Comment by cmdli
3 hours ago
Selling a pen labeled "this pen will refuse to sign certain orders" is not sabotage or malicious and is thus not a supply chain risk. The DoD is free to not buy from Anthropic, but designating them as a supply chain risk is incorrect, as well as arguably arbitrary and capricious given their public criticism of Anthropic's beliefs.
The DoD buys from suppliers, who buy from suppliers, and so on. Hence supply chain. Hence supply chain risk.
I don't think anyone doubts that subcontracts exist. They doubt that Anthropic's insistence that Claude isn't capable of being the operating system for an automated killbot and associated terms the DoD previously agreed to means that there's any danger to the US military from Lockheed Martin using Claude as a code assistant to build GUIs.
"Supply chain risk" specifically refers to risk of malicious attack or sabotage through the supply chain, not all risks associated with supply chains.
A vendor with particularly poor QA might be a risk in your supply chain but isn't a "supply chain risk" according to this designation and neither would Anthropic be.
You would think that's a surprisingly easy concept to grasp, but many are viewing this through the lens of desired outcome and not reality.
Supply chain risks are usually when someone does a attack over the supply chain. Like when the mossad planted literally explosives in radio devices for Hezbollah.
Antrophic merely said they don't allow their tools to be used for autonomous killing.
A very specific case.
So where is the danger making it necessary preventing all suppliers from using Claude at all? That only concerns those who work directly on autonomous killing and only they will have to go to Altman or Musk.
So none of that is any threat to the military - so it was just black mailing to make them do the governments will - which is something usually dictatorships do, not democratic systems.
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They thought the product was such garbage they threatened them for not letting them use it any way they wanted?
Oddly when the topic of e.g. car infotainment systems comes up, like BMW locking you out of features in your own car, this place is up in arms, but when the military has a problem with it, suddenly they should be forced to accept it?
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