Comment by _fat_santa

Ehh, Hamill's take on Israel is pretty middle of the road and diplomatic[1]: support for the people of Palestine and Israel while not at all supporting the governments of those places.

[1] https://xcancel.com/MarkHamill/status/1725979647991537786?la...

That's a fair point, but I think Dario's quote in GP corroborates ACX's story quite well:

> "Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War..."

This administration needs the benefit of the doubt always. This administration deserves the benefit of the doubt never.

I think a big question mark here, is whether anything said on Anthropic's side if in the framing of "We have a thing going on that we are trying to communicate around where a canary notice if it existed would no longer be updated"

Those people are dealing with you in bad faith, and you need to cut them off before they try to overthrow your government again.

If anthropic is saying “you can use our models for anything other than domestic spying or autonomous weapons” and the pentagon replies “we will use other models then”, I'd say Anthropic are the patriots here...

I'm guessing you're being down voted because people don't know if you think that's a good thing or not. I do not think it's a good thing. Do you?

No one cares if the Pentagon refuses to do business with Anthropic. But Hegseth has declared that effective immediately, no one else working with the DoD can either--which includes the companies hosting Anthropics models (Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet).

So it's six months to phase out use of Anthropic at the DoD, but the people hosting the models have to stop "immediately".

Which miiight impact the amount of inference the DoD would be able to get done in those six months.

What's your definition of "patriotism" and why do private companies need to be "patriotic"? How do you reconcile this with the Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of association, and so on?

The US isn't Iran, North Korea, or even China, as much as some people, including the US president, seem want to emulate those models.

>The national industry is supposed to submit to the military's wishes to the extent that they get compensated.

According to whom?

I think you were downvoted due to your use of "patriotism" (specifically without scare quotes) because that word is usually used with an intended positive connotation. So the reader gets the impression that you think that submitting to the DoD’s wishes is how things ought to be.

[flagged]

Playing devil's advocate: if I did in fact grab one of my kitchen knives to defend myself against a violent intruder into my kitchen, I wouldn't expect to be banned from buying kitchen knives.

I'm not sure this is still a useful analogy, though...

These knife and lead analogies don't map well to the reality of AI. Note: just talking about the analogy itself not the point you are making.

Edit: hell I get downvoted and look where the knife analogy got us. A load of weird replies miles away from anything related to AI or DoD.

No it isn't. There are warnings, but once a knife is yours you are free to do whatever you want with it, including reselling it to someone else. The idea of terms of service of using something is not something that typically exists with physical objects that one can own. They can't take your knife away from you because you decided to use it for a medical purpose without purchasing a medical license for the knife.

Or how to best direct the power of the military against the US civilian population. They keep trying.

I have used chatgpt 5.2 thinking for health, gemini hallucinates a lot, specially with dna analysis. Never tried using the new claude even though i have access through antigravity. Might give it a try. Do you have any tips on how to approach it for health ‘analytical power’?

The thing is nobody is saying the government is bad for not renewing the contract. Like it or not, that's definitely the administration's prerogative.

What we're seeing here is that when a vendor declines to change the terms of its contractual agreement for ethical reasons, the government publicly attacks it.

I'm not a fan of EULAs, I think if you acquire some software anonymously and run it on your own systems you should be able to do whatever you want. however if you want software hosted on someone else's machines, or want to enter into a contractual relationship with them then government or not you should not have the right to compel work from them.

A lot of things are different when it comes to national security, and military.

Congress could come up with an act it it's for national interest.

The military isn't the typical End User.

Depending on the country, their legal value is limited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement#Enf...

The government is armed and can exempt itself from prosecution either by judicial means and/or by naked force. So it isn’t just a cut and dry licensing problem.

Because it's the government? Companies need to follow the rules the government sets, if they like it or not

What does the customer informing the vendor have to do with the vendor informing the customer?

Your comparison seems backwards

He is just a symptom. The problem is far deeper and more severe than just him.

I call it department of war, because I think it is a great self-own on their part to do such a rename.

I think it's worth giving people a tiny bit of grace on this. I've surprised people by explaining that the "Department of War" is just fascist fanfic and that the legal name has not changed.

It's a testament to the broken information ecosystem we're in that many people genuinely don't know this. Most will correct themselves when told. I agree with you that those who don't are not worth engaging.

Google Maps calls it Gulf of America, pretty difficult to ignore Google.

I tried to grab @SecDef just now, they appear to have it blocked/internally reserved

Except they don’t, because fighting a war requires congressional approval.

Calling it Department of The Armed Forces or Department of Military would be neutral. Putting War in the name is as propaganda-like as Defense.

Gulf of America and department of war are nothing but propaganda and dick measuring. Prove me wrong please.

Never in history has an authoritarian ceded power without massive violence.

Alternately, they COULD terminate their involvement with the pentagon.

The argument isn't that nobody knew Anthropic had DoW contracts. The argument is that there's a difference between "publicly known if you follow defense-tech procurement" and "trending on social media where Anthropic's core audience is now actively discussing it." Both can be true simultaneously.

A fact being technically available and that fact commanding widespread public attention are very different things. Anthropic's communications team understands this distinction even if you don't find it interesting. The blog post wasn't written for people who already track federal AI contracts, it was written for the much larger audience encountering this story for the first time and forming opinions about it in real time.

If the point you're making is just "I already knew this," that's fine, but it doesn't address anything about the incentive structure behind the public response.

That's a fair point about sequencing, but it actually reinforces the argument rather than undermining it. If Anthropic pushed back internally, and that pushback is what led to the directive going public, then Anthropic had every reason to anticipate that this would become a public story. Which means the blog post wasn't a spontaneous act of transparency, it was a prepared response to a foreseeable escalation. That's more strategic rather than less so.

Internal pushback and public damage control aren't mutually exclusive. A company can genuinely disagree with a client's demands behind closed doors and simultaneously craft a public narrative designed to make itself look as good as possible once those disagreements surface. In fact, that's exactly what competent communications teams do, they plan for the scenario where private disputes become public, and they have messaging ready.

The real question isn't who went public first or why. It's whether Anthropic's stated position, "we support these military use cases but not those ones", reflects a durable ethical framework or a line drawn precisely where it needed to be to keep both the contracts and the brand intact. Nothing in the sequencing you've described answers that question. It just tells us Anthropic saw this coming, which, if anything, means the messaging was more carefully engineered, not less.