Comment by testdelacc1
5 hours ago
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?
5 hours ago
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.
Designating Anthropic a supply-chain risk means that no one in the federal government can use Anthropic's products for anything. Outside of the military, there are tons of places where Anthropic's products are a good fit for the needs of many other federal government agencies.
The DoD is perfectly free to say "no one in the DoD can use Anthropic products because we believe their products are not fit for our needs". That would 100% solve the problem.
Designating them a supply-chain risk is just political retribution for not caving to the DoD's contract negotiation demands. That's all. It's not necessary to ensure the integrity of the US military's goals and objectives. It's just punitive, elementary school grade bullying.
> They are complying with Anthropic's demands to not be used in war
There was no such demand from Anthropic. Why are you making things up?
EDIT: Honestly, the rest of your comment is even stranger. You're starting from a false premise, a strange belief about what the designation is meant for, but you do end up providing a wonderful demonstration of your opening sentence for yourself at least. You definitely don't know what you're talking about.
> 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.
This reminds me of an old comment here where some idiot claimed that suicide is illegal so police are allowed to stop people from killing themselves. No, if Anthropic doesn't want their systems involved in war (that's a thing you made up, again, just to be clear) then they do not need to be designated a supply chain risk to "protect them" or whatever drivel you come up with next.
The correct response from the DOD would be to terminate contracts with Anthropic, and that's it. Then Anthropic would be responsible for ensuring that any contracts with other parties keep them out of war (again, not a thing they said they want, just your fiction). This is how it works for all other software systems where people don't want their work involved in wars or used by the police or whatever.
Designating them a supply chain risk was punitive. Only fools think otherwise.
> I feel like in this thread no one is understanding what supply chain risk designation is.
I wouldn't say "no one" understands, but you certainly don't.
Again with the lack of understanding why it matters. The DoD does not want Anthropic anywhere near any system they'd use! Because it's, well, a risk to their supply chain if Anthropic were to somehow find out and then e.g. crash a rocket if the DoD was using a third party rocket provider that used Anthropic models. This is the correct response by the DoD, they simply do not want Anthropic in their supply chain. The DoD don't care what Anthropic comes up as reasoning, they want to maintain control of their systems without any (even potential) meddling.
10 replies →
It's going to make things complicated w.r.t. software used anywhere within and by the DoD:
1. the linux kernel has patches created by and security vulnerabilities identified by Claude/Anthropic;
2. same with other software like SQLite and rsync.
Humans are 100% in the loop with software patches and there are many people in the chain so that provenance is maintained. It’s not that Claude could never look at the source code
6 replies →
Anthropic said "we don't want to be used as part of kill chain decision-making" (actually it may have been even more specifically autonomous/unmanned kill chain decision making)
The DoD responded not by saying "alright, we will use OpenAI for our kill-chain uses" but by saying "Boeing is no longer allowed to use Claude Code".
Correct, they do not want “Boeing” to use Claude models to write software for airplanes for example
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No. They can do that with an order covering the specific parameters under which they care about it. Supply chain risk definition is about adversaries and sabotage, not companies dictating contract terms.
They don't want Anthropic to be able to sabotage any operations the DoD has. Anthropic already has a history of trying to sabotage others like during the Fable release when they said they'd subtly wreck your code if you were working on cutting edge AI.
> 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.
They do, but this is not it. This is designating Anthropic as an adversary of the USA, and it is forbidding anyone who wants to sell to the DoD from using Anthropic products for anything. This is a massive attack on free speech, free enterprise, and the market.