Comment by techblueberry
1 day ago
So they are such a risk to national security that no contractor that works with the federal government may use them, but they're going to keep using them for six more months? So I guess our national security is significantly at risk for the next six months?
It's a waste of your effort to apply rational argument to the actions of a group that are in it for a shakedown.
Simple rational argument:
SCOTUS says POTUS is above the law, so POTUS has collected $4B in bribe / protection money since taking office 13 months ago. Anthropic has lots of money at the moment. Why should they be allow to keep it?
Since they didn't pay off the president (enough?), his goons are going to screw with their revenue and run a PR smear campaign.
Once you realize it only has to do with Trump's personal finances, and nothing to do with national security or the rule of law, then all the administration's actions make perfect rational sense.
Open question: How much should a congress-critter charge Trump for a favorable vote? (The check should come with a presidential pardon in the envelope, of course...)
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> If Anthropic doesn’t want the responsibilities of being a US company
When did this suddenly become "businesses will do whatever the government says regardless of earlier contracts signed"?
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I see it more like: I sell you a pencil and I could not care less what you write with it. You ask me to write a note for you and I will exert editorial discretion. Because unless I’m missing something we’re talking about Anthropic’s infrastructure running LLMs. If it was a physical good I could see another interpretation.
Further, what law lets the government dictate what contracts a company signs? Anthropic refused to work with them. We had a whole Supreme Court case about refusing working with customers.
Are they legally required to agree to a new contract? Which law says this?
> they’re legally required to in the US
Obviously false, not even arguable
Facilitating "mass domestic surveillance" and "fully autonomous weapons" are social responsibilities now? Insanity.
This makes an interesting assumption: that being told by any member of government that you're legally required to do something, means you're required to do that thing, and that they're definitely not making those things up as they go.
But that's not the case, is it? The government can say that it's legally required to give Donald Trump a gold bar every Sunday. That wouldn't even be too far off from the outlandish claims we've seen over the past year. The Trump administration is, as Chapelle would put it, a habitual line stepper.
Boot meet tongue
I like how you use the phrase social responsibilities to mean doing whatever the DoD wants which includes spying on the American people and operating autonomous drones to kill people. It's like saying they have social responsibilities to enable murder for people who have been shown to be unthinking murderers justifying the most pointless murders because they think it makes "their side" winners.
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It's bad faith to call one's position in a dispute "obvious", and that's before we even get to all the insults.
(What is obvious is the kind of response I will get, which is why I will ignore it and not comment further.)
> petite bourgeoisie clutching their pearls
> mean girl slights
Lick! The! Boot!
It’s the mob. This is nothing more than, “Nice AI ya got here. Be a shame if sometin’ wuz to happen to it.”
Except that it’s sovereign.
What's sovereign - the mob? The AI company? Being enigmatic for cool points isn't conducive to productive discussion.
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So are we. You want garbage picked up in your town, you gotta talk to us.
Sovereign like King George III?
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Let us sit upon the ground, and tell sad stories of the death of kings.
Sovereign like Putin.
Keep in mind that Anthropic “is the only A.I. company currently operating on the Pentagon’s classified systems” [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/technology/defense-depart...
Because Palentir is using Anthropic.
From what i understand, Palentir using Claude during the capturing of Maduro is the reason all this started, as Anthropic did not agree their systems were used that way. [1]
Obviously Palentir and others need time to migrate off Anthropic’s products. The way i read it is that Anthropic made a serious miscalculation by joining the DoD contracts last year, you can’t have these kind of moral standards and at the same time have Palentir as a customer. The lack of foresight is interesting.
1 https://www.axios.com/2026/02/15/claude-pentagon-anthropic-c...
They are the same amount of ‘risk’ to national security that the various ‘emergencies’ the executive branch has used as legal excuses to do otherwise illegal things are emergencies.
Congress is negligent in not reigning this kind of thing in. We’re rapidly falling down so many slippery semantic slopes.
I'm def adding "slippery semantic slopes" to my vocab.
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect
For this administration the law isn't something that binds them, but something they can use against others.
the administration which declares ad-hoc emergencies is behaving as predicted
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Dont forget Nvidia technology was condsidered too sensitive to be exported to China....until the Trump administration decided they could export it if they paid a 10% export tax.
We've moved beyond telling people not to forget and have entered "expect nothing less" territory
Aren't export taxes against the US constitution?
Yes but only if you call them export taxes.
If it’s payments to continuously verify National Security protections, it’s all good.
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Yes ... but what's your point? /s
The part of this you're missing is that China doesn't want it [1].
Why? Because China will make their own. This has been obvious to me for at least 1-2 years. The US doesn't allow EUV lithography machines from ASML to be exported to China either. I believe the previous export ban on the most advanced chip was a strategic error because it created a captive market of Chinese customers for Chinese chips.
China will replicate EUV far quicker than Western governments expect. All it takes is to throw money at a few key ASML engineers and researchers and the commitment of the state to follow through with this project, which they will.
I'm absolutely reminded of the atomic bomb. This created quite the debate in military and foreign policy circles about what to do. The prevailing presumption was that the USSR would take 20 years to develop their own bomb if it ever happened.
It took 4 years.
And then in 1952 the US detonated the first thermonuclear bomb. The USSR followed suit in 1953.
[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
this is inacccurate, tesla was the first mover in china's EV market and held by far the largest market share for over a decade. obviously that was in large part to elon hiring chinese systems engineers to build out the first super factories and using chinese robotics tech. but ever since losing those key early leaders, tesla has completely fallen behind.
Isn't this our governments classic negotiation strategy? Go to the extreme, and meet somewhere well on their side of the middle.
The Trump administration tends to use this playbook.
Putting aside my take, I’m trying to objectively make sure I’m grounded on what is likely to happen next, without confusing “what is” with “what is ok”.
Don't make the mistake of thinking their words have meaning. They see a way to punish the company, they take it. Same thing with declaring a national emergency to impose tariffs. There's no supply chain risk, no national emergency, but that doesn't stop them.
Can't just unplug the thing and use something else.
Obviously the DoD would not want limited use. Strange they don't make their own given their specific needs.
I think this is maybe the most revealing thing about this saga, that seemingly the U.S. government has not been training their own frontier models.
Perhaps getting donations from Altman and "investing" directly in OpenAI is more convenient.
> Obviously the DoD would not want limited use.
I agree in this sense: Hegseth's Dept. of War doesn't want any restrictions. I'll try to make the case this is self-defeating, assuming one has genuine, long-term national interests at the front of mind (which I think is lacking or at least confused in Hegseth).
Historically, other (wiser) SecDefs would decide more carefully. They are aware when their actions would position DoD outside of reasonable ethical norms, as defined both by their key personnel as well as broader culture. I think they would recognize Hegseth's course of action as having two broadly negative effects:
1. Technology, Employees, Contractors. Jeopardizes DoD's access to the best technology. Undermines efforts in hiring the best people. Demotivates existing employees and contractors. Bullying leads to fearful contractors who perform worse. Fewer good contractors show up. Trumpist corruption further degrades an already lagging, sluggish, inefficient system.*
2. Goodwill & Effectiveness. Damages international goodwill that takes a long time to restore. Goodwill is a good investment; it pays dividends for U.S. military strength. The fallout will distract Hegseth from legitimately important duties and further undermine his credibility. Leading probably to a political mess for Hegseth, undermining his political capital.
* Improving DoD procurement is already hard given existing constraints. Adding Trumpist-level corruption makes it unnecessarily worse. There is already an unsavory, poorly tracked, bloated gravy train around the military industrial complex.**
** BUT... Despite all this, the system has more or less worked reasonably well for more than what, 80 years! It has enjoyed bipartisan continuity, kept scientists and mathematicians well funded, and spurred lots of useful industries. It is, in a weird gnarly way, a sort of flux capacitor for U.S. technical dominance.
I agree with the damage. Not simply an unwise spokesman though. It's the trend in the entire administration, or one should identify as the United States slide into less sugar coating, if any.
We will kidnap statesmen, we will conduct illegal arrests, illegal tariffs, threaten to take over lands from our traditional allies, bomb our enemies during negociation, without congress approval. All for the good of the American Empire.
It would be a far stretched script for fiction, but that's exactly the terms and actions taken just in the last year.
I doubt these were the recipe for what worked well for the last 80 years. Momentum is the result of a smoother and more balanced doctrine.
> So I guess our national security is significantly at risk for the next six months?
That does seem to be what Hegseth is arguing, yes; and that is presumably his justification for doing something drastic here. Although I assume he is lying or wrong.
And as a cynic, let me just add that the image of someone going to the political overseers of the US military with arguments about being "effective" or "altruistic" is just hilarious given their history over the last ~40 years.
There has been a terrifying decline in quality and an increase in corruption in Trump’s second administration.
Re: the hilarity part, I’m conflicted: in general, a good sense of humor is useful, but in present circumstances a stoic seriousness seems warranted.
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Any documentation regarding the claim about breaking their contract?
Haven't heard that. Regardless, as someone who works with these models daily (as well as company leadership that loves AI more than they understand it) - Anthropic is absolutely right to say that the military shouldn't be allowed to use it for lethal, autonomous force.
The United States has freedom of speech. The Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech. A company can always direct their money, speech, however they like with regards to the government. Can you be sued for breach of contract? Sure. Is it a supply chain risk absolutely not.
> They are a "supply chain risk" if they can willy-nilly break their contract with US govt and enforce arbitrary rules to service.
It is the US govt that seeks to break their contract with Anthropic.
The contract they signed had the safeguards, so they were mutually agreed upon. These safeguards against fully autonomous killbots and AI spying of US citizens was known before signing.
This conflict now is because the US govt regrets what they agreed to in the contract.
> These safeguards against fully autonomous killbots and AI spying of US citizens was known before signing
source?
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> completely understandable decision from a neutral third party PoV.
Except it's not, really. If Anthropic/Claude doesn't mean the DoD's need, they can and should just put out an RFP for other LLM providers. I'm sure there's plenty of others that'd happily forgo their morals for that sweet government contract money.
No US company has to provide services to the DoD or any other branch of government. It's not "veto power" it's being selective of who you do business with, which is 100% legal.
I don't understand your point here. Looks like what you suggest is exactly what is happening. US government did not ban Anthropic from conducting business in the US. They just don't want them to influence their own supply chain, 100% legal as you say.
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Then you go to another supplier. But any company with proper counsel will tell them the same thing: don't break the law, which is exactly what they're trying to coerce Anthropic into doing. DoD requests do not supersede the law.
What is this "law" you speak of?
I understand 'goals' and 'means to an end', but this concept of "law" evades me.
Not unless they're the sole supplier of the technology. They're saying, if you want to do this kind of thing - not with our product, but you can get it elsewhere.
No, you are the one lying trying to get political gotchas here. There is no "trying to exert veto power" absolutely anywhere, Anthropic's terms were laid out in the contract the Pentagon signed, which they want to forcibly amend. If they didn't like the terms, they didn't need to sign the contract.
What are you suggesting here? US government breaching the contract already signed? I am not aware of that happening here.
> Anthropic's terms were laid out in the contract the Pentagon signed, which they want to forcibly amend.
It's called negotiation in business. I am sure both sides are clear-eyed on what the consequences were and Anthropic made a calculated bet (probably correctly) that some segment of their employee/customer base would get wet by hearing this news and it more than offsets the lots business, thus is worth it.
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Or worse: train the AI to make decisions that align with the view of Anthropic management and not the elected government. Workout telling anyone.
I’d agree it is a serious risk.
This rather implies that simply being elected casts a binding on officials that forces them to pursue popular will with their mandate.
The government is supposed to represent the people and their will, not dictate
The current government is deeply unpopular, it's only going to get worse for them.