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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. 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”.
    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?
    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.
    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".
    firesteelrain · 1790368810 · focus · HN ↗
    Correct, they do not want “Boeing” to use Claude models to write software for airplanes for example
    joshuamorton · 1790369799 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, and this is not (and cannot be!) a supply chain risk in any reasonable interpretation.
    satvikpendem · 1790370164 · focus · HN ↗
    If the DoD uses some Boeing plane, they do not want Anthropic to be able to interfere somehow.
    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.
    satvikpendem · 1790379499 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you remember the Fable release? Anthropic themselves said they'd sabotage code of certain groups they didn't like such as frontier AI researchers. Why do you think they couldn't do the same here?
    joshuamorton · 1790382203 · focus · HN ↗
    No, they said fable would stop working. That's very different.
    satvikpendem · 1790389610 · focus · HN ↗
    > But for researchers trying to use Claude Fable 5 for frontier AI development, Anthropic outlined a different approach. The firm would deliberately degrade the model’s performance in ways that were invisible to the user. The move would effectively sabotage researchers trying to use Claude to train competing AI models, which Anthropic explicitly bans in its terms of service.
    <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-responds-to-backlash-on-claudes-secret-sabotage-on-ai-research/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-responds-to-backlash-o...
    It's not just "stop working," it's actively degrading the code.
    joshuamorton · 1790396099 · focus · HN ↗
    Okay, so what relevancy does this thing, which anthropic didn't do, have to anything we are talking which right now is using Claude code in line with its terms of service?
    satvikpendem · 1790410590 · focus · HN ↗
    They didn't do it due to backlash but they have the capability and more importantly the culture to do so. It is correct that the government doesn't want anything to do with a company who'd act like that.
    joshuamorton · 1790417086 · focus · HN ↗
    Actually, what I said was "Once the code is written, anthropic has not plausible form of control."
    To which you brought up something that still wasn't relevant.
    The government is perfectly able to choose not to work with contractors it doesn't like. That's not this.
    satvikpendem · 1790436704 · focus · HN ↗
    If Claude adds a backdoor autonomously then Anthropic would have a form of control. Even if it doesn't, Claude would be following the will of its creator instead of the government which the latter obviously does not want. I am not sure why it's that hard to understand that the government does not want any part of its stack to be influenced by such a company. This is exactly what supply chain risk is.
    joshuamorton · 1790450669 · focus · HN ↗
    So Claude is a supply chain risk in the same way that an employee is a supply chain risk.
    I'm struggling here because you're basing this determination entirely on things which the government never acused anthropic of, and haven't asked anthropic to address, and which the underlying law probably doesn't support.
    The government made clear that it was only designating anthropic a supply chain risk due to their refusal to allow Claude to be used lawfully for autonomous kill chains and domestic surveillance. Why are you bringing up this other stuff when the government never did?
    firesteelrain · 1790454222 · focus · HN ↗
    If an employee might be a supply chain risk in this analogy then they conduct background checks before they let them do anything and conduct periodic investigations. Otherwise, they don’t get access to the code base or information
    joshuamorton · 1790456513 · focus · HN ↗
    Right, and for the same purposes, the government has not made any claim that Claude poses risks. (And to the extent that they exist, pre-existing concepts like code review and testing mitigate them)
    Again I'll reiterate: the only concern the government has stated is that of Claude refusing to answer things during an active battle.
    I respect that decision, I think if the government wants to use OpenAI for that situation it makes sense. They can and should pick suppliers who meet their needs.
    Nothing about what the government has said suggests any reason that Claude Code is a risk. So why are you insisting that it is and that the government is justified in banning it?
    firesteelrain · 1790461287 · focus · HN ↗
    > Nothing about what the government has said suggests any reason that Claude Code is a risk. So why are you insisting that it is and that the government is justified in banning it?
    I think there is an important distinction here because even the Government’s own lawyer conceded that a contractor using Claude code is not necessarily a risk.
    The nuance is relying on Claude code as part of a DoW delivered or production system. This case puts Anthropic directly into the supply chain. Thus, if Claude is actually part of a DoW-procured capability, Anthropic still controls the model. DoW’s argument is that Anthropic could put something in there to perturb or retard the capability that DoW is after. DC Circuit said the department viewed that as a national-security problem because Anthropic had refused to accept a contract term the department considered necessar

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