Comment by easton
1 day ago
> Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.
I’m sure the lawyers just got paged, but does this mean the hyperscalers (AWS, GCP) can’t resell Claude anymore to US companies that aren’t doing business with the DoD? That’s rough.
Probably yes. Additionally the (probably more for AWS) won't be allowed to use it internally either. This will probably apply to all the top SaaS/software companies unilaterally.
Additionally, every major university will undoubtedly have to terminate the use of Claude. First on the list will be universities that run labs under DOD contracts (e.g. MIT, Princeton, JHU), DOE contracts (Stanford, University of California, UChicago, Texas A&M, etc...), NSF facilities (UIUC, Arizona, CMU/Pitt, Purdue), NASA (Caltech).
Following that it will be just those who accept DOD/DOE/NSF grants.
There is no evidence that what you say is true. A tweet is not a legally binding statement.
What part? Are you doubting that they are being designated as a supply chain risk? Or the implications of being designated as one?
We do have a recent example with Huawei, and it did fall just like this - and that was just some hardware.
>A tweet is not a legally binding statement.
In the recent Supreme Court hearing over the firing of Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve, the administration is acting like Truth Social posts are official notices.
>Several justices have noted the unusual nature of the case before it, which began with a post by Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social, that said he would fire Cook.
>Jackson wondered why that would be considered sufficient notice: “How is it that we can assume that she’s on social media?”
https://apnews.com/live/supreme-court-lisa-cook-federal-rese...
It will be true as soon as it becomes official though, assuming they actually go through with it and this is not just a bargaining tactic.
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When did legality apply to this administration?
It was confirmed by the Anthropic CEO that contractors can still use Claude for non-defense work.
Billable hours will win figuring it out but in theory, no because they can’t test it or use it.
Generally any machine that touches Supply chain Risk software cannot ship any software to DoD. AWS has separate clouds but software comes from same place.
Bigger question is whether government contractors can use any Open Source software after this. Open Source is a big part of the supply chain.
It means everyone waits for the injunctions.
(edit: I'm most likely wrong)
You got it backwards, can't use claude if you ARE doing business with DoD.
Presumably AWS/GCP don't care, its up to the end customer to comply. Not like GCP KYC asks if you work with DoD.
AWS/GCP/Azure all do business with the DoD and at least AWS and Azure use Claude a decent amount internally. AWS’s Kiro tool (which is used internally instead of Claude Code) relies entirely on Claude models.
This is almost certainly going to be rolled back, because I guarantee the DoD isn’t going to stop doing business with the hyper scalers, and the hyper scalers aren’t going to stop doing business with Anthropic.
I don't think he got it backwards, at least if Hegseth's statement is accurate. AWS, GCP, etc. all do business with DoD. If they, as DoD contractors, are no longer allowed to do business with Anthropic, then presumably they have to stop re-selling or hosting Anthropic's models to anyone.
Ah, true. Well then, what makes GCP/AWS more money? DoD contracts or Claude resell fees? They could drop DoD though I guess I see how this will go...
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>> at least if Hegseth's statement is accurate
Oh you tender babes, trying to logic the meaning of what the lieutenant of the biggest crime syndicate in the world means with his words, as if this was a well thought-out strategy... it's a shakedown; it would make more sense to ask "at least if Hegseth is sober..."
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So GitHub Copilot will remove Anthropic as an LLM provider, I suppose?
Agree with other reply. I don’t think it’s backward. No they said any commercial activity. Does not feel like a stretch that commercial activity includes reselling api usage.
have you tried punching in "Huawei" the shopping portal on google.com in the US?
No, what happens when one does?
nothing, which is the point though
Even more extreme, that might mean they won't be able to offer Claude to non-US companies at all.
I don't see how you get that reading. Anthropic is clearly allowed to sell Claude to companies not doing business with the US Military. If anything that's more likely to be non-US companies.
IIRC, the supply chain risk designation is sticky which is why it tends to ultimately mean "nobody can work with this". Amazon using claude means a DoD company can't use Amazon. Every business that touches claude gets tainted.
It's a bit like how the US Cuba sanctions worked and why they effectively isolated Cuba from everything.
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Because Anthropic sells Claude through other companies that in turn do business both with Anthropic and the government. These intermediaries, large cloud companies, can't offer Claude anymore if they want to keep the government as a customer.
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Sorry, the "they" referred to the hyperscalers
There is no way they can just stop selling Opus 4.6. This will crater the market.
This doesn’t erase Claude, and even if it did Gemini and Codex are there to replace it.
Even if a ton of companies have to switch over to an alternative, it won’t be catastrophic to the economy.
The stock market will be spooked if the US govt can willy nilly high trajectory darling of the AI world like this though.
Who's next? OpenAI? Google? What if they refuse to allow the DoD to use AI with zero safeguards and Trump's goons decide they are also a "supply chain risk"?
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Wait, what about Bun?