Comment by thimabi
1 day ago
The problem with forcing public policy on companies is that companies are ultimately made from individuals, and surely you can’t force public policy down people’s throats.
I’m sure nothing good can come out of strong-arming some of the brightest scientists and engineers the U.S. has. Such a waste of talent trying to make them bend over to the government’s wishes… instead of actually fostering innovation in the very competitive AI industry.
I don't see how public policy is being "forced" on anyone here? It seems like the system is working as intended: government wants to do X; company A says "I won't allow my product to be used for X"; government refuses to do business with company A. One side thinks the government should be allowed to dictate terms to a private supplier, the other side thinks the private supplier should be allowed to dictate terms to the government. Both are half right.
You can argue that the government refusing to do any business with company A is overreach, I suppose, but I imagine that the next logical escalation in this rhetorical slapfight is going to be the government saying "we cannot guarantee that any particular use will not include some version of X, and therefore we have to prevent working with this supplier"...which I sort of see?
Just to take the metaphor to absurdity, imagine that a maker of canned tomatoes decided to declare that their product cannot be used to "support a war on terror". Regardless of your feelings on wars on terror and/or canned tomatoes, the government would be entirely rational to avoid using that supplier.
I think the bigger insanity here is the labeling of a supply chain risk. It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic. It's another when it actively attempts to isolate Anthropic for political reasons.
It means that all companies contracting with the government have to certify that they don't use Anthropic products at all. Not just in the products being offered to the government.
This is a massive body slam. This means that Nvidia, every server vendor, IBM, AWS, Azure, Microsoft and everybody else has to certify that they don't do business directly or indirectly using Anthropic products.
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Its a government department signalling who's boss.
> It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic.
This is literally the mechanism by which the DoD does what you're suggesting.
Generally speaking, the DoD has to do procurement via competitive bidding. They can't just arbitrarily exclude vendors from a bid, and playing a game of "mother may I use Anthropic?" for every potential government contract is hugely inefficient (and possibly illegal). So they have a pre-defined mechanism to exclude vendors for pre-defined reasons.
Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate.
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> It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic.
But that's what the supply-chain risk is for? I'm legitimately struggling to understand this viewpoint of yours wherein they are entitled to refuse to directly purchase Anthropic products but they're not entitled to refuse to indirectly purchase Anthropic products via subcontractors.
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The government declaring a domestic company as a supply chain threat is a tad more than “refusing to do business” don’t you think?
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> The Department of War is threatening to […] Invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to serve their model to the military and "tailor its model to the military's needs"
This issue is about more than the government blacklisting a company for government procurement purposes.
From what I understand, the government is floating the idea of compelling Anthropic — and, by extension, its employees — to do as the DoD pleases.
If the employees’ resistance is strong enough, there’s no way this will serve the government’s interests.
They're labelling Anthropic a supply chain risk, without even the pretense that this is in fact true. They're perfectly content to use the tool _themselves_, but they claim that an unwillingness to sign whatever ToS DoW asks marks the company a traitor that should be blacklisted from the economy.
The government is doing far more than “refusing to do business” here.
The President is crashing out on X because a company didn’t do what they wanted. “Forcing” is not a binary. Do you seriously believe that the government’s behavior here is acceptable and has no chilling effect on future companies?
One of the options they're discussing, which is legal according to this law, is to simply force Anthropic to do what they want. As in Anthropic will be committing a felony if they don't do what the DoKLoP wants, and the CEO will go to jail and be replaced by someone who will.
I mean Secretary of War can not act any other way to be honest. It’s just a fucked up situation.
There is no Secretary of War. The name of the Defense Department is set by statute that has not been named regardless of Pete Hegseth's cosplay desires.
Sweet summer child, the purpose of government is a monopoly on forcing things down people's throats. When people lose control of their government that monopoly doesn't go away, especially when the Don running the show has blackmail on every influential person in society taken from a decades long intelligence operation by offing it's leader.
A vast number of people in positions of responsibility right know have their life at the mercy of the redaction pen and are ultimately going to do whatever it takes to keep that pen out of the "wrong hands"
> I’m sure nothing good can come out of strong-arming some of the brightest scientists and engineers the U.S. has
And where would they emigrate? Russia? China? UAE? :-)
The UK and Europe welcome the US Footgun Operation. Plenty of opportunities for those top researchers and engineers over here.
The EU (which is not the same as Europe), is also looking a bit sharper on AI regulation at the moment (for now… not perfect but sharper etc etc).
The EU and UK is a long way from attracting top AI talent purely from opportunity and monetary terms.
Not to mention UK is arguably further down the mass surveillance pipeline than the US. They’ve always had more aggressive domestic intelligence surveillance laws which was made clear during the Snowden years, they’ve had flock style cameras forever, and they have an anti encryption law pitched seemingly yearly.
I’d imagine most top engineers would rather try to push back on the US executive branch overreach than move. At least for the time being.
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Do UK and Europe have hardware manufacturing for those researches to work with once US imposes GPU export restrictions to them at the first whiff of competition/threat?
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To make 1/10th the salary they're making now?
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I agree. And even if those workers stay in the U.S., there’s absolutely no guarantee that they’ll do their best to favor the government’s interests — quite the opposite, if anything.
At the end of the day it’s a matter of incentives, and good knowledge work can’t simply be forced out of people that are unwilling to cooperate.
Well that's quite a leap to make. Plenty of room in between those options.
> ... UAE? :-)
At least you are not paying taxes for the things you don't agree on. It's indeed a strange time we are living in.