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. sippingabonedry · 1790358153 · focus · HN ↗

      > I know everyone says this is political but it actually seems like a textbook designation

      It literally is a textbook definition, signed into US law:

      “Supply chain risk,” means the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of a covered system so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise degrade the function, use, or operation of such system (see 10 U.S.C. 3252).

      To add onto what another commenter said, the pen analogy would be more like the manufacturer designing pens that stopped working when used to sign strike orders they disagreed with.

      1. cmdli · 1790366861 · focus · HN ↗

         Selling a pen labeled "this pen will refuse to sign certain orders" is not sabotage or malicious and is thus not a supply chain risk. The DoD is free to not buy from Anthropic, but designating them as a supply chain risk is incorrect, as well as arguably arbitrary and capricious given their public criticism of Anthropic's beliefs.

         1. rdsubhas · 1790368694 · focus · HN ↗

            The DoD buys from suppliers, who buy from suppliers, and so on. Hence supply chain. Hence supply chain risk.

            1. notahacker · 1790369144 · focus · HN ↗

               I don't think anyone doubts that subcontracts exist. They doubt that Anthropic's insistence that Claude isn't capable of being the operating system for an automated killbot and associated terms the DoD previously agreed to means that there's any danger to the US military from Lockheed Martin using Claude as a code assistant to build GUIs.

               1. rayiner · 1790441294 · focus · HN ↗

                  [delayed]

                  1. notahacker · 1790464365 · focus · HN ↗

                     Code which renders dots on a map isn't going to magically reorder itself because the GNSS endpoints get switched from manned to unmanned assets just because it was authored by Claude, and if the subcontractor isn't auditing and testing the code outputs then they're the supply chain risk, not the specific code-gen tool they use. Obviously chatbots are far more risky when they're being used to execute combat decisions in real, but that's literally the risk the military demanded Anthropic let them take, before determining that if Anthropic insisted it wasn't safe for that, then code written for a subcontractors HR management portal must be treated with the same suspicion as Chinese hardware,

                     It's not like the DoD and their subcontractors and their subcontractors' subcontractors aren't used to all sorts of fine-grained separation when it comes to what is and isn't classified or export controlled when they haven't got a thundering moron like Hegseth sticking his oar in.

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