Comment by jzb
6 hours ago
“the military said no and therefore doesn't want anthropic used anywhere in their supply line”
It’s clearly a punitive measure and has nothing to do with national security.
If a supplier uses Anthropic to develop a product, how does that pose a risk to the DoD or national security? The DoD can specify that a third party system can’t rely on Anthropic for DoD use without designating the company a supply risk. It was very clear that the administration was punishing the company for saying “no”.
Anthropic took the position that our military’s decision making power should be subordinate to Anthropic’s constraints.
Any dependency on a company that thinks they have that moral authority and has the technical means to enforce it is absolutely a risk to the supply chain.
If you want to blame someone or something for this, we should start with Dario and “effective altruism”.
> Anthropic took the position that our military’s decision making power should be subordinate to Anthropic’s constraints.
Not at all. They want their product kept out of specific decisions because it's not capable.
> They want their product kept out of specific decisions because it's not capable.
Herein lies the DoW’s point. Anthropic can’t dictate how the DoW conducts business.
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They're offering a service, with contractual limitations that the Pentagon agreed to.
It doesn't seem any different to me than Dominos pizza offering to deliver pizzas to the Pentagon but not to the strait of Hormuz. If that somehow makes the military subordinate to Dominos Pizza, just because Dominos is able to dictate the terms of their own delivery service, then sure, ban anyone in the military supply chain from being able to order pizzas. It would make the same amount of sense.
The difference would be the DoW needing a a Tehran pizza delivery service, and thus saying "None of our pizza delivery services can use Dominos because they refuse to do the work we need".
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But why can’t the military just not use Anthropic? Why can’t the DoD say “ok we’re going with a different vendor”? Even if you find Anthropic’s stance distasteful, why support taking punitive action on Anthropic?
I feel like in this thread no one is understanding what supply chain risk designation is. The government can just not use Anthropic, and that's exactly what they're doing, and they are not using it so much that they don't want Anthropic anywhere in their chain of supply. It's not necessarily punitive, the government is just covering their tracks so that if somewhere in their supply chain Anthropic exists, they want to remove them. They are complying with Anthropic's demands to not be used in war and the DoD says, okay, we won't use you anywhere and also enforce that we won't use you, just like you wanted.
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> Why can’t the DoD say “ok we’re going with a different vendor”?
That's exactly what they're doing. It turns out the DoD is a really big bureaucracy and has process to make sure they thoroughly exclude a vendor and transitive dependencies on that same vendor.
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Supply chain risk is a technical definition not a vibes based one.
And companies absolutely have the right to dictate terms. The idea that the DoD has the unilateral authority to do whatever it wants is literal textbook fascism. It's never been the law in the US and it should not be now.
If the DoD doesn't want Anthropic anywhere in their supply chain, because Anthropic said they won't supply the services the DoD needs.. why can't the DoD bar them from being in their supply chain?
Seems very straight forward.
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