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

499 points · 900 comments · cramer4next

  1. petcat · · 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 · · 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 · · 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.

        1. andrewla · · 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.

          1. noahbp · · focus · HN ↗
            Anthropic did not have access to the servers where their models were deployed. They were under the control of AWS and Palantir, and they could neither disable, nor modify the model's behavior.

            <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;software&#x2F;2026&#x2F;04&#x2F;01&#x2F;claude-codes-source-reveals-extent-of-system-access&#x2F;5222658#:~:text=Anthropic%20does,model%2E%22" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;software&#x2F;2026&#x2F;04&#x2F;01&#x2F;claude-codes...

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