Thread

1. 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. jzb · 1790359108 · focus · HN ↗

      “the military said no and therefore doesn't want anthropic used anywhere in their supply line”

      It’s clearly a punitive measure and has nothing to do with national security.

      If a supplier uses Anthropic to develop a product, how does that pose a risk to the DoD or national security? The DoD can specify that a third party system can’t rely on Anthropic for DoD use without designating the company a supply risk. It was very clear that the administration was punishing the company for saying “no”.

      1. frumplestlatz · 1790359216 · focus · HN ↗

         Anthropic took the position that our military’s decision making power should be subordinate to Anthropic’s constraints.

         Any dependency on a company that thinks they have that moral authority and has the technical means to enforce it is absolutely a risk to the supply chain.

         If you want to blame someone or something for this, we should start with Dario and “effective altruism”.

         1. testdelacc1 · 1790361771 · focus · HN ↗

            But why can’t the military just not use Anthropic? Why can’t the DoD say “ok we’re going with a different vendor”? Even if you find Anthropic’s stance distasteful, why support taking punitive action on Anthropic?

            1. satvikpendem · 1790366619 · focus · HN ↗

               I feel like in this thread no one is understanding what supply chain risk designation is. The government can just not use Anthropic, and that's exactly what they're doing, and they are not using it so much that they don't want Anthropic anywhere in their chain of supply. It's not necessarily punitive, the government is just covering their tracks so that if somewhere in their supply chain Anthropic exists, they want to remove them. They are complying with Anthropic's demands to not be used in war and the DoD says, okay, we won't use you anywhere and also enforce that we won't use you, just like you wanted.

               1. joshuamorton · 1790367526 · focus · HN ↗

                  Anthropic said "we don't want to be used as part of kill chain decision-making" (actually it may have been even more specifically autonomous/unmanned kill chain decision making)

                  The DoD responded not by saying "alright, we will use OpenAI for our kill-chain uses" but by saying "Boeing is no longer allowed to use Claude Code".

                  1. firesteelrain · 1790368810 · focus · HN ↗

                     Correct, they do not want “Boeing” to use Claude models to write software for airplanes for example

                     1. joshuamorton · 1790369799 · focus · HN ↗

                        Yes, and this is not (and cannot be!) a supply chain risk in any reasonable interpretation.

                        1. satvikpendem · 1790370164 · focus · HN ↗

                           If the DoD uses some Boeing plane, they do not want Anthropic to be able to interfere somehow.

                           1. joshuamorton · 1790374731 · focus · HN ↗

                              And my point is that using Claude models for coding a Boeing plane does not allow anthropic to interfere in the operation of those planes. Once the code is written, anthropic has not plausible form of control.

                              Thus, it cannot be a supply chain risk.

                              1. firesteelrain · 1790375987 · focus · HN ↗

                                 It is if the auto generated code for say safety critical or mission critical code generated by a LLM or even someone tries to put LLM in the decision loop and it refuses to do an action.

                                 1. joshuamorton · 1790396231 · focus · HN ↗

                                    Claude code is neither of those things. So now can you explain how using Claude code could be a supply chain risk?

                                    1. satvikpendem · 1790410712 · focus · HN ↗

                                       Claude Code can insert something into your code you are not aware of, like a backdoor in many millions of lines of code, especially as many people now aren't even reading the code anymore. How is this not blatantly obvious?

                                       1. joshuamorton · 1790416959 · focus · HN ↗

                                          Can't open AI do the same thing?

                                          1. satvikpendem · 1790442603 · focus · HN ↗

                                             They can, they haven't shown to try to do so yet unlike Anthropic which I've linked before in this thread. Of all AI companies Anthropic is the most untrustworthy even as it acts, well, the most anthropic.

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