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The writeup here[1] was pretty clear to me.

> *Isn’t it unreasonable for Anthropic to suddenly set terms in their contract?* The terms were in the original contract, which the Pentagon agreed to. It’s the Pentagon who’s trying to break the original contract and unilaterally change the terms, not Anthropic.

> *Doesn’t the Pentagon have a right to sign or not sign any contract they choose?* Yes. Anthropic is the one saying that the Pentagon shouldn’t work with them if it doesn’t want to. The Pentagon is the one trying to force Anthropic to sign the new contract.

[1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anth...

Regardless of the original contract, it's entirely appropriate for a vendor to tell the customer how to use any materials.

Imagine a _leaded_ pipe supplier not being allowed to tell the department of war they shouldn't use leaded pipes for drinking water! It's the job of the vendor to tell the customer appropriate usage.

I don't believe they can change the name to Department of War without an actor Congress. It remains the DoD.

the entire administration negotiates in bad faith. literally every agreement they sign whether it's international trade or corporate contracts is up to the whim of a toddler with twitter

It's the Department of Defense.

[1] "only an act of Congress can formally change the name of a federal department." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14347

(edited to add the url I omitted)

You're taking Dario's post at face value, but consider the timing and context. That statement wasn't published out of principle, it was published because the directive went public and suddenly everyone learned that Anthropic has active contracts with the Department of War. For a company that has built its entire brand on safety, responsibility, and ethical AI, that revelation is a serious PR problem with its core audience.

Dario's framing: "we said no to the bad stuff, we only do the good stuff", is textbook damage control. He's not disputing that Anthropic works with the DoW. He's trying to control the narrative around how they work with the DoW before critics on both sides define it for him. The carefully drawn line between "acceptable" and "unacceptable" military use cases reads less like a principled stand and more like a retroactive justification designed to thread the needle between defense revenue and public image.

Ask yourself: if the directive had never been made public, would that blog post exist? Almost certainly not. Anthropic would still be quietly serving the DoW, and none of us would be having this conversation.

That doesn't necessarily make the DoW right or Anthropic wrong on the contract dispute itself. But treating Dario's statement as a neutral, authoritative account of what happened, rather than what it obviously is, which is a company protecting its brand in a crisis, is doing a lot of the DoW's work for them by accepting one side's PR as fact.

Contracts typically have escape clauses, especially for govt work.

They will just have to recompete!

With this administration, after all their proven lies, when in doubt, assume bad faith on their part. Assuming good faith at this point is Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football, but now the football is fascism (i.e., state control of corporations, e.g., what Trump administration is doing here).

Trump has historically stiffed his contractors. Why do you think his administration would be any different with adhering to a contract?

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I was pondering the same thing and to me the answer is a contractor sold something to the DoD and Anthropic pulled the rug out from under that contractor and the DoD isn't happy about losing that.

My speculation is the "business records" domestic surveillance loophole Bush expanded (and that Palantir is build to service). That's usually how the government double-speaks its very real domestic surveillance programs. "It's technically not the government spying on you, it's private companies!" It's also why Hegseth can claim Anthropic is lying. It's not about direct government contracts. It's about contractors and the business records funnel.

I think that’s the whole idea. Anthropic didn’t ask for much so that they would look like the reasonable party.

Trump doesn't want another election to happen. He needs some powerful tools to ensure that happens, ie, massive scale ai surveillance and manipulation. Eg, like Xi uses in China. I bet anyone here he starts a war as his excuse

Their intention is to turn it against the American people. Hegseth literally wrote a book about eliminating democrats from the US, and this surprises people.

Did the DoW ask for these things?

This whole thing seems like people talking past each other, and that there’s something being left unsaid.

Anthropic doesn’t make a product that would assist with kill drones, and they don’t have the right to deny subpoenas.

It's a waste of your effort to apply rational argument to the actions of a group that are in it for a shakedown.

It’s the mob. This is nothing more than, “Nice AI ya got here. Be a shame if sometin’ wuz to happen to it.”

Keep in mind that Anthropic “is the only A.I. company currently operating on the Pentagon’s classified systems” [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/technology/defense-depart...

They are the same amount of ‘risk’ to national security that the various ‘emergencies’ the executive branch has used as legal excuses to do otherwise illegal things are emergencies.

Congress is negligent in not reigning this kind of thing in. We’re rapidly falling down so many slippery semantic slopes.

the administration which declares ad-hoc emergencies is behaving as predicted

Can't just unplug the thing and use something else.

Obviously the DoD would not want limited use. Strange they don't make their own given their specific needs.

Dont forget Nvidia technology was condsidered too sensitive to be exported to China....until the Trump administration decided they could export it if they paid a 10% export tax.

Isn't this our governments classic negotiation strategy? Go to the extreme, and meet somewhere well on their side of the middle.

Don't make the mistake of thinking their words have meaning. They see a way to punish the company, they take it. Same thing with declaring a national emergency to impose tariffs. There's no supply chain risk, no national emergency, but that doesn't stop them.

> So I guess our national security is significantly at risk for the next six months?

That does seem to be what Hegseth is arguing, yes; and that is presumably his justification for doing something drastic here. Although I assume he is lying or wrong.

And as a cynic, let me just add that the image of someone going to the political overseers of the US military with arguments about being "effective" or "altruistic" is just hilarious given their history over the last ~40 years.

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Companies change (remember "don't be evil"?) but yeah for the Anthropic of today, respect.

It's also a very clear differentiator for them relative to Google, Facebook, and OpenAI, all of whom are clearly varying degrees of willing to sell themselves out for evil purposes.

I'm signing up for their $200/year plan to reward them for standing up to this regime.

The team that handles their PR has done an amazing job in the last 9 months

They have earned my business, for now.

This whole saga is extremely depressing and dystopic.

Anthropic is holding firm on incredibly weak red lines. No mass surveillance for Americans, ok for everyone else, and ok to automatic war machines, just not fully unmanned until they can guarantee a certain quality.

This should be a laughably spineless position. But under this administration it is taken as an affront to the president and results in the government lashing out.

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Exactly.

If you're a billionaire there's no risk to "sticking to principles", so there's nothing to admire. Also that's not what they're doing. These are calculated moves in a negotiation and the trump regime only has 3 years left. Even a CEO can think 4 years ahead.

It's probably in Anthropic's interest to throw grok to these clowns and watch them fail to build anything with it for 3 years.

> 83 people in total killed in US attack to abduct President Nicolas Maduro

Blood is on their hands already

> Good. I'd rather not have my favorite AI from a company working on AGI to have murder and spying in it's DNA.

Anthropic made it quite clear they are cool with spying in general, just not domestic spying on Americans, and their "no killbots" pledge was asterisked with "because we don't believe the technology is reliable enough for those stakes yet". The implication being that they absolutely would do killbots once they think they can nail the execution (pun intended).

I suppose you could say they're taking the high road relative to their peers, but that's an extremely low bar.

Do all of the employees want to move to Europe suddenly? Unless it’s the UK or Ireland, do they speak the local language? If it is the UK or Ireland, do they prefer the weather in California? Do they have children in school or in college locally? Do they have family they’d rather not move 9 time zones away from? Elderly parents they’re taking care of?

Canada is another option. Canada has significant AI research institutes going back decades ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mila_(research_institute) ) that have produced much of the foundational research that backs today's AI models.

For Americans and international researchers it's easy to get visas there quickly. It's not far at all for Americans to relocate to or visit. Electricity is cheap and clean. Canada has the most college educated adults per capita. The country's commitment to liberalism, and free markets, is also seeming more steadfast than the US at this point in time.

Canada faces obstacles with its much smaller VC ecosystem, its smaller domestic market, and the threat of US economic aggression. Canada's recent trade deals are likely to help there.

I say this all as an American who is loyal to American values first and foremost. If the US wants to move away from its core values I hope other countries, like Canada or the EU, can carry on as successful examples for the US to eventually return to.

I have my doubts about Anthropic wanting to pick up and move the entire company to Europe even if Ursula von der Leyen personally signed their visas. Maybe only if the government tried to nationalise their proprietary models.

Why wouldn’t the government just arrest their board and execs on charges of treason or something? At this point they could probably publicly hang them all and a plurality of Americans would cheer it. I don’t know if you appreciate how disliked tech is by the left and right alike.

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AGI? My guy, it's a text predictor slot machine. Very useful tool but will never be AGI.

Europe doesn’t give a shit about another American company and their employees trying to dominate their markets and import their workaholic American culture. They will tell Anthropic to go home.

If Anthropic moving to Europe was better for Claude, why has Europe not produced Claude?

None of the hyper scalers are going to stop offering Claude. All of the big 3 have invested billions of dollars into Anthropic, and have tens (if not hundreds) of billions more tied up in funding deals with them. Amazon and Google are two of the largest shareholders of Anthropic.

Anthropic is going to be fine. The DoD is going to walk this back and pretend it never happened to save face.

It is narrower than that by law, though not by their proclamation.

That label forbids contractors on DoD contracts for billing DoD for Anthropic, or including Anthropic as part of their DoD solution.

So - AWS can keep claude on bedrock, but can't provide claude to the DoD under its DoD contracts

Not entirely true.

The designation only applies to projects that touch the federal government, or software developed specifically for the federal government.

Contractors can still use Claude internally in their business, so long as it is not used in government work directly.

A complete ban would be adding Anthropic to the NDAA, which requires congress.

The DoD designation allows the DoD to make contractors certify that Anthropic is not used in the fulfillment of the government work.

From what I’ve heard the actual restriction is just on using Claude for stuff they’re doing for the Pentagon. They’ll keep using Claude for everything else and be less effective when they work for the government, and that’s fine because everyone else working for the government will have the same handicap.

I’m sure most of their revenue is large enterprise customers who serve government with their products - this looks very bad

This will likely go to court, again as Dario has stated this is blatant retaliation as no US company has ever been designated a supply chain risk and they continue to operate on classified systems for 6 more months.

No, Anthropic could easily call their bluff.

You can't discuss this topic without broaching the idea that the government is acting in bad faith — that they don't actually believe that Anthropic is a supply-chain risk and that this action is meant to punish the company. But this is in the HN guidelines regarding comments:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

If a commenter who supports the government makes the same argument that the government is making, the guidelines tell us to assume good faith.

My conclusion is that any topic where a commenter might be making a bad faith argument is outside the scope of Hacker News.

I've been on hn for years and I see this kind of sentiment raised all the time. It is not my understanding of the guidelines.

Politics and ideology are not off topic, provided the subject matter is of interest, or "gratifying", to colleagues in the tech/start-up space.

What's important is that we don't use rhetoric, bad faith or argumentation to force our views on others. But expressing our opinions about how policy affects technology and vice versa has always been welcome, in my observation.

So, what do you think about the US government's decision, and why?

> Normally avoiding politics and ideology where possible, created higher quality and more interesting discussions.

Everything is politics and "ideology"

Welcome to reality. HN likes to pretend politics is something you can just look away from and ignore. That’s a mighty big privilege, which makes sense since HN skews cis-white-het-male. That’s not a lie. It is easy to ignore this when it doesn’t touch them. But now it DOES touch them, and you’ve just discovered what every oppressed group in history has to live with: politics doesn’t just go away if you ignore it.

Being a hacker used to be an extremely political and ideological movement. Then capitalism came along and bought the term. It's about time we take that word back where it belongs.

Please at least try. There are already enough contributors here "qualified" to talk about politics.

>Topics like this are where I struggle with HN philosophy. Normally avoiding politics and ideology where possible, created higher quality and more interesting discussions.

Our whole society runs on technology. All tech is inherently political.

A "no politics" stance is merely an endorsement of the status quo.

If the last ten years have taught us anything it's that politics just isn't a topic isolated to the halls of government. It's real life. Political alignment has never so starkly indicative of your position on fundamental human morality. At the same time we've never had a government be so directly involved in private businesses.

I appreciate your restraint, and keeping this a high quality discussion space. As a political dissident myself, I don't mind some threads going political, I expect them to. The best ones are when there is a lot of disagreement or debate. As long as its not in every unrelated thread....

Why would you want to be non-political in 2026? The current administration is awful in ways we couldn't have imagined. There's no sense in not talking about it.

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Feels a bit like Jack Ma and Alibaba

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Probably yes. Additionally the (probably more for AWS) won't be allowed to use it internally either. This will probably apply to all the top SaaS/software companies unilaterally.

Additionally, every major university will undoubtedly have to terminate the use of Claude. First on the list will be universities that run labs under DOD contracts (e.g. MIT, Princeton, JHU), DOE contracts (Stanford, University of California, UChicago, Texas A&M, etc...), NSF facilities (UIUC, Arizona, CMU/Pitt, Purdue), NASA (Caltech).

Following that it will be just those who accept DOD/DOE/NSF grants.

Billable hours will win figuring it out but in theory, no because they can’t test it or use it.

Generally any machine that touches Supply chain Risk software cannot ship any software to DoD. AWS has separate clouds but software comes from same place.

Bigger question is whether government contractors can use any Open Source software after this. Open Source is a big part of the supply chain.

It means everyone waits for the injunctions.

(edit: I'm most likely wrong)

You got it backwards, can't use claude if you ARE doing business with DoD.

Presumably AWS/GCP don't care, its up to the end customer to comply. Not like GCP KYC asks if you work with DoD.

have you tried punching in "Huawei" the shopping portal on google.com in the US?

Even more extreme, that might mean they won't be able to offer Claude to non-US companies at all.

There is no way they can just stop selling Opus 4.6. This will crater the market.

Wait, what about Bun?

I think it’s sovereign behavior and what’s the point of being sovereign if you don’t exercise the power of the sovereign?

I guess I would support the democratically elected sovereign over the private corporation.

Supply chain risk ? Seems the risk here is the US Gov't wanting free reign to do whatever they want - - when they want.

Look no further than the famous expose by Mark Klein, the former AT&T technician and whistleblower who exposed the NSA's mass surveillance program in 2006, revealing the existence of "Room 641A" in San Francisco. He discovered that AT&T was using a "splitter" to copy and divert internet traffic to the NSA, proving the government was monitoring massive amounts of domestic communication.

The real question we should be asking is what others HAVE agreed to. Has OpenAI just agreed to let the government go crazy with their models?

It's scary to me that there are people out there who don't see this kind of zero-integrity behavior as disqualifying in elected officials.

That's a shame. They might at least continue to work together to spy on foreigners. I don't understand the fuss anyway, what do claude models do that gpt and gemini can't?

Is this the same Administration that reversed a previous block, and allowed NVIDIA to sell H200 to China?

It feels like when you are negotiating a contract for job with a toxic employer who you still don’t know they are toxic yet.

Trump wrote a long rant on Truth Social and ordered ALL federal agencies to stop using Anthropic. Not just the department of defense. This is straight up authoritarian.

Meanwhile, irrelevant "AI Czar" David Sacks, member of the PayPal mafia alongside known Epstein affiliates Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, is furiously retweeting all the posts from Trump, Hegseth, and other accounts. He is such a coward and anti American:

https://xcancel.com/davidsacks

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I don’t see a contradiction here. If control is out of the hands of decision makers, that’s a supply chain risk . Were it not for that, the service is seen as critical to national security.

I dunno, safeguard seems like a weasel word here. It’s just reserving control to one party over another. It’s understandable why the DoD(W) wouldn’t like that.

That’s the crazy thing. This whole dispute was over Anthropic saying no to fully automated kill bots. They only required there be a human in the loop to press the button.

'yet'. Their reason for not allowing autonomous weapons usage was it isn't ready, not that they wouldn't do it on principle. Only the surveillance objection was on principle.

A bit of a cop-out, don't you think?

They still pay taxes, which fund the US government, which kills innocent human beings around the world...

I don't think it was that hard because if they had caved a LOT of employees would have quit.

Sleep well in a box under the overpass maybe. If Amazon can’t serve Anthropics model until the courts get everything figured out it will be too late for them.

and USA created Islamic terrorism that is plaguing the whole world

I empathize, but surely China is not the right choice? Can we please have like, Australia? Or a unified EU?

American here, I would much rather have China being the foremost power too. This saga with Anthropic shows just how clueless these AI companies are. This soap opera has to stop, none of these CEO's, officials from the Trump administration, or the Department of War are good for humanity. I've read the ethics policies that China that they released on generative AI and it's years ahead of anything we have in America.

China's AI Safety Governance Framework: https://www.cac.gov.cn/2025-09/15/c_1759653448369123.htm

Most Americans hate AI and it's effectively the ostrich effect where they hope to outright ban it and ignore everything else. Meanwhile, all the evil people are running the show. While Anthropic continues to propagate Sinophobic messaging, DeepSeek and other companies have a much more muted tone.

They were already banned over a year ago

Could the NSA use a national security letter to get a copy of a major private LLM?

>because every US model provider refuses to work with them

Zero percent chance of that happening as long as xAI exists.

Pete Hegseth is frantically asking Deepseek to come up with targets in Iran and some plausible objectives he can sell to the public.

As a Canadian looking in, I see people talking about a 36% approval as low.

How is it that high!?

That means that more than 1-in-3 of your countrymen are ride-or-die, and it's just heartbreaking to see that we're going to have to launch that many people into the sun.

To counter point, do you think AI companies located on our adversaries turf will take the same stand? I agree its nightmarish to think of AI surveillance. But why is that being lumped in with weaponry? I see these as two separate issues.

I'd say you're right, except that Trump is near death (maybe) and (more importantly) very unpopular.

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TACO

Glad there are no hard feelings after those Superbowl ads

Really hoping for an official statement from oai. If all large llms are a supply risk, I guess it's a crash

Basically a reflection of the average intelligence in the U.S.

Because this administration is entirely composed of those same 17 year olds, older but not any more mature.

Autonomous loitering munitions with 'AI' (image classification CNNs) are already in service and have been used - most demonstrably by the IDF.

Even during the Nagorno-Karabakh war, Azeri loitering munitions were able to suppress Armenian air defenses by hitting them when they rolled out of of concealment. I believe that killchain requires a level of autonomous functionality.

It's same reason this administration recently tried to indict six Congresspersons for urging military members to resist "illegal orders." They want to demonize anyone who isn't blindly loyal to their side.

Note that previously this label has been applied (nearly?) exclusively to non-US companies. US companies that don't do business with the DoD are not affected, and non-US companies that do business with the DoD are affected.

Name one truly major market that is more business friendly

That's exactly what is happening... Anthropic are choosing not to sell their technology to the government. I'm not sure what you're suggesting otherwise here.

They can, but the government can always just not buy their stuff.

That's not what the government is doing here.

If the T&C is agreed to up front, why shouldn't they be able to? If their client or potential client doesn't like the T&C, they can find another vendor.

The current administration scoffs at laws. Nothing stopping them in that case from declaring war on Nauru and doing all the same. The solution is a sane, informed electorate, which is much more difficult in this age where a few disgustingly rich people have so much influence over news and media.

I guess the worry is that we don't get Due Process here and they destroy them to make an example of them.

It's basically legal hacking.

Hacking is using a system in a way it was not intended to be used.

Here it is that, but applied to the law.

Hegseth and friends are a bunch of black hat legal hackers.

You would have to assume it will be immediately challenged and an injunction filed to suspend the order until it makes it to court.

AWS Bedrock has deployed Anthropic models under an interesting structure. It is fully hands off - the models are copied into the AWS infrastructure and don't use anything from Anthropic. I think if push came to shove, Anthropic could cut ties with Amazon and AWS could probably still keep serving the models it has with Anthropic forgoing revenue until this is resolved, while asserting they are not "conducting commercial activity" between each other.

All speculation of course.

I wonder, can't Amazon create a new legal entity to split AWS into "AWS-for-DoD" and "AWS-for-everyone-else"? So one can work with Anthropic and the other can't. Not sure how it works in the US.

Probably Grog, which probably means even worse outcomes

Grok is already being brought in

The name is the Department of Defense. Congress did not vote to rename it, so the name hasn’t changed.

i’m currently subscribed to openai for their $20 a month tier chatgpt subscription.

i told myself if anthropic does not back down on their current stipulations to the DoD, then i’d cancel and switch over to claude

they said there is a line they do not want to cross, and stuck to that stance, at great personal and financial risk to themselves

My understanding is that they would have been likely to lose many of their senior researchers if they had backed down here.

I've only ever used the free plans, but I'd consider a sub with Anthropic now.

I'm switching.

"Hey Claude, make this sound less durnk ..."

What court orders has the admin ignored?

Maybe, but nowadays I wouldn’t put much money on what the US government thinks.

The whole reason this is happening is because Anthropic looked into how Claude was used in the Maduro op and found it to violate the negotiated terms of service.

Their hard lines are:

- no usage of AI to commit murder WITHOUT a human in the loop

- no usage of AI for domestic mass surveillance

I don't think it's ever been about strong or weak, or at least I don't think that's where the differentiation is. You always want 'strong' government, committed to the things it says it's committed to.

It's more been about the size of the government; that it should do a minimal amount of control (and do it well), but leave a lot of things for "the market to decide".

Having said all that, I think this issue is just tangential to any big/small government ideology. This is a hissy fit about a defence contractor sticking to their agreement where the DoD want to change the agreement in a way that goes against the contractors Mission Statement and/or the US Constitution itself.

The old ideology of the Republicans doesn't mean anything here. This administration is purely about 'give me what I want, now!'.

And it's whims change with the breeze. Do not look for consistency here.

If the government thinks the terms of Anthropic are unacceptable, they can just stop using them, right? But why would you then retaliate and ban other companies from making business with Anthropic if they want to be a defense contractor? How do these requirements make Anthropic a supply chain risk that makes them unusable for use by other companies?

It's perfectly reasonable for the US government to end the contract if they no longer like the terms they agreed to (assuming the contract does in fact let them); it's not reasonable to destroy the counterparty to the contract in retaliation. The line "I am altering the deal; pray I don't alter it further" is literally spoken by Darth Vader, the most comic-book of comic-book villains.

Then the government should end their contract with Anthropic. The terms of the contract were clear.

Designating them a supply chain risk is unprecedented authoritarian strong-arming.

What a dork.

This is nice rhetoric but ignores the fact that the elected officials are bought out by other billionaires. The US is an oligarchy in a republics clothing.

Neither side wants that so seems pretty unlikely

In what fantasy world?

EU won't do 996

> Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles.

TIL Fully automated killbots and mass domestic surveillance are American principles.

I mean, I should have known but there's no clearer sign saying "leave the country now if you don't agree with this admin" than now I guess.

This is a pimple on the arse of said consequence. It's one tiny thing in a chain of many bigger things.

It's magnified because it's right now, but this won't affect midterm results barely a whisker compared to many other daily headlines.

There are no serious enemies to this administration in SV and I can't see this changing that. SV has bent the knee exactly like Anthropic didn't. They're not going to stand up because of this, they've proven they don't have those muscles.

OTOH it could amplify their base: “Big Tech refusing to work with us on National Security matters!” The base will never hear what/where the red line was drawn, just that Some Company in California (liberal/bad) is being Woke and Political.

Basically, if you are a federal contractor, the designation means the DoD can force you to certify that Anthropic tech is not used in the fulfillment of your government work. Because it's just a DoD designation, and an executive order and not added to the NDAA, you can still use Claude for non-government (federal) touching work.

So using Claude Code to write software for the DoD is now a no go, you'd be in breach of procurement directives now.

If they go as far as to convince congress to add Anthropic to the NDAA, that would be a nationwide ban like Huawei making it illegal for any federal contractor to use the tech anywhere in their business.

But for now, even fed contractors can still use Claude in their business, just not directly for government work.