Comment by Firaxus
6 hours ago
By that expansive definition, any cloud software provider can do the same thing and so should also be a supply chain risk.
This whole fiasco is happening because the defense dept wanted to use anthropic models in a way not allowed in the existing contract. Anthropic stuck to the contract, and the def dept tried to be punitive about it.
If they can’t get what they want from the seller, fine go to a different seller, but the supply chain risk is just government overreach.
I think I mostly agree here -- any cloud provider or frankly SaaS system carries a similar risk. The question is whether they want to explicitly make that part of their terms of service, and in addition have made public statements about their willingness to apply those terms of service.
AWS GovCloud I believe promises the opposite. They could still do it, in terms of the capability itself, but then they'd be subject to both civil, criminal, and possibly even military consequences. Whereas Anthropic would be shielded from those consequences by the terms of their agreement (presumably; I'm not up to speed on the specifics of their contractual demands. This is just based on the context from this article and the previous appeals case that ruled against the government).