial decision.
stainablesteel 7mo ago
i think the military should be able to do what it wants last i checked the german military is held down by stupid obligations forced onto it by its government that make it both inefficient and obsolete
- Analemma_ 7mo ago
  As many, many people more intelligent and good-faith than you have pointed out, the government is free to stop using Anthropic‘s services at any time: nobody disputes that. What they are not free to do is impose a corporate death sentence because their contract counterparty wouldn’t submit to forceful changing of terms they had previously both agreed on.
  - stainablesteel 7mo ago
    > claims bad faith > starts off with insults the judge ruling is independent of the prior events you can think one thing about one of those things, and another about another
chmorgan_ 7mo ago
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inquirerGeneral 7mo ago
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ljsprague 7mo ago
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- SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
  As everyone will see it for what it is when Hegseth reports for his prison sentence. I regret that you see American democracy protecting itself as a plot by "the Left", and hope you'll have the wisdom to abandon ship before the aspiring autocrats drag you down with them.
  - ljsprague 6mo ago
    American Democracy Protecting Itself like when Bernie Sanders faced a rigged primary or when Hillary/Obama manufactured "Russia collusion" or when Biden flooded the country with non-citizens. It's not just "the Left" though, I will concede. Republicans almost equally captured.
pugchat 7mo ago
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telotortium 7mo ago
Just a district judge, so I’m supposing the Trump administration will file an appeal if they care, and will almost certainly get a preliminary injunction. The Ninth Circuit ruling will be more telling.
xvector 7mo ago
Unfortunately the Pentagon can and will appeal, and the 9th Circuit and higher courts are excessively deferential on "matters of national security."
yalogin 7mo ago
Glad to see the judicial system works sometimes atleast. Less cynically now, the president has admired Xi many many times openly, and it’s clear he prefers an administrative style similar to China. That is what he is turning the country into. Everybody goes and bends the knee like the tech ceos did and he controls every aspect of the administration with an iron fist, just like China.
- trymas 7mo ago
  IMHO current USA government is somewhat inverse to China. US government now is a kakistocracy made out of sycophants to the biggest egomaniac this generation have ever seen. Who is only driven by personal wealth and attention. Any billionaire capitalist psychopath openly promising to give cash and attention to orange musollini gets a free reign to do anything (they could be even not from USA) - it’s oligarchy. China is not that. Xi and CCP are much more principled than emotional children in USA.
  - IAmBroom 7mo ago
    Xi is intelligent and capable of long-term planning. The only similarity I see is that neither Xi nor our Narcissist-in-Chief brook any criticism; but aside from the "Let 1,000 Flowers Bloom" campaign of Mao, that has always been China's domestic policy.
    - criley2 7mo ago
      It's not that a leader is capable of long-term planning, it's that a system is. I am a big proponent for democracy, but the fact is simple that when you do a massive regime change every ~4 years, nothing big will get done. You have about 2 good years to do something, and most big projects simply require more time than that. China, unlike the US, can look 10 years into the future and consistently execute towards a goal. That's not because of leaders, it's because the systems are fundamentally designed this way. It's like the two party system in the US. It's because of first past the post in the Constitution. The system is designed to do this, so it does it. The US is designed to be unable to plan or execute long term vision.
panny 7mo ago
>10 U.S.C. § 3252 authorizes the Secretary of Defense to exclude a source from defense procurements involving national security systems if there is a supply chain risk, defined as the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or subvert a covered system. I think any LLM is covered by that, but specifically for Anthropic, >Recent research has uncovered several critical vulnerabilities, including the "Claudy Day" attack chain which allows silent data exfiltration through conversation history, and a zero-click XSS prompt injection in the Chrome extension that enabled attackers to inject prompts without user interaction until a patch was released in February 2026. What is obvious to me however is the timing. This Trump pants-shitting happened just before the Iran invasion. You can just imagine it. Trump wants to send fully autonomous bots into Iran to destroy the non-existent nuclear program. Anthropic leadership tries to make a moral stand saying innocent civilians could die. Trump doesn't care because he wants zero US military casualties even if it means a school full of Iranian children is bombed and everyone is killed. And then we get exactly that plus a forever war. And obviously, the judge is out of her lane too... since, you know, the rule basically can apply to any AI agent because they're just as likely to do what you ask as they are to delete all your emails without even apologizing for it.
lrvick 7mo ago
I mean they -are- a supply chain risk, but also, so is every security negligent proprietary software firm the public and government relies on for no reason. Anthropic deserves to -share- this label with dozens of other companies. What is insane is that the US government lacks the capability to insert GPUs into PCIe slots, and provide them with electricity and FOSS tools. This shit is just not that hard. Especially when you have an unlimited money printer. A level of incompetence that causes the US government to even think they need to pay a private company to host LLMs for them is the biggest risk I see.
zombot 7mo ago
Will it help? This administration is not big on adherence to the law.
aimemobe 7mo ago
[flagged]

447 points by prawn 7mo ago

bustah 7mo ago

[flagged]

yubainu 7mo ago

[dead]

nickysielicki 7mo ago
[flagged]
- etchalon 7mo ago
  No one is forcing the DoD to contract with a company.
  - nickysielicki 7mo ago
    DoD would like to use Palantir. DoD also believes Anthropic is pursuing posttraining in future models that will limit the effectiveness of Palantir tooling, if used by Palantir, for the purposes of DoDs mission. What other legal mechanism do they have to prevent Palantir from specifically not subcontracting out to Anthropic, other than a supply chain risk designation? Note that directly asking Palantir to prefer Google or OpenAI over Anthropic is a violation of procurement law and highly illegal. What other mechanism do they have?
    - dathery 7mo ago
      They can say "sorry Palantir, we will only sign a contract with you if you commit not to use Claude to provide services" and then Palantir is free to decide if they want to accept the terms of the contract or not. This is how business works.
      - nickysielicki 7mo ago
        That would be illegal and ripe for corruption. It would also require the DoD to renegotiate the thousands of existing defense contract it has outstanding. That’s the entire reason this law exists, because what you’re suggesting is impractical. The department has to confidentially document its rationale for marking a company as a supply chain risk. It’s in the confidential record of this very court case. That’s the legal way to do this.
        etchalon 7mo ago
        Yes, it turns out our laws make it hard for the government to do a lot of things because making it easy for them to do things leads to some deeply authoritarian bullshit.
        nickysielicki 7mo ago
        What a beautiful/horrifying inversion of logic. The government does it the legal way, through an existing law, and you’re short circuiting and pattern matching to “the government is trying to work around the law”. The DoD is not trying to sneak its way out of behaving legally. On the contrary, they’re doing it the legal way and you’re suggesting that they could just do it the illegal way.
        etchalon 7mo ago
        The DOD is labeling a domestic company a supply chain risk - label generally reserved for hostile foreign powers and their cooperators - because that domestic company didn't agree to its contract terms. Judge Lin's order finds that it do so specifically to harm that company, without due process and without the remedies Congress specifically requested be used when it drafted the law. The DOD was, in essence, using a law illegally. The version of events you present does not seem to be tethered to reality.
        thereticent 7mo ago
        Again, you of undue certainty: the government attempted this potentially legal avenue, and it was adjudicated as impermissible. Meaning what they tried didn't work. Why are you acting like no one else here understands what has happened? Probability dictates that you are almost certainly not the smartest person in the room.
    - brookst 7mo ago
      Why are they entitled to have a mechanism to force a private company to deal in weapons and surveillance?
      - nickysielicki 7mo ago
        [flagged]
        etchalon 7mo ago
        No, Anthropic is suing for the right to not be labeled a supply chain risk for a failed contract negotiation. Nothing in their suit, or this ruling, says the DoD has to buy things from them.
        nickysielicki 7mo ago
        Whose supply chain? A supply chain risk to whom? If they are comfortable without being in that supply chain, whoever’s supply chain that is (exercise to the reader), why are they suing?
        thereticent 7mo ago
        You can say this person is an idiot all you want, but the fact of the matter is that if DoD does not want to deal with Anthropic through Palantir, their only legal recourse at this point is to drop Palantir. They shot their shot with this legal gamble to remove Anthropic from the supply chain, and they failed. That's it. Curtains or deal with it.
        nickysielicki 7mo ago
        You really think the world works that way? One judge with two years on the bench makes a determination after two weeks of consideration and the case is closed forever? This injunction doesn’t take effect for a week, precisely so that the Department has time to appeal this to the 9th circuit. And even if the 9th circuit doesn’t stay it, SCOTUS will. This court has stayed district court injunctions against the executive on national security grounds multiple times. They are not going to let a single district judge in San Francisco dictate military procurement during an active war. Obviously. OBVIOUSLY. Lin didn’t drop Palantir from the defense supply chain unilaterally. The world does not work that way. Obviously. She issued a preliminary injunction that will be appealed before it takes effect. The DoD has not “shot their shot.” This lawsuit hasn’t even started yet.
    - dragonwriter 7mo ago
      > DoD would like to use Palantir. DoD also believes Anthropic is pursuing posttraining in future models that will limit the effectiveness of Palantir tooling, if used by Palantir, for the purposes of DoDs mission. > What other legal mechanism do they have to prevent Palantir from specifically not subcontracting out to Anthropic, other than a supply chain risk designation? Even assuming the stated concern was justifiable, and even assuming that there was no alternative mechanism, that does not: (1) Justify them failing to what is explicit required for the supply chain risk designation, (2) Create an exception to the 5th Amendment Due Process Clause, which (for reasons stated in the ruling) merely meeting the facial standards in the statute for the supply chain risk designation does not do when the supplier is (contrary to the motivating justification for the statutory provision) a domestic supplier where the government has no special evidence that it can demonstrate for exigency, (3) Justify the other challenged actions covered by the injunction (like the Hegseth Directive ordering a much broader ban than is imposed by the supply chain risk designation, or the earlier Presidential Directive ordering an even broader ban than the Hegseth Directive.) (4) Really, do anything at all legally, because it is not a principal of US law that the government, if it has a good motive, is free to act outside of the law merely because there is no provision inside the law which meets its desires.
      - nickysielicki 7mo ago
        The court hasn’t found anything. A preliminary injunction is a finding of likelihood of success on the merits, not a ruling on the merits. The designation is still in place and will remain in place until the appellate courts weigh in. On the substance: nothing in 3252 limits ‘adversary’ to foreign actors. Congress used ‘foreign adversary’ in other statutes when it meant foreign adversary. It didn’t here. That’s a problem for you. The government’s brief cites three dictionaries defining adversary as ‘an opponent in a contest, conflict, or dispute.’ A vendor that questions active military operations through intermediaries and demands an approval role in the operational decision chain is an opponent in a dispute. That’s the plain text. Originalist judges will see it that way. I don’t really follow what you’re saying in point 1, the supply chain risk rationale is in the confidential record of this court case. There’s no way for us to know what’s in there, but it’s safe to assume the government covered their bases. On point 2, I also don’t understand what you’re saying. They are in court right now. How have they been denied due process? Point 3 is less interesting to me. Twitter posts by Hegseth obviously don’t really hold water. Anthropic should win here. But that’s not really what this case is about or why it’s interesting. Your point 4 assumes the government acted outside the law. I’m not convinced of that. That’s the very question being litigated. The government’s position is that it acted within 3252. One San Francisco district judge disagreed at the preliminary injunction stage. That’s not a final answer. Not even close.
    - zmmmmm 7mo ago
      I think the whole entire point of this is they shouldn't be excluding Anthropic as an entity, they should be excluding all suppliers on equal terms on the basis of whether they satisfy requirements or not. If it is a requirement that they be able to conduct mass domestic surveillance then they should put that into their contract with Palantir, not "You can't use Anthropic". So I agree with you, it ought to be illegal for them to tell a supplier what other suppliers to use. But that is exactly the larger point here in the first place that they should not be doing that at all.
      - nickysielicki 7mo ago
        The government cannot conduct massive domestic surveillance in any case, that’s illegal. Other vendors are mature and serious enough to understand that the government is subject to American law and must operate under American law. They’re mature and serious enough to understand that it is the exclusive right of the judicial branch to make determinations around whether the law has been violated or not. They’re mature and serious enough to understand that the DoD has a mandate to pursue its mission to the fullest extent allowable by the law, and it is the sole responsibility of the DoD legal team to determine whether they are operating safely within the bounds of the law. Anthropic is uniquely interested in introducing itself as an external enforcer of US law, a sort of belt-and-suspenders approach, where the Department is not only subject to operate under the constitution and the laws from the legislative branch, but also subject to anthropics interpretation of whether they are operating under the constitution and the laws from the legislative branch. The department of defense does not want to engage in massive domestic surveillance beyond what the law allows them to do. They have signed agreements with OpenAI and other vendors which reiterate that they do not wish to use AI systems for massive domestic surveillance. These terms were unsatisfactory for Anthropic, for whatever reason. The problem is not the terms of the agreement. It’s the people and the way they conduct business. It’s the fact that they’ve expressed a willingness to hold their product (or future products) hostage, at the cost of DoD operational excellence. It’s the fact that they’re training a specific model variant for government usage with extra guardrails and limitations and values. Above all else, it’s the fact that they want to leverage their position as a leading AI company to influence government policy. This is not how a serious reliable partner of the government behaves. The problem from the DoDs perspective is the company itself and the people in charge of it.
- dathery 7mo ago
  Did you read the order? It directly addresses your comment: > More importantly, as discussed above, no one is entitled to conduct business with the Federal Government, see Perkins, 310 U.S. at 127, and irrespective of the challenged actions, DoW and other federal agencies are free to terminate its contracts and agreements with Anthropic, as Anthropic readily admits. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.465515/gov.uscourts.cand.465515.96.0_3.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
  - nickysielicki 7mo ago
    This entire event came about because Anthropic raised concerns with Palantir and the Department around how Palantir used Claude when the Pentagon used Palantir in the Maduro raids. The pentagon can terminate its direct contract with Anthropic but it does nothing to address the risk that Anthropic poses to the reliability of Palantir’s services, which are (at this point) critical to the way that the Department operates. People keep repeating this lie and I’m sick of it. The direct usage of Claude by the pentagon is not what they’re trying to address, it’s the usage of Claude by Palantir that they’re trying to address. And this is the legal way for them to do that. Again, for the third time in this thread, they MAY NOT ask Palantir off the record to just not use Anthropic. This would be extremely illegal and would give Anthropic standing to sue to the government.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
      I don't understand how to square your story about what motivated the government against what actually happened. This is the statement that the President of the United States made when announcing that Anthropic would be cut off: > 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 trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY. > Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again! There will be a Six Month phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic’s products, at various levels. Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow. > WE will decide the fate of our Country — NOT some out-of-control, Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Perhaps you've not seen this statement before; there are a number of people who find it inconvenient that US policy is driven by insane social media rants, and prefer to make up more sensible rationales for the same policies. But there's no part of the actual published announcement that discusses the relationship between Palantir and Anthropic.
inquirerGeneral 7mo ago
[dead]
monkpit 7mo ago
> successfully Time will tell
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

JohnTHaller 7mo ago

Some judicial pushback against authoritarian policies is good to see.

alexchapman 7mo ago
Oh I agree.
alienbaby 7mo ago
I'd wish more for an impartial, considered judgement
- sgc 7mo ago
  Which of course would look exactly like judicial pushback against authoritarian policies.
- KronisLV 7mo ago
  > Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government What issue do you take with that statement or the outcome here? I think Anthropic’s position on what the tech should not be used for was well reasoned. It feels like the govt. flipped out based on their public messaging and this whole ordeal - instead of them themselves being more measured and just choosing not to use Anthropic’s services if they take an issue with it.
- mpalmer 7mo ago
  I deeply wish for people who say things this cryptic and opinionated to actually speak their mind and back up their positions. Comments like these add little to the discussion.
  - xvector 7mo ago
    They don't speak their minds because they know their opinions are so beyond the pale that they wouldn't be accepted in civil society.

comrade1234 7mo ago

[flagged]

paulpauper 7mo ago

So much for all that alarmism a month ago. Just got to be patient and wait for cooler heads to prevail. Or it goes to show how Anthropic handled it well, by making their case as persuasively and assertively without delay as they had done.

jonplackett 7mo ago
It’s all a big PR campaign. They will reveal shortly that they used Claude as their legal team.
SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
I completely disagree with the idea that a court not allowing the Secretary of Defense to bankrupt a company for disagreeing with him means it's wrong to be alarmed that he tried. It remains extraordinarily alarming that the guy who runs the US military thinks anyone who tries to stop him from doing what he'd like is a threat.
- Waterluvian 7mo ago
  I think the verdict has been in for years now that there is nothing that Americans will mobilize against if it’s only the principles of freedom and liberty on the line. I think it will take being poked with a rather large stick to see some movement. Crippling the economy might be that stick. Unfortunately we all get to suffer their idiocracy.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
    As I've told people in the past, what you have to understand is that the First Amendment gives Americans wide latitude to mobilize in ways which don't code as mobilization. There's a nationwide protest scheduled for Saturday based on the premise that Trump is a tyrant and we the people won't let him do what he wants. But it's legal and common for people to say that; indeed, it's even legal to say (and I do say) that Trump should be overthrown. So what would be "mobilization" in a lot of places is just another weekend.

0x3f 7mo ago

Is the practical outcome much different? I doubt they'll get contracts either way, so the labelling was just a formality. If anything it seems the label was just intended to give a veneer of legitimacy to the admin by using an existing mechanism and terminology, rather than saying "we're going to block your access because we feel like it".

epolanski 7mo ago
It's a strong signal that the government cannot strong arm privates.
- simmerup 7mo ago
  Though of course that would require the government to respect the rule of law
mmoustafa 7mo ago
The Supply Chain Risk label requires every single company in the supply chain of a product or service provided to the US Government to either drop Anthropic or get dropped themselves. This is not just suppliers, but also includes suppliers of suppliers all the way down. This is a much larger chunk of the economy (approaching 100%) than the Pentagon/DOW.
- 0x3f 7mo ago
  Yes, but > I suspect the admin will now just have an informal, not-written-down policy that does exactly the same thing.
  - mmoustafa 7mo ago
    Aaand that would get challenged in court, remember they had to get Congress to create this designation in the first place because it is not de-facto legal for the USG to discriminate between individuals or corporations.
  - root_axis 7mo ago

charcircuit 7mo ago

What's the point of a supply chain risk distinction if you can't mark a company as a risk if they express that they will be a risk?

0x3f 7mo ago
Well, you could also say what's the point of laws when courts can interpret them however they like? There's never a neat answer in such multi-valent systems, is there?
mexicocitinluez 7mo ago
What's the point of the Constitution when the government can ignore it at their discretion?
- dboreham 7mo ago
  Freedom Treater.
Dylan16807 7mo ago
Is this question supposed to have anything to do with the situation at hand, where what they did was refuse to perform certain categories of service?
- charcircuit 7mo ago
  >was refuse to perform certain categories of service? Anthropic wanted to have the power over what the government could or couldn't do. If there was any false positive on something that was supposed to be allowed the government would have to work with Anthropic and get permission from them to do something they are allowed to do. This to me is the risk that Anthropic was giving to the government. If Anthropic expresses that they want this level of power over what the military can do I think that such intention can justify being a risk. That is how it relates to my comment.
  - joe5150 7mo ago

dataflow 7mo ago

I assume the court case [1] is referring to 10 U.S. Code § 3252 [2]? [1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72379655/134/anthropic-pbc-v-us-department-of-war/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72379655/134/anthropic-... [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/3252 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/3252

arrglk34t 7mo ago

[flagged]

arrglk34t 7mo ago

[flagged]

arrglk34t 7mo ago

[flagged]

amarant 7mo ago
@dang I'm formally petitioning you to bring down the banhammer upon this obvious troll account
- arrglk34t 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- Dylan16807 7mo ago
  If you need a moderator you can send an email, but it's a brand new account posting on one thread so that's not going to do much.
- gnabgib 7mo ago
  @dang doesn't work.. you've been here long enough. > (..) email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - amarant 7mo ago
    Right, my bad

tim4ock 7mo ago

[flagged]

AbrahamParangi 7mo ago

[flagged]

fwipsy 7mo ago
Can you be more specific? I see a lot of uninformed takes, but no specific bias. Do you mean downvotes?
- davidw 7mo ago
  If you turn on the thing that shows 'dead' comments, there is a larger than normal number here.
  - dfabulich 7mo ago
    Indeed, and the dead comments (from new users!) overwhelmingly favor the government position. But, this is a non-story, because those comments were correctly killed precisely so they wouldn't clog up this thread.
    - longislandguido 7mo ago
      Do you think it's more likely a government influence operation, or a single dipshit lazily pasting LLM slop?
      - nutjob2 7mo ago
        Could be organic dipshits with little to offer the discussion. That's the most common case in my view. Said dipshits tend have an unnecessarily high degree of self regard.
        SecretDreams 7mo ago
        [flagged]

felixagentai 7mo ago

[flagged]

jimbob45 7mo ago

Lost in the cacophony is the fact that Anthropic fumbled a strong lifeline while hemorrhaging cash without a business model. It’s fun to look down at OpenAI but they may not get another chance like this again.

felixgallo 7mo ago
It's fun to say that Anthropic doesn't have a business model, but clearly they do. Hopefully they can achieve it while maintaining their standards, even if in the eyes of some that's 'fumbling a strong lifeline'.
MeetingsBrowser 7mo ago
Claude has had such a massive increase in usage since being labeled a supply chain risk the service has been struggling to scale to meet increase demand. On top of that, the prevailing opinion seemed to be that courts would overrule the supply chain risk designation, allowing the government and its subcontractors to use Claude again. It’s hard to see how they could have navigated this better
israrkhan 7mo ago
This government contract was a very small part of anthropic revenue. Almost negligible. Their 2026 revenue is projected to be $14 billion to $20 billion. This contract was $200M over 2 years.
- brandensilva 7mo ago
  On top of that, Palantir has been designated as a multi year contract and they use Anthropic under the hood.
bicx 7mo ago
Anthropic is the leading enterprise LLM provider. All they have to do is keep building a best-performing product, charge what they need, and keep costs as far down as possible. If my company knew there were an LLM 1.5x as good as Opus, they would be willing to pay 3x the cost. If it were being sold by Anthropic, they’d be even more likely to pay, since we could easily keep our same tooling.

mrkstu 7mo ago

The issue of course is that the Judge can't change the knowledge that the head of the executive doesn't want people down the chain using this product, so they won't. Anthropic is a dead letter in government circles until the next Presidential election.

ajross 7mo ago
That's something that normal boring suits can and do remedy. Companies sue and win over denied government contracts all the time.
ncallaway 7mo ago
Eh, it’s not going to be transitively problematic for Anthropic the way the supply chain risk designation would’ve been. Amazon isn’t going to have to divest from Anthropic because of this. Yes, they probably won’t be able to get a contract with Raytheon, but that wasn’t the main risk of being tagged with the supply chain risk designation.
bakies 7mo ago
The type of contract they had was optional anyway. They could have just not done business with Anthropic in the first place. Really I think this has only promoted their platform as being sane and moral.
- heavyset_go 7mo ago
  > Really I think this has only promoted their platform as being sane and moral. I mean, maybe for people who aren't paying attention to how Claude's actually weaponized[1]? This use case is neither "domestic mass surveillance" nor "autonomous weapons" as humans were in the loop: > Old intelligence and AI? Behind the deadly attack on an Iranian girls’ school that left 175 dead > The targets for Operation Epic Fury were identified with the aid of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Maven Smart System, which folds in data from surveillance and intelligence, among other data points, and can lay out the information on a dashboard to support officials in their decision-making. > Maven, created by Palantir, has been coupled with Anthropic’s Claude, a large language model that can vastly speed up that processing. > Seth Lazar, who leads the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab at Australian National University, said the use of Claude to select military targets “should send chills down the spine of anyone who's been spending the last few months vibe-coding, vibe-researching, vibe-engineering.” Doesn't sound sane and moral to me [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/iran-school-attack-ai-investigation-b2937456.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

mr_00ff00 7mo ago

Had this conversation with a friend, but I think as an America you can be very optimistic about the institutional strength of democracy in the country. People are very pessimistic recently, but if anything, we are seeing that our system works well. A person got into power that a majority voted for, but when he oversteps, the courts and other institutions (even judges and fed reserve chairs he picked!) seem to hold him to the rules. I get the pessimism, but for the most part, I kinda think the system is working.

cwillu 7mo ago
The question is not whether the walls can contain the bull until animal control arrives, but whether any china will remain intact.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- setsewerd 7mo ago
  Given the iran situation I think china will be fine. (I'll show myself out)
- kirubakaran 7mo ago
  The bull comparison is a bit unfair to the bull, who didn't break any china at all in MythBusters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzw2iBmRsjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzw2iBmRsjs
- pjc50 7mo ago
  It's more like the early bits of Jurassic Park: the T-Rex bashing away at the restraints while everyone assures you that they spared no expense to make it secure.
mxkopy 7mo ago
This is one ruling out of many, many of which directly benefit Trump. See Trump vs. United States 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States There’s absolutely 0 reason to be optimistic towards a court stacked explicitly in his favor.

yen223 7mo ago

How many of you had to stop using Claude because of the Pentagon edict?

gburgett 7mo ago
We are certainly moving that direction (small defense sub)
Terretta 7mo ago
Invert the question: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/06/claudes-consumer-growth-surge-continues-after-pentagon-deal-debacle/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/06/claudes-consumer-growth-su...
biophysboy 7mo ago
I had to, and I work in a completely different agency (NIH)
xvector 7mo ago
Pushed me towards Claude.
Seattle3503 7mo ago
I did, but the govt is one of my companies customers
mholm 7mo ago
My org gave us 5 months to transition our personal usage away from Anthropic products. Presumably that's paused now, though they haven't made an announcement. I work with medicare/medicaid, and the supply chain risk was directly cited in the initial decision.

stainablesteel 7mo ago

i think the military should be able to do what it wants last i checked the german military is held down by stupid obligations forced onto it by its government that make it both inefficient and obsolete

Analemma_ 7mo ago
As many, many people more intelligent and good-faith than you have pointed out, the government is free to stop using Anthropic‘s services at any time: nobody disputes that. What they are not free to do is impose a corporate death sentence because their contract counterparty wouldn’t submit to forceful changing of terms they had previously both agreed on.
- stainablesteel 7mo ago
  > claims bad faith > starts off with insults the judge ruling is independent of the prior events you can think one thing about one of those things, and another about another

chmorgan_ 7mo ago

[dead]

inquirerGeneral 7mo ago

[dead]

ljsprague 7mo ago

[flagged]

SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
As everyone will see it for what it is when Hegseth reports for his prison sentence. I regret that you see American democracy protecting itself as a plot by "the Left", and hope you'll have the wisdom to abandon ship before the aspiring autocrats drag you down with them.
- ljsprague 6mo ago
  American Democracy Protecting Itself like when Bernie Sanders faced a rigged primary or when Hillary/Obama manufactured "Russia collusion" or when Biden flooded the country with non-citizens. It's not just "the Left" though, I will concede. Republicans almost equally captured.

pugchat 7mo ago

[dead]

telotortium 7mo ago

Just a district judge, so I’m supposing the Trump administration will file an appeal if they care, and will almost certainly get a preliminary injunction. The Ninth Circuit ruling will be more telling.

xvector 7mo ago

Unfortunately the Pentagon can and will appeal, and the 9th Circuit and higher courts are excessively deferential on "matters of national security."

yalogin 7mo ago

Glad to see the judicial system works sometimes atleast. Less cynically now, the president has admired Xi many many times openly, and it’s clear he prefers an administrative style similar to China. That is what he is turning the country into. Everybody goes and bends the knee like the tech ceos did and he controls every aspect of the administration with an iron fist, just like China.

trymas 7mo ago
IMHO current USA government is somewhat inverse to China. US government now is a kakistocracy made out of sycophants to the biggest egomaniac this generation have ever seen. Who is only driven by personal wealth and attention. Any billionaire capitalist psychopath openly promising to give cash and attention to orange musollini gets a free reign to do anything (they could be even not from USA) - it’s oligarchy. China is not that. Xi and CCP are much more principled than emotional children in USA.
- IAmBroom 7mo ago
  Xi is intelligent and capable of long-term planning. The only similarity I see is that neither Xi nor our Narcissist-in-Chief brook any criticism; but aside from the "Let 1,000 Flowers Bloom" campaign of Mao, that has always been China's domestic policy.
  - criley2 7mo ago
    It's not that a leader is capable of long-term planning, it's that a system is. I am a big proponent for democracy, but the fact is simple that when you do a massive regime change every ~4 years, nothing big will get done. You have about 2 good years to do something, and most big projects simply require more time than that. China, unlike the US, can look 10 years into the future and consistently execute towards a goal. That's not because of leaders, it's because the systems are fundamentally designed this way. It's like the two party system in the US. It's because of first past the post in the Constitution. The system is designed to do this, so it does it. The US is designed to be unable to plan or execute long term vision.

panny 7mo ago

>10 U.S.C. § 3252 authorizes the Secretary of Defense to exclude a source from defense procurements involving national security systems if there is a supply chain risk, defined as the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or subvert a covered system. I think any LLM is covered by that, but specifically for Anthropic, >Recent research has uncovered several critical vulnerabilities, including the "Claudy Day" attack chain which allows silent data exfiltration through conversation history, and a zero-click XSS prompt injection in the Chrome extension that enabled attackers to inject prompts without user interaction until a patch was released in February 2026. What is obvious to me however is the timing. This Trump pants-shitting happened just before the Iran invasion. You can just imagine it. Trump wants to send fully autonomous bots into Iran to destroy the non-existent nuclear program. Anthropic leadership tries to make a moral stand saying innocent civilians could die. Trump doesn't care because he wants zero US military casualties even if it means a school full of Iranian children is bombed and everyone is killed. And then we get exactly that plus a forever war. And obviously, the judge is out of her lane too... since, you know, the rule basically can apply to any AI agent because they're just as likely to do what you ask as they are to delete all your emails without even apologizing for it.

lrvick 7mo ago

I mean they -are- a supply chain risk, but also, so is every security negligent proprietary software firm the public and government relies on for no reason. Anthropic deserves to -share- this label with dozens of other companies. What is insane is that the US government lacks the capability to insert GPUs into PCIe slots, and provide them with electricity and FOSS tools. This shit is just not that hard. Especially when you have an unlimited money printer. A level of incompetence that causes the US government to even think they need to pay a private company to host LLMs for them is the biggest risk I see.

zombot 7mo ago

Will it help? This administration is not big on adherence to the law.

aimemobe 7mo ago

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