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> This should make any US company nervous

"Nice little business ya got here -- it'd be shame if something happened to it..."

It opens the door for Democratic administrations to do the same to vendors for their own political reasons.

That’s ultimately why Ted Cruz spoke out about the Kimmel cancelation. It doesn’t take long until those powers are turned against you.

“Concerned” is an understatement. USA is already operating at nazi Germany levels and more than half of the civil society is approving. Not that it’s a surprise for global spectators though - it’s finally showing it’s true colors.

Crossing red lines for previous administrations is clearly a goal at this point.

I always find it interesting to listen US citizen answer "What would it take for you to not consider your country a democracy?" and admire the wide range of answers and denials.

"jumped on the opportunity" is possible, but per https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-whole-thing-was-scam it's plausible that OpenAI created this situation through straightforward bribery.

Congress must approve any renaming the Department of Defense... They haven't. Stop giving them what they want without them even doing it in good faith at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_De...

They'll do nothing. It's really hard to take the morals of these devs seriously when they're already fine working for, and have a history with, some of the most evil companies in current existence.

According to legend the devil adheres precisely to the terms of the contacts he signs; it's usually the foolhardy peasant who didn't notice the fine print.

The military is perhaps the biggest possible customer around. They do plenty of things that aren't blowing people up. It's not bad to help with non combat tasks.

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But for how long? If Claude is a supply chain risk. That means anyone hosting him would also be a supply chain risk.

Ergo AWS/Azure/GCP - nobody will host them because it’s Anthropic or the lucrative government contracts. Hegseth/Trump didn’t just say “you’ll never do business with the US” - it’s that they will never do business IN the US. Hopefully that means they’ll be able to take up shop elsewhere in the world.

I prefer the claude code CLI interface for everything anyway. It is actually more convenient. Memory is local files, type one word to use rather than navigate.

If I were to download those weights I can't run them unless I spend $100k on a cluster, so the privacy advantage is not there yet.

We already have Groq, Celebras and AWS Bedrock and others in the inference of open models space, so the model is usable that way.

Is Claude better than Llama, Gwen etc. Probably. For now.

But for how long? Dissolving means relying on Meta or Deepseek etc. to pick up and carry on tuning. Otherwise it'll be as useful as a GPT2 or Atari ST eventually in a competitive environment.

Also open sourcing the weights is handing it over to DoD (aka DoW).

Complicated question but probably not the best move. Keep going means keep working on safety research.

I kinda wonder if this is how we got DeepSeek. It was developed by a Chinese hedge fund. Entirely possible their business model was to take out large leveraged puts against the major U.S. AI vendors; shit on their business models with an entirely open-source model; and profit. The stock market certainly dropped in a massive way when DeepSeek was released, so if they traded against NVDA/GOOG/META et al, they profited in a big way.

They would never do this because the entire point of the company is to try and control what AI is allowed to do, who is allowed to use it, and what they’re allowed to do with it. The overarching philosophy of Anthropic is explicitly opposed to open models. If it were up to them it would be illegal to inference them in the U.S.

There’s plenty of markets outside the pentagon to sell to.

Far more likely is they spin up a defence focused subsidiary with slightly different policies if they really want to sell to them.

> Look I know it's an insane idea. I'm just curious what the most unhinged response to this might be.

I mean what if all the employees stripped off their clothes and walked through the streets naked while barking, then called up their middle school math teachers and barked live dogs then moved to a commune and stood on their heads.

> Writing out a thought I had, someone please critique my reasoning here...

I mean to critique your reasoning, it makes sense to also include a criteria of something they might reasonably do. There are an infinite number of unhinged things a group of people could in theory do. But maybe start with something they would actually have an incentive to do.

Why would they voluntarily dissolve their company, put themselves out of work, release their crown jewels and get nothing for it? Yes it's unhinged but unless I'm missing something bug, they wouldn't do that because they wouldn't at all want that to happen.

> I'm just curious what the most unhinged response to this might be.

Are you asking how dangerous open-weight models are? You could start with:

Ryan Greenblatt on the AI Alignment Forum : "When is it important that open-weight models aren't released?" https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/TeF8Az2EiWenR9APF/when-...

From the Centre for Future Generations : "Can open-weight models ever be safe?" https://cfg.eu/can-open-weight-models-ever-be-safe/

From OpenAI authors, far from neutral : "Estimating Worst-Case Frontier Risks of Open-Weight LLMs" https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03153

I’m not sure that’s how billionaires think.

I canceled my subscription, but have not yet exported and deleted because I'm an idiot, and also because I'm not sure if deleting it will have any actual impact (is it a hard delete? Likely not, even if they say it is).

And I'm just trying to play out what happens if Anthropic, and Google (if they haven't already), capitulate. Am I just going to forego using the best models and suffer any repercussions of not having access when the people who couldn't care less if the military is using AI for illegal uses continue to leverage them? When I say illegal I'm talking about the surveillance-of-US-citizens red line Anthropic would not agree to. The autonomous weapon one I'm sure there are zero laws against and so that wouldn't actually be illegal.

Are you able to view your chats through the .html file in the export? Mine are all garbled, like the JSON's not being parsed properly or something.

Asked for an export but still haven’t received the mail with the download link

Thanks, I had deleted the app from all my devices but not deleted the account. I have deleted my account now too.

I am in the exact opposite position — I am such an Anthropic hater (bc I’m forced to use Claude Code instead of OpenCode against my will) that I am now pro-Trump

(this is a joke, please forgive me for engaging in public wrongthink)

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Eh, they are all morally indefensible.

Anthropic had no problems to do business with the current administration until now. Are we to pretend it was all for happy purposes until now?

Presumably, if a spouse requested being able to have access to your phone at any time for a spot check, and to vet every single outgoing call and text you made, you would still marry this person, because that’s pretty much what Anthropic was requesting. Go/no-go on a per project basis.

No reasonable self-respecting person would agree to that, that’s basically “my relationship with you is contingent upon your guilt, until proven innocent.”

Dear HN: I would like comments before additional downvotes, please, this is not fucking Reddit

Don't get too attached. We're witnessing capitalism in its most ruthless form. Any of these companies will discard their principles the moment it becomes existential.

If Anthropic changes course will you move to Gemini? If all models do, local llama I assume?

For now it's in-house counsel Jeffrey Bleich, former special counsel to President Obama.

https://www.inc.com/chris-morris/legal-legend-leading-anthro...

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I'm willing to bet is was a golf course conversation.

"Hey why is the gov using Anthorpic over OpenAI, don't you know how much money I've donated?"

It sounds like they still have not issued any sort of actual order. The "formal label" described in the article is that they sent a communication directly to Anthropic saying they're a supply chain risk.

this isn't on topic at all

You can download the manual from kremlin.gov, and I am only half-joking here.

Rational investors live in reality. In reality, a great deal of business conducted throughout the world involves graft; companies accept that, and keep doing business.

It's not a good thing, AT ALL. There's a huge loss of overall productivity when you have corrupt systems (see Russia), which is why modern governments have worked so hard to lower corruption. But Trump ruining all that isn't going to end business ... it's just going to make everyone pay more for everything.

Been going on for a long time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Investor: "here's a million dollars for a ballroom, it'd be real nice if you cancelled the government's contract with our investment's competitors."

Seems like a great ROI. The loser is Average Joe with a 401(k).

That is already started to happen but it cannot happen overnight. Not only is it not easy but finding alternatives is also not easy. Just think of from your own personal perspective, say you have $100m right now invested in US business and wisely you say "I gotta get my shit away from this mess" - where exactly would you park your assets? You will find a way of course but you won't be moving $100m elsewhere overnight

> I said it before and I say it again: If openly bribing a crony gov to cancel your competitor is now the de-facto standard of making business in the US, I don't see how any rational investor could still see US companies as a secure investment.

Arguably large parts of the market in the US have been irrational and largely vibes based for a long time at this point. This action (like many others coming out of the Trump administration) adds to the chaos but I tend to doubt it will be the event that causes Wile E. Coyote to look down.

From what I understand it cannot be used to perform work on contracts where the DoW is on the other side. [1]

In practice I would suspect companies with such contracts would play it safe by outright banning the use of Anthtropic products, even if they could technically be used for work on contracts with other parties.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-comments-secretary-...

You can ask that question every other hour.

Not to a US company.

Every action has an opposite reaction. The DoD has made itself riskier to do business with, and future contacts will have to price that risk in.

Apparently that's not 100% true. The DoD contractor itself can still use Anthropic's technology, just not on U.S. military contract projects.

I’d like a lawyer to give some input. If you have a company that deals with the military does this chain down to not being allowed to use Claude or not?

Genuine question - was your fair consideration prior to or after J6?

We're all trying to find the guy who did this!

And 32% of eligible voters that thought Kamala would've been worse.

Anthropic already had a deal via Palantir so it seems it's models are used in a variety of ways by the pentagon.

The reports about Venezuela and Iran seem to suggest it's primary role was processing bulk intel.

But also that it was being used in planning and target selection.

Presumably what spooked Anthropic was that these tools were about to be directed internally.

But it's not clear if this is a point of principle that the government wants no holds barred with it's tools?

> I would love to understand in more detail what kind of use cases we’re talking about.

The whole point is that the use-case does not matter; either you allow the government to do everything they want, either you don’t.

Not these people for what I see.

Conservatives haven't had any power in Washington in decades. They are in thrall to MAGA now, which is all about seizing the means of production when its convenient.

They're not conservatives.

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I really can't tell if this is snark or not.

Mark Levin is that you?

Anthropic and the military had a contract. The military wanted to change the terms of that contract. Anthropic said no, which is their clearly defined contractual right. They got labeled a supply chain risk. How is this anything other than a shakedown? Does contract law mean anything to this administration?

The legal definition of supply chain risk:

> “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).

Naming a US company a "supply chain risk" is basically saying "this company is an adversary of the USA", which is FUCKING INSANE.

Because it's not a military asset? It's a privately-owned asset.

Because last time I checked, private companies that voluntarily offer a service to the government on contract terms are free to put whatever restrictions they want into their contract, and the government is free to not sign it if they don't like it?

Or is, say, FedEx now a supply chain risk too, if they happened to offer parcel delivery services for the DoD and put in a clause excluding delivery to active war zones?

Congratulations, you are clearly the smartest person on this forum, and I don’t mean that facetiously. The number of naïve comments here is absolutely astounding.

It would be like a spouse proposing restrictions and terms of their access to your phone contingent on you marrying them. Assuming guilt until proven innocent

> There are game theoretic reasons why a military should never accept any external restrictions on an asset.

1. Last week I made a case for why DoD, if rational, would accept limited use under a consequentialist decision theory frame: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190039

2. One what basis is it rational to give the current administration (the leadership) the benefit of the doubt w.r.t. having a sincere drive towards advancing the national security of the United States? The evidence highly points in the other direction: towards corruption, political ends, and narcissistic whims.

I may look at your comment history.

I am having trouble understanding what you are saying. If you were more explicit I and other people would be able to respond and interact with your writing. As it stands, I am having trouble finding anything concrete to interact with.

I feel you may be onto something, but you're not saying, so I (and I imagine other people) can't see it.

> Isn’t it actually quite fair that if you are not compliant with whatever the government wants you to do you will be supplying chain risk?

In the US, government is not in control of business specifics. Certainly the government can regulate businesses, but when the government wants to do business with a company, they don't get to dictate the terms. The government and the company come to a negotiated agreement, and then both abide by the terms of that agreement. Or they don't come to an agreement, and they go their separate ways, and that's the end of it.

This was just a contract dispute, and nothing more. The US government has no legal right to use any companies' products on terms that the US government dictates. (Yes, there are exceptional/emergency cases where they can do this, but that's more a nuclear option, and shouldn't be used lightly.) Consider a different set of circumstances: the US government wants to be able to use Claude at $10 per seat per month, unlimited usage. Should Anthropic be forced to accept these terms? And if they don't, it's reasonable to designate them a supply-chain risk? I don't think so. A dispute over contract terms around acceptable use is no different.

Designating Anthropic a supply-chain risk is about retaliation and retribution, plain and simple. The US government, outside of the Pentagon, could certainly use Anthropic for many different purposes if they wanted to, and it would be fine. But not now: as a supply-chain risk, no one in the US government can use them for any purpose. And this might even be a problem for unrelated companies that use Anthropic products internally, but also want to obtain and work on government contracts.

Anthropic and the Government both signed a contract. Anthropic is still abiding the terms of that contract. The Government is demanding that they be able to disobey the contract.

The right response is to not use the said product and use something else. If i want your widget to do something I want and you refuse, I don't get to smash your shop.

If I produce and sell widgets in my widget shop, then nobody but me gets to decide how I make those widgets.

The government can come into my shop and order sixty thousand widgets built exactly the way they say they want them built, and it may be something that doesn't run afoul of any laws at all.

But that doesn't mean that I am required or compelled to build widgets their way -- or at all.

I'm free to tell them to fuck off.

The government can then find go someone else to build widgets to their specifications (or not; that's very distinctly not my problem).

It is completely normal to have ethics based conditions like that. It already eciats - drugs that can not be used in execution or elements that cant be used in arms

Goverment is being super unreasonable here. And tyrannical too, companies dont have duty to provide unreliable arms for illegal war.