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Posted by klausa 2 hours ago

Pentagon formally labels Anthropic supply-chain risk(www.wsj.com)
313 points | 196 comments
netinstructions 19 minutes ago|
This designation is usually reserved for foreign adversaries/companies, and so this is crazy to apply it to US company over a sudden contract dispute... that was previously agreed upon by all parties.

This should make any US company nervous about entering into an agreement with the government. Or any US company that already has a contract with the government. If they one day decide they don't like that contract, they can designate you a supply chain risk.

Not 1) rip up the existing contract and cease the agreement or 2) continue (but not renew) the existing contract or 3) renegotiate terms upon renewal but instead a full on ban of doing any business with an entire industry/sector.

pstuart 18 minutes ago|
> This should make any US company nervous

"Nice little business ya got here -- it'd be shame if something happened to it..."

Analemma_ 9 minutes ago||
Shame you didn’t donate $25 million to Trump, like the company we decided to give the contract to instead did, who will benefit tremendously from you being designated a supply chain risk. Maybe next time you’ll be a little smarter.
neogodless 1 hour ago||
Previous information:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47186677 I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk (twitter.com/secwar) 5 days ago, 1083+ comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189441 Anthropic says it will challenge Pentagon supply chain risk designation in court (reuters.com) 5 days ago, 37+ comments

germandiago 1 hour ago||
This is awful. That a disagreement tjat involves politics can make a company ruined is really awful.

The civil society should be quite concerned about this kind of attacks.

softwaredoug 45 minutes ago||
It opens the door for Democratic administrations to do the same to vendors for their own political reasons.

That’s ultimately why Ted Cruz spoke out about the Kimmel cancelation. It doesn’t take long until those powers are turned against you.

wrs 6 minutes ago|||
No it doesn't. As with so many other things this administration does, this door was not open. They bashed through it anyway.
1718627440 9 minutes ago||||
I think we should really judge governments by their actions and stop labeling democracies, if they do such things that don't look like democracies at all.
Analemma_ 39 minutes ago||||
Yeah, now that this door is cracked open, it's now possible to decapitate SpaceX, which is at least as natsec-critical as Anthropic. The owner is a drug addict, has business interests in China, and is a Russian sympathizer (recall all the restrictions on Ukraine using Starlink), which all together is way stronger evidence for SCR designation than anything Anthropic has done. They're quickly going to come to regret opening this can of worms, but what else is new.
tw04 18 minutes ago||
Trump isn’t planning on ever leaving office before his death. His sycophants will just say yes in the hopes of unconditional pardons. They know they’ll never hold a position of power again so they’re grabbing everything they can while they can.
thinkingtoilet 26 minutes ago|||
I love when a Republican does something awful the response is "but what about if Democrats do that same awful thing to us!" as opposed to discussing and admitting that the Republicans did something awful.
softwaredoug 22 minutes ago|||
The only way you convince Republicans it’s awful is by reminding Republicans power can be abused in both directions.
1718627440 10 minutes ago||||
Oh. Before your comment I completely misunderstood "Democratic administrations". I understood it to mean administrations of countries that are democratic, not an US administration that is dominated by the Democratic party.
SpicyLemonZest 20 minutes ago|||
I think you're misinterpreting the discussion here. Democrats are precommitting that they are going to do the same awful thing; when the time comes, I will be contacting my legislators demanding that they do to OpenAI or SpaceX whatever is done to Anthropic now. It's outrageous that Sam Altman would step in to try and benefit from the political persecution of his main competitor and we must ensure that he regrets this.
manoDev 24 minutes ago||
“Concerned” is an understatement. USA is already operating at nazi Germany levels and more than half of the civil society is approving. Not that it’s a surprise for global spectators though - it’s finally showing it’s true colors.
stared 18 minutes ago||
Should it be officially marked as the date of transition from liberal democracy to illiberal democracy?

Such tampering with companies is a smoking gun. Let's wait until there is another decision seizing this (or others') company assets.

quentindanjou 14 minutes ago|
I always find it interesting to listen US citizen answer "What would it take for you to not consider your country a democracy?" and admire the wide range of answers and denials.
cheesecompiler 10 minutes ago|||
Right, as if _this_ is straw that breaks the camel's back, and not the pile of hay the camel has been carrying for decades.
breakpointalpha 10 minutes ago|||
Many proudly and loudly claim the US is a "republic".
GaryBluto 6 minutes ago||
Is it not?
blueblisters 1 hour ago||
It might be that this admin does not have the capacity to reason about second or third order effects.

But given that what would typically be red lines for previous administrations have been brazenly crossed without consequences, why would they bother?

andrewstuart2 57 minutes ago|
Crossing red lines for previous administrations is clearly a goal at this point.
Chance-Device 34 minutes ago||
Anthropic should never have gotten into bed with the military or intelligence services to begin with. They wanted to make a deal with the devil and dictate the terms, that is the problem. If they had stayed out this wouldn’t be happening. Yes, someone else will probably step in and do all the evil you have just refused to do, but that isn’t a reason to instead decide to do it personally.

Note that I give them a lot of credit for trying to stop and to have their own red lines about the use of their technology, and to stick to those red lines to the end.

mitthrowaway2 17 minutes ago||
According to legend the devil adheres to the terms of the contacts he signs; it's usually the foolhardy peasant who didn't notice the fine print.
idiotsecant 18 minutes ago|||
The military is perhaps the biggest possible customer around. They do plenty of things that aren't blowing people up. It's not bad to help with non combat tasks.
Chance-Device 12 minutes ago||
Yeah, but aren’t all of those things in service of “blowing people up”?
draw_down 27 minutes ago||
[dead]
hedayet 1 hour ago||
So, DoD has done what it said it would. And OpenAI has jumped on the opportunity.

I'm curious what'll openai signatories on notdivided.org do now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188473

Remain undivided in spirit while grinding for OpenAI?

burkaman 39 minutes ago||
"jumped on the opportunity" is possible, but per https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-whole-thing-was-scam it's plausible that OpenAI created this situation through straightforward bribery.
surprisetalk 18 minutes ago||
> OpenAI exec becomes top Trump donor with $25 million gift

> https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/brockman-openai-top-trum...

scoofy 18 minutes ago|||
Congress must approve any renaming the Department of Defense... They haven't. Stop giving them what they want without them even doing it in good faith at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_De...

hedayet 10 minutes ago||
Thanks for pointing this out. Updated my post
shimman 57 minutes ago|||
They'll do nothing. It's really hard to take the morals of these devs seriously when they're already fine working for, and have a history with, some of the most evil companies in current existence.
Computer0 34 minutes ago||
And when you suggest unions and worker organization to them they gloat that the company takes better care of them without it. They don't want to be in the same class as the peasantry.
alanwreath 8 minutes ago||
Labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk only because they were uninterested in doing business with the US government under the terms requested seems very much a bullying tactic that results in something the west critiques China for: coerced alignment.

Anthropic has been given a death sentence.

Waterluvian 45 minutes ago||
It was really easy to close out my ChatGPT account and switch to Claude. I was really only there out of inertia. I don’t do anything beyond occasional free tier stuff like rubber ducking but so far Claude is so much better.
alanwreath 2 minutes ago||
But for how long? If Claude is a supply chain risk. That means anyone hosting him would also be a supply chain risk.

Ergo AWS/Azure/GCP - nobody will host them because it’s Anthropic or the lucrative government contracts. Hegseth/Trump didn’t just say “you’ll never do business with the US” - it’s that they will never do business IN the US. Hopefully that means they’ll be able to take up shop elsewhere in the world.

jdndbdjsj 19 minutes ago||
I prefer the claude code CLI interface for everything anyway. It is actually more convenient. Memory is local files, type one word to use rather than navigate.
adamtaylor_13 1 hour ago|
Writing out a thought I had, someone please critique my reasoning here...

What if Anthropic just shrugged, dissolved the company and open-sourced all of the Opus weights? Could this harm OpenAI and advance AI in a reasonable way?

Look I know it's an insane idea. I'm just curious what the most unhinged response to this might be.

jdndbdjsj 12 minutes ago||
If I were to download those weights I can't run them unless I spend $100k on a cluster, so the privacy advantage is not there yet.

We already have Groq, Celebras and AWS Bedrock and others in the inference of open models space, so the model is usable that way.

Is Claude better than Llama, Gwen etc. Probably. For now.

But for how long? Dissolving means relying on Meta or Deepseek etc. to pick up and carry on tuning. Otherwise it'll be as useful as a GPT2 or Atari ST eventually in a competitive environment.

Also open sourcing the weights is handing it over to DoD (aka DoW).

Complicated question but probably not the best move. Keep going means keep working on safety research.

nostrademons 31 minutes ago|||
I kinda wonder if this is how we got DeepSeek. It was developed by a Chinese hedge fund. Entirely possible their business model was to take out large leveraged puts against the major U.S. AI vendors; shit on their business models with an entirely open-source model; and profit. The stock market certainly dropped in a massive way when DeepSeek was released, so if they traded against NVDA/GOOG/META et al, they profited in a big way.
jrsj 14 minutes ago|||
They would never do this because the entire point of the company is to try and control what AI is allowed to do, who is allowed to use it, and what they’re allowed to do with it. The overarching philosophy of Anthropic is explicitly opposed to open models. If it were up to them it would be illegal to inference them in the U.S.
stirlo 55 minutes ago|||
There’s plenty of markets outside the pentagon to sell to.

Far more likely is they spin up a defence focused subsidiary with slightly different policies if they really want to sell to them.

BoiledCabbage 43 minutes ago|||
> Look I know it's an insane idea. I'm just curious what the most unhinged response to this might be.

I mean what if all the employees stripped off their clothes and walked through the streets naked while barking, then called up their middle school math teachers and barked live dogs then moved to a commune and stood on their heads.

> Writing out a thought I had, someone please critique my reasoning here...

I mean to critique your reasoning, it makes sense to also include a criteria of something they might reasonably do. There are an infinite number of unhinged things a group of people could in theory do. But maybe start with something they would actually have an incentive to do.

Why would they voluntarily dissolve their company, put themselves out of work, release their crown jewels and get nothing for it? Yes it's unhinged but unless I'm missing something bug, they wouldn't do that because they wouldn't at all want that to happen.

xpe 35 minutes ago||
> I'm just curious what the most unhinged response to this might be.

Are you asking how dangerous open-weight models are? You could start with:

Ryan Greenblatt on the AI Alignment Forum : "When is it important that open-weight models aren't released?" https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/TeF8Az2EiWenR9APF/when-...

From the Centre for Future Generations : "Can open-weight models ever be safe?" https://cfg.eu/can-open-weight-models-ever-be-safe/

From OpenAI authors, far from neutral : "Estimating Worst-Case Frontier Risks of Open-Weight LLMs" https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03153

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