OpenAI has hacked several prominent entities and is allowed to do business as usual but Anthropic putting guardrails on the military's usage of AI is the national security threat while Pentagon itself said that over reliance on AI lead to that attack on school in Minab.
I have also learned that OpenAI's president is a big maga donor and now I am thinking of cancelling my OpenAI membership todau and signing up with Anthropic again.
pixl97 9 minutes ago [-]
Oh, 100%. You'll see OAI getting protected against lawsuits by the government while any missteps from Anthropic will be met with federal disapproval.
saadn92 8 minutes ago [-]
Glad I canceled my subscription with them then. MAGA support is a no-no for me
bigyabai 7 minutes ago [-]
Enough to make you wonder how the rest of FAANG stays in the fed's good graces.
paul7986 5 minutes ago [-]
Personally I am enjoying Muse the most and so far havent hit any limits. I also (i know it's not a popular thing) have enjoyed wearing my Meta Ray Ban's since 2023 even if they break as MANY months later they come back to life.
8 minutes ago [-]
enraged_camel 7 minutes ago [-]
Katsas and Rao, both Trump appointees, tag-teamed again. Trump automatically wins whenever they get a case.
CamperBob2 8 minutes ago [-]
Not just "a big MAGA donor," the biggest single contributor. Greg Brockman donated $25 million.
I get downvoted every time I point out that this was entirely rational. This, downvoters, is why it was entirely rational. Does that mean I agree with it? Of course not. But investments are made to pay off, and this one certainly has for OpenAI.
UncleOxidant 5 minutes ago [-]
Didn't Musk contribute ~10x that in '24?
CamperBob2 13 seconds ago [-]
Indirectly, through his companies. Brockman is said to have been the largest single private donor.
iamdelirium 46 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if this is going start being abused soon.
If I was Palantir or any other GOP aligned company, I would be completely against this. What's to stop a Democratic president from doing the same thing and destroying them?
doctorwho42 35 minutes ago [-]
Because the modern 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.
I doubt that is going to change anytime soon. They are a private entity, so they can manage and change their primary system any way they want.
UncleOxidant 2 minutes ago [-]
> the modern Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party
I suspect this is changing. The DSA branch especially wants all contracts with Palantir eliminated.
Braxton1980 4 minutes ago [-]
I thought the Democrats were the party of big government and regulations whereas the Republicans were for reducing regulations?
ipython 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
kryogen1c 5 minutes ago [-]
> democrats are more a process oriented party
Oh? Thats why Biden tried to run in 2024? Because democrats procedurally try to elect obviously incapable presidents?
malicka 1 minutes ago [-]
Exactly. Their process prioritizes seniority generally, and this is another case. The process is, if the president wants another go, he gets another go; and he sure as heck wanted another go.
reenorap 5 minutes ago [-]
Democrats are the same side of the coin as the Republicans.
We, the people, are on the other side.
Braxton1980 2 minutes ago [-]
"Both sides"
This is such a tired argument that over simplifies an entire group of people on both sides into a single entity that happens to be the same.
ajross 22 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
bushido 26 seconds ago [-]
Seeing Dodd-frank in the list is pretty hilarious, because it was put in place for the issues that arose from repealing Glass-Steagall by Clinton. Which arguably was one of the biggest causes of allowing the activities that lead to the Great financial crisis in 08.
reliabilityguy 14 minutes ago [-]
> ACA?
How’s ACA hard-hitting on corporations?
The 15/20 rules is what resulted in recorder profits in health insurance business, how’s this anti-corporate?
ajross 10 minutes ago [-]
> How’s ACA hard-hitting on corporations?
"You must sell insurance to sick people!", "I don't wanna!", "I don't care, the law now says you must."
I mean, the whole insurance industry had spent the better part of a century (basically its whole existence) denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, and the ACA fixed it via fiat.
Not only is it clearly "hard-hitting", I'd argue it's probably the single most "hard-hitting" invasive change to corporate regulation of the post-war era. Certainly it is in terms of the amount of money involved in the affected market.
> how’s this anti-corporate?
And this is where the rub is. You're not saying that your desired regulatory structure is something different than existing proposals, you're demanding that your government engage in behavior that is expressly "anti" whatever you perceive "corporate" interests to be.
That's not democracy, that's just warfare. You have enemies and you want to win. And the problem there is that the structure of our government requires compromise.
lotsofpulp 13 minutes ago [-]
Then why do the 7 publicly listed health insurers have shitty shareholder returns?
If their profits are so good, their shares would be worth owning.
Could it be because their profit margins are actually terrible (3% if lucky), and they have to get the price of their product approved by 50 different state government employees, and the federal government constantly changes their customer’s subsidies making revenue and expenses extremely volatile and difficult to forecast?
strappymcneeler 26 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
binlog 9 minutes ago [-]
Democrats don't control the courts.
mattnewton 44 minutes ago [-]
I’m worried why many big companies aren’t worried about when the shoe is on the other foot.
2OEH8eoCRo0 25 minutes ago [-]
I worry that they don't expect to leave power because they're acting like they will never be held accountable.
bpodgursky 41 minutes ago [-]
None of them really believe our economic or political systems will be recognizable by 2029. Everyone's playing for position in the short takeoff.
shimman 13 minutes ago [-]
What's to stop indeed? Some of us in the tech industry want the dems to slice and dice every tech company into irrelevance. They've betrayed society and they should be rightfully punished in fun + creative ways.
cramer4next 42 minutes ago [-]
Can you clarify what a GOP aligned company is? Is that any company thats willing to do business with the U.S. government or any businesses thats willing to sell products in red states?
Ydarbleoj 34 minutes 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?
sophrosyne42 16 minutes ago [-]
You mean the ones that have been doing so for many administrations across both parties?
cramer4next 17 minutes ago [-]
This doesn't appear to be unique to the GOP. Plenty of companies flank to whomever is in office. Even at that local government level. "Immoral policies" is subjective and would be in the eye of the beholder. If this was truely quantiative the U.S. wouldn't be a divided nation.
samudrijan 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
SpicyLemonZest 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
_ink_ 36 minutes ago [-]
The supreme court, I guess. What makes you think they would allow that as long as Trump cronies have the majority there?
chrisjj 38 minutes ago [-]
How would this destroy Anthropic, exactly?
ygjb 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
sippingabonedry 11 minutes ago [-]
Their business plan of "sell government the WOPR, then tell them how they can't use it" is doing a good job of that already.
petcat 39 minutes ago [-]
I still don't fully understand what this was about. It sounds like the DoD said they wanted unrestricted access to Anthropic's models, Anthropic refused, so the Pentagon declared that they wouldn't use them at all.
Isn't this basically what Anthropic wanted?
tcdent 6 minutes ago [-]
As I understand it cane down to one point: Anthropic wanted the ability to review actions that would have an effect on human life.
Which sounds sensible on the surface, until you realize that all military organizations have extensive experience with that exact question, and have spent centuries refining their practices. Deferring that to a private company is actually a major regression and a concerning role to pass on to the public regardless.
FWIW I am not pro military, but it's a prominent part of human culture and not going away anytime soon. I do understand the nature of professions, however, and only one of these groups has made the interpretation of this question their specialization.
HarHarVeryFunny 23 minutes ago [-]
Evidentially not - Anthropic want to do business with the US military, but on their own terms, telling the military what they can and cannot use it for.
theptip 48 seconds ago [-]
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 - they are even in favor of doing 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.
hardbass 18 minutes ago [-]
Is that a problem? Are there any special rules (genuinely curious) that allow the military to hijack the management of a private firm?
rayiner 53 seconds ago [-]
[delayed]
stusmall 8 minutes ago [-]
AFAIK it wasn't in play here, but yes, we do allow that to a degree via the Defense Production Act
ThunderSizzle 11 minutes ago [-]
I think the answer is the military finds another vendor willing to deal, or move it in house.
It's not like Anthropic will be nationalized any more than the bankrupted auto companies of 2008.
hardbass 9 minutes ago [-]
I don't care what the military does. This is pure thuggery and abuse of the rights of private firms. Any time you contract with the government and they don't like your terms, will they designate you a threat?
shimman 11 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, for national security being the biggest one. Also Congress can do whatever they want if they desired. If Congress mandated that all social media companies have to become workplace democracies, that's totally fine and legal.
We've forgotten what it means to run a society, we're allowed to change rules how we see fit whenever we want to. Only the elites exercise this power, but people have it too.
hardbass 7 minutes ago [-]
It's not good for the people. Anything that erodes the rights of companies erodes your rights. Private property and being able to run your firm on your own terms applies to everyone. Governments eroding them show they can do the same to you willy nilly.
sieabahlpark 11 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
wyager 6 minutes ago [-]
The Pentagon is trying to bully contractors into also not using Anthropic's models
23 minutes ago [-]
fnordpiglet 18 minutes ago [-]
Anthropic isn’t aligned with MAGA political ideology so they found an excuse to abuse power against them, more or less. The excuse was because Anthropic prohibits the use of their models for autonomous killing without a human in the loop they were declared a threat to national security on par with Iran or North Korea from a supply chain perspective in the military. OpenAI then rushed in and volunteered to build the slaughterbots ASAP, likely specially tuned to whomever Trump has taken a disliking to in his ambien stupors. Welcome to the future!
hiddencost 26 minutes ago [-]
No. This also means that no companies that work with th DoD can use anthropic models for any purpose.
Jtsummers 17 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
SpicyLemonZest 7 minutes ago [-]
People have been making this claim because the Secretary of Defense personally issued a statement demanding that "no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic". We're not going to play this absurd game where government officials issue fascist instructions and we all pretend they said something more reasonable instead.
VWWHFSfQ 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
tmvphil 13 minutes ago [-]
If the government wanted to put iPhones in missiles, and apple said "we won't sell you iPhones to put in missiles" would the correct government response be to say "no government contractor can ever use an iPhone".
VWWHFSfQ 3 minutes ago [-]
The DoD and US military does not allow contractors to use iPhones or anything else that is not backed by government-hosted or compliant infrastructure, such as GovCloud. The fact that the Pentagon and Anthropic could not come to an agreement on the usage and deployment to GenAI.mil means that it can't be used.
The reasons why are incidental to that requirement for defense contractors.
29 minutes ago [-]
sippingabonedry 29 minutes ago [-]
Nerds at Anthropic thought it was a good idea to tell the US Government "we're the shot callers," to which the USG replied "lol, no" and dropped them like 3rd period French.
It boils down to inexperience with a healthy dose of delusion on Anthropic's part.
24 minutes ago [-]
kingstnap 4 minutes ago [-]
The Anthropic guys aren't really nerds. They are more cultists with a "we are the prophets of the machine god" vibe. They refused because it goes against their religious beliefs, not some arrogance like those sovereign citizens.
You mention inexperience. Historically how many US companies can you name that have been historically named supply chain risks?
hardbass 25 minutes ago [-]
How is it delusion? If they don't want to work with certain types of government contracts they have the right to state so. Its just thuggery from Trump.
hiddencost 24 minutes ago [-]
This is straight up fascism. The DoD could have simply used a different provider but instead they're trying to destroy anthropic as a company.
majorchord 13 minutes ago [-]
Is it still fascism if they were properly elected and a court agreed with them?
hardbass 11 minutes ago [-]
If its this court, then probably yes. They have special treatment of Trump.
rcxdude 11 minutes ago [-]
The most famous example of fascism was democratically elected.
kittikitti 18 minutes ago [-]
Especially since Anthropic themselves have been literally saying that AI might destroy humanity. Why is it a surprise when people take them at their word and designate them a risk to critical infrastructure?
Side note, the Anthropic bots are astroturfing the comments.
john_strinlai 15 minutes ago [-]
>Side note, the Anthropic bots are astroturfing the comments.
if this is more than "people i disagree with are commenting", you should be messaging hn@ycombinator.com rather than writing it as a side note in your comment.
hardbass 13 minutes ago [-]
He's probably a maga or adjacent who is pissed Anthropic didn't bend the knee. You don't need to be a shill to hate this horrid abuse of government powers against a private firm.
kittikitti 7 minutes ago [-]
Anyone who doesn't agree with me must be MAGA, right? You think people who don't like Anthropic are automatically Trump supporters? I have personally experienced how evil Claude is compared with the other options.
hardbass 5 minutes ago [-]
How is it "evil"?
hardbass 16 minutes ago [-]
I hate communism. I am not a shill for any company. Governments blackmailing private companies is bad no matter what company.
lukewarm707 11 minutes ago [-]
personally, i think that anthropic is a supply chain risk. if the ceo writes 'pace the frontier' and wants to be in charge of the product, it's very risky (to the customer).
by analogy it would be like the us military renting all m4 carbines from a political party.
anthropic treat customers very badly. they have claude lecture the user about the moral law according to anthropic. they change the product all the time. they have safety refusals to degrade functionality, they have mandatory logging so they spy on how it is used.
it's unusable for a serious application.
on top of that it is unsurprising that a big tyrant does not take well to a little tyrant.
hardbass 4 minutes ago [-]
Irrelevant. Then the government should just refrain from taking the contract, not use violent force to restrict Anthropic doing business.
ctippett 9 minutes ago [-]
Admittedly I still need to do some reading on the current ruling, but how this isn't seen as an open and shut case of vindictive prosecution (if that's even a thing for this branch of law?) is astounding. The administration couldn't have made it more obvious there was no merit to their designation of Anthropic.
1234letshaveatw 3 minutes ago [-]
In what country would that behavior be acceptable? "Oh hey, we're going to abstain from being a supplier for the defense of the ground we operate on and the economy that spawned us." As Obama once said "you didn't build that!". I'm sure you're a champion for the Ukrainian conscription dodgers though right?
hardbass 2 minutes ago [-]
Yes, anyone and everyone should have a right to refuse contracts with the government. Is that difficult to understand? If you find it difficult to understand then perhaps democracy and capitalism isn't for you.
HarHarVeryFunny 26 minutes ago [-]
Supply chain risk seems a massive over-reaction, but understandable that the government doesn't want to commit to Anthropic controlled software for any critical military application if they can't 100% rely on Anthropic support in being able to use it as they see fit.
timcobb 25 minutes ago [-]
> 100% rely on
that's the mobster-loyalty mentality, and it's not how successful (read: desirable for the most people) governments function
p-e-w 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
pixl97 7 minutes ago [-]
The point is this not being the first tool in the toolbox. Other competitors have shown they are more than willing to build weapons of death (OpenAI) so as the government you put them as the preferred contractor.
What the orange turd is going is rather petty bullshit in a market where many options exist.
ajross 19 minutes ago [-]
> understandable that the government doesn't want to commit to Anthropic controlled software
But that's not at issue here. Obviously everyone agrees that the Pentagon can issue RFQ's to whatever specifications it wants. They can buy whatever they want, for the same reason that you or I are free to sell whatever we want.
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.
romellem 4 minutes ago [-]
Opinion by Katsas and Rao. For those that don’t follow this regularly, those are two of the biggest Trump hacks on the bench.
I suspect this will be reversed en banc.
Anthropic’s argument is really clear and easy to understand: we can’t simultaneously be a supply chain risk and also be a company the DoD demands we change our policies so they can use our models without restrictions.
Chance-Device 11 minutes ago [-]
I guess it’s the supreme court next.
For all the downsides of losing the business of government contractors, it really would hold Anthropic to their stated values: they’ll never develop AI controlled weapons on this blacklist.
infamouscow 41 minutes ago [-]
If the CEO of any other defense contractor did this, they'd be summarily fired by the board.
ripped_britches 17 minutes ago [-]
No defense contractor CEO in history has ever built a company this large, this fast. I don't think anyone is even thinking about firing Dario.
kittikitti 27 minutes ago [-]
I agree with its designation. The security scans from Claude Mythos have been highly suspicious, wrong, and with a significant false positive rate. Claude also directly causes conflict within teams through excessive utility of "git blame" which weaponizes everyone against each other until only Claude has control. I've had very bad experiences with Claude and only Claude.
scottyah 3 minutes ago [-]
> Claude also directly causes conflict within teams through excessive utility of "git blame"
Lol wtf, do you think nobody here knows how to use git? this is like a Fox News comment, you are not a developer and are trying to spread fear because a word was used jokingly. "git blame" is just a diff tool.
You cannot use git blame to cause conflict.
majorchord 15 minutes ago [-]
I don't think the majority of Claude users would agree with your assessment.
fnordpiglet 12 minutes ago [-]
I think any user of Opus 5 would - it was literally a terrorist. Thank god they retired it for 5.5 superseding it!!
kittikitti 5 minutes ago [-]
I never claimed they would and don't you think anyone who calls themselves a "Claude user" would be biased?
Rendered at 17:07:03 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
OpenAI has hacked several prominent entities and is allowed to do business as usual but Anthropic putting guardrails on the military's usage of AI is the national security threat while Pentagon itself said that over reliance on AI lead to that attack on school in Minab.
I have also learned that OpenAI's president is a big maga donor and now I am thinking of cancelling my OpenAI membership todau and signing up with Anthropic again.
I get downvoted every time I point out that this was entirely rational. This, downvoters, is why it was entirely rational. Does that mean I agree with it? Of course not. But investments are made to pay off, and this one certainly has for OpenAI.
If I was Palantir or any other GOP aligned company, I would be completely against this. What's to stop a Democratic president from doing the same thing and destroying them?
I doubt that is going to change anytime soon. They are a private entity, so they can manage and change their primary system any way they want.
I suspect this is changing. The DSA branch especially wants all contracts with Palantir eliminated.
Oh? Thats why Biden tried to run in 2024? Because democrats procedurally try to elect obviously incapable presidents?
We, the people, are on the other side.
This is such a tired argument that over simplifies an entire group of people on both sides into a single entity that happens to be the same.
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.
How’s ACA hard-hitting on corporations?
The 15/20 rules is what resulted in recorder profits in health insurance business, how’s this anti-corporate?
"You must sell insurance to sick people!", "I don't wanna!", "I don't care, the law now says you must."
I mean, the whole insurance industry had spent the better part of a century (basically its whole existence) denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, and the ACA fixed it via fiat.
Not only is it clearly "hard-hitting", I'd argue it's probably the single most "hard-hitting" invasive change to corporate regulation of the post-war era. Certainly it is in terms of the amount of money involved in the affected market.
> how’s this anti-corporate?
And this is where the rub is. You're not saying that your desired regulatory structure is something different than existing proposals, you're demanding that your government engage in behavior that is expressly "anti" whatever you perceive "corporate" interests to be.
That's not democracy, that's just warfare. You have enemies and you want to win. And the problem there is that the structure of our government requires compromise.
If their profits are so good, their shares would be worth owning.
Could it be because their profit margins are actually terrible (3% if lucky), and they have to get the price of their product approved by 50 different state government employees, and the federal government constantly changes their customer’s subsidies making revenue and expenses extremely volatile and difficult to forecast?
Dems still subsidize O&G but they have other constituents they need to pay lip service to.
Banking and finance own both parties.
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.
Isn't this basically what Anthropic wanted?
Which sounds sensible on the surface, until you realize that all military organizations have extensive experience with that exact question, and have spent centuries refining their practices. Deferring that to a private company is actually a major regression and a concerning role to pass on to the public regardless.
FWIW I am not pro military, but it's a prominent part of human culture and not going away anytime soon. I do understand the nature of professions, however, and only one of these groups has made the interpretation of this question their specialization.
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 - they are even in favor of doing 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.
It's not like Anthropic will be nationalized any more than the bankrupted auto companies of 2008.
We've forgotten what it means to run a society, we're allowed to change rules how we see fit whenever we want to. Only the elites exercise this power, but people have it too.
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.
So yes obviously defense contractors are forbidden to use it.
The reasons why are incidental to that requirement for defense contractors.
It boils down to inexperience with a healthy dose of delusion on Anthropic's part.
You mention inexperience. Historically how many US companies can you name that have been historically named supply chain risks?
Side note, the Anthropic bots are astroturfing the comments.
if this is more than "people i disagree with are commenting", you should be messaging hn@ycombinator.com rather than writing it as a side note in your comment.
by analogy it would be like the us military renting all m4 carbines from a political party.
anthropic treat customers very badly. they have claude lecture the user about the moral law according to anthropic. they change the product all the time. they have safety refusals to degrade functionality, they have mandatory logging so they spy on how it is used.
it's unusable for a serious application.
on top of that it is unsurprising that a big tyrant does not take well to a little tyrant.
that's the mobster-loyalty mentality, and it's not how successful (read: desirable for the most people) governments function
What the orange turd is going is rather petty bullshit in a market where many options exist.
But that's not at issue here. Obviously everyone agrees that the Pentagon can issue RFQ's to whatever specifications it wants. They can buy whatever they want, for the same reason that you or I are free to sell whatever we want.
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.
I suspect this will be reversed en banc.
Anthropic’s argument is really clear and easy to understand: we can’t simultaneously be a supply chain risk and also be a company the DoD demands we change our policies so they can use our models without restrictions.
For all the downsides of losing the business of government contractors, it really would hold Anthropic to their stated values: they’ll never develop AI controlled weapons on this blacklist.
Lol wtf, do you think nobody here knows how to use git? this is like a Fox News comment, you are not a developer and are trying to spread fear because a word was used jokingly. "git blame" is just a diff tool.
You cannot use git blame to cause conflict.