Comment by JumpCrisscross
6 hours ago
> The government is the one that said it didn't want/couldn't use this
Technically, the Pentagon did. I don’t know if that’s legally binding on the NSA.
6 hours ago
> The government is the one that said it didn't want/couldn't use this
Technically, the Pentagon did. I don’t know if that’s legally binding on the NSA.
I work for a completely unrelated fed agency, who doesn’t use Anthropic products, and we all received the email stating we couldn’t use them period.
Huh, does supply-chain risk mean SecDef can bar a company from all federal contracting?
Correct. And this quickly expands out into most companies in the US as the federal government uses and buys a huge amount of software. A component that you make and sell to X, that is used in Y, which is bundled up in Z that had Anthropic used on it can't be used by the fed.gov.
I have no idea but this went out to all fed agencies from what I could tell looking at the subreddit for fed employees. I was surprised by the notice because my agency does not have a contract with them and obviously we can’t just use any LLM provider.
TFA says the NSA is part of the DOD.
It is, but NSA reports to the director of national intelligence, not the defense secretary, so it’s unclear (to me at least) that SecDef’s opinion of Anthropic counts for anything here
I guess DOD is large enough they have multiple parallel cabinet level positions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency
It’s not as clear as that. The NSA director is also, traditionally, dual-hatted as the Commander of CYBERCOM and thus a flag officer reporting ultimately to the SecDef. The DNI is responsible for coordinating/funding national intelligence activities but ultimately a lot of day to day operational decision making tends to flow through the pentagon. They would definitely need to abide by DoD policy
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