Comment by sfink

You could use the same logic to defend the military declaring that Anthropic is full of pedophiles and therefore they cannot use their products as it would be contributing to pedophilia.

Anthropic offered a contract, with certain conditions, as do all contracts everywhere; that's their purpose. The military did not want to agree to those conditions. If they had stopped there, and refused to sign the contract, all would be good. (It's actually worse, they did sign such a contract, and then decided they wanted the contract to say something different than it actually did. "Pray I don't alter it any further.")

> >The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized [emphasis mine]

That is speculation, and you can't call it a "textbook designation" without discussing whether there's a basis for that "reasonable fear". Again, that argument also works for declaring you have a reasonable fear that giving money to Anthropic will support pedophilia. We do not know the specifics, but I at least have heard of zero evidence that Anthropic would sabotage something they signed a legal contract for, and yet I have an abundance of evidence that this administration will use whatever contortions are necessary to pressure and punish those who interfere with it getting what it wants. It all hinges on the word "reasonable", and based on the evidence that is public, this specific fear seems more ridiculous than reasonable to me.

If the government somehow had a way to force Anthropic to sign a contract that it did not want to sign, then this fear might become more reasonable. The twist is that this supply chain risk designation is exactly that. If Anthropic now capitulated, the accusation of supply chain risk (eg from Anthropic employees acting alone) would be justified. So the only way Anthropic can reasonably be considered a supply chain risk is because it is accused of being a supply chain risk.

This is a textbook example, yes, but it's a textbook example of corruption and judicial capture.

> Though they'd probably put the DoD on the cybersecurity whitelist today, the very idea of the claude whitelists for certain functionality already exists and is being used by them today.

And if they signed a contract permitting fully autonomous killbots, then using the whitelist mechanism would be a contract violation. I have some degree of faith that we'd know if such a contract were signed, because half the staff would quit. (As opposed to half the Google staff quitting after signing such a contract, which has been proven to be an incorrect expectation -- such a contract was signed, and I've heard of exactly one person quitting over it. There may be more, I don't know.)