Thread

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

499 points · 900 comments · cramer4next

ApolloFortyNine · 1790356118 · focus · HN ↗
I know everyone says this is political but it actually seems like a textbook designation. Anthropic wanted to have rules on how the military used AI, the military said no and therefore doesn't want anthropic used anywhere in their supply line.
This is like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike orders, now the military needs to have a special box of pens that don't have stipulations attached. With AI usage it would be the same thing except applied to entire product chains. It seems like it would just add more complexity to operations.
You can agree with the rules anthropic wanted, but having rules set by a private company at all that apply to the military does seem fair for the military to object to.
>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 and necessary
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.
1. novia · 1790357457 · focus · HN ↗
  I think you're confused. When the White House decided to stop having federal agencies buy paper straws [1], they didn't designate paper straws a supply chain risk, they just stopped buying them. The term has a very specific meaning which would not apply in the pen scenario.
  [1] <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/ending-procurement-and-forced-use-of-paper-straws/" rel="nofollow">https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/endi...
  1. dlcarrier · 1790359211 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not a great analagy; it's more like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike orders, who then only ships pens with cameras and solenoids so that the point stays retracted until the camera verifies that the paper doesn't include a drone strike orders.
    lukewarm707 · 1790359785 · focus · HN ↗
    i am not sure even this covers it.
    it would be like the pen manufacturer who ships pens with an automatic point retractor, AND a video livestream to the manufacturer from the pen AND remote control of the point retractor.
    anthropic and contractors monitor the livestream remotely to make sure the pen is not signing drone strike orders and may choose to activate the retractor.
    neuronexmachina · 1790377213 · focus · HN ↗
    > anthropic and contractors monitor the livestream remotely to make sure the pen is not signing drone strike orders and may choose to activate the retractor.
    I might be mistaken, but in the case of national security deployments the models are airgapped and Anthropic doesn't actually have access to telemetry/logging from them.
    lukewarm707 · 1790432561 · focus · HN ↗
    for current deployments the models are airgapped.
    however anthropic is demanding that they have access to chat logs for anything better than opus 5.
    it is not possible to run recent anthropic models in a secure way. palantir, nvidia, booz allen etc have blocked fable because they can't run it safely.

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