Comment by geysersam
1 day ago
No domestic company has ever before been declared a supply chain risk. If this is the normal way of excluding a supplier from a bidding, are you saying the DoD has never before excluded a domestic supplier from a bidding?
That’s because no company who has ever sold weapons to the government has ever been brazen enough to tell the government how they can and cannot use their purchase. It’s unprecedented because most companies that sell to the government are publicly traded and have a board that would never let this happen. It’s unprecedented because Anthropic is behaving like a reckless startup.
That’s what they will argue, anyway.
This is just factually incorrect.
To begin with, the existing contract included the language on usage.
Other companies also have such language about usage. It's fairly standard, and is little more than licensing terms.
The idea this is unprecedented is some PR talking point nonsense.
> the existing contract included the language on usage. Other companies also have such language about usage.
The existing contract is only a few dozen months old. It didn’t hold up to scrutiny under real world usage of the service. The government wants to change the contract. This is not the kill shot you think it is. It’s totally normal for agreements to evolve. The government is saying it needs to evolve. This is all happening rapidly and it’s irrelevant that the government agreed to similar terms with OpenAI as well. That agreement will also need to evolve. But this alone doesn’t give Anthropic any material legal challenge. The courts understand bureaucracy moves slowly better than anyone else, and won’t read this apparent inconsistency the same way you are.