Thread

U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk

499 points · 900 comments · cramer4next

petcat · 1790353704 · focus · HN ↗
I still don't fully understand what this was about. It sounds like the DoD said they wanted unrestricted access to Anthropic's models, Anthropic refused, so the Pentagon declared that they wouldn't use them at all.
Isn't this basically what Anthropic wanted?
1. HarHarVeryFunny · 1790354633 · focus · HN ↗
  Evidentially not - Anthropic want to do business with the US military, but on their own terms, telling the military what they can and cannot use it for.
  1. theptip · 1790355977 · focus · HN ↗
    Every private citizen or corporation gets to do business (or not) with the military on their own terms. This is the difference between totalitarianism and a free country.
    Anthropic’s position is also known as “having terms of service”.
    To be clear the existing, signed ToS terms that Trump balked at were:
    1. No mass surveillance of US civilians - illegal but we have all read the Snowden papers.
    2. Fully unmanned kill chains on autonomous weapons - Anthropic have even stated they will support this eventually, they just didn’t think their models were ready and didn’t want the obvious, inevitable blowback.
    The DoD is within its rights to cancel the contract if it doesn’t like the terms that it previously signed.
    andrewla · 1790356838 · focus · HN ↗
    The concern, I think, in its most generous terms, is that they can't buy Anthropic's service the way the could, say, a wrench, because Anthropic can decide at any point to disable the military's ability (even transitively, through other vendors) to use their models if they determined that they do not like what the military is doing with that or if it violates their interpretation of the terms of service.
    This seems like a definitional supply chain risk.
    theptip · 1790363818 · focus · HN ↗
    That is not the definition of a supply chain risk, this is:
    > FASCSA definition (41 U.S.C. § 4713(k)(6)): "Supply chain risk" means the risk that any person may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, extract data, or otherwise manipulate the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, maintenance, disposition, or retirement of covered articles so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise manipulate the function, use, or operation of the covered articles or information stored or transmitted on the covered articles.
    This topic is a mind-killer, lots of uninformed opinion swamping the news, and it's hard to get actual signal on the technical questions at hand. (And, I think it's naive to believe that the government is actually concerned about the precise legal definitions; remember Hegseth decreed that no government sub-contractors would be allowed to transact with Anthropic, despite there being no legal basis for this?)
    > Anthropic can decide at any point to disable the military's ability
    If you're referring to the claims of a killswitch, Anthropic testified under oath that they don't have one. This has been thoroughly covered, e.g. <a href="https://www.axios.com/2026/04/22/anthropic-no-kill-switch-ai-classified-settings" rel="nofollow">https://www.axios.com/2026/04/22/anthropic-no-kill-switch-ai.... Anthropic provides the weights, they get run in DoD's secure enclave. There's no "phone home".
    If you mean more generally, that DoD might breach a contract and then have that contract cancelled going forwards, then yes - this is literally how all SaaS contracts work. And it's very clearly not what the quoted text above refers to.
    The way this works in a non-totalitarian country is, the government says "I want new terms and you won't give them to me; instead I will take my business elsewhere". And indeed this is what happened, DoD now has contracts with Google and OpenAI for equivalent capabilities.
    Just to engage on your terms, with the actual concern you're raising; I would say rather than "FASCSA supply chain risk" a better way of thinking about it is "vendor lock-in". DoD absolutely should not rely on a single vendor for these kinds of capabilities. And most defense spending explicitly contemplates this already. This should be and has been solved through basic procurement practices.
    andrewla · 1790368032 · focus · HN ↗
    This is great context and I feel that this is bringing in a lot of information that I wasn't aware of.
    If what you're saying is true, then there is truly no supply chain risk other than the risk of civil action against the government for violation of terms of service. That seems like a rather weak point on which to balance a "supply chain" risk though.
    theptip · 1790372426 · focus · HN ↗
    To be fair and give the best steelman of the government’s position, see the ruling, it’s quite clear. I linked better analysis in <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849556">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849556
    The TL;DR is that this was actually decided on the principle that Anthropic can “manipulate” the defense systems by training Claude to refuse to take certain actions.
    This feels like a parallel construction to me, it wasn’t reported AFAICT at the time of the original drama.
    But yeah, the decision in OP has nothing to do with the contractual terms that everyone has been debating upthread.

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