[_fat_santa]

The disconnect here for me is, I assume the DoW and Anthropic signed a contract at some point and that contract most likely stipulated that these are the things they can do and these are the things they can't do.

I would assume the original terms the DoW is now railing against were in those original contracts that they signed. In that case it looks like the DoW is acting in bad faith here, they signed the original contact and agreed to those terms, then they went back and said no, you need to remove those safeguards to which Anthropic is (rightly so) saying no.

Am I missing something here?

EDIT: Re-reading Dario's post[1] from this morning I'm not missing anything. Those use cases were never part of the original contacts:

> Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War

So yeah this seems pretty cut and dry. Dow signed a contract with Anthropic and agreed to those terms. Then they decided to go back and renege on those original terms to which Anthropic said no. Then they promptly threw a temper tantrum on social media and designated them as a supply chain risk as retaliation.

My final opinion on this is Dario and Anthropic is in the right and the DoW is acting in bad faith by trying to alter the terms of their original contracts. And this doesn't even take into consideration the moral and ethical implications.

[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war

[anigbrowl]

The administration's approach to contracts, agreements, treaties and so on could be summed up as 'I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.'

The basic problem in our polity is that we've collectively transferred the guilty pleasure of aligning a charismatic villain in fiction to doing the same in real life. The top echelons of our government are occupied by celebrities and influencers whose expertise is in performance rather than policy. For years now they've leaned into the aesthetics of being bad guys, performative cruelty, committing fictional atrocities, and so forth. Some MAGA influencers have even adopted the Imperial iconography from Star Wars as a means of differentiating themselves from liberal/democratic adoption of the 'rebel' iconography. So you have have influencers like conservative entrepreneur Alex Muse who styles his online presence as an Imperial stormtrooper. As Poe's law observes, at some point the ironic/sarcastic frame becomes obsolete and you get political proxies and members of the administration arguing for actual infringements of civil liberties, war crimes, violations of the Constitution and so on.

[tavavex]

I think it's the other way around. They have always wanted to do those cruel things that have real victims. It took them many years of dedicated, coordinated efforts as they slowly inched many systems to align with their insane ideas. The villain branding is just that - branding. Many of them actually like the 'bad guys' in those stories, especially if those bad guys are portrayed as strong, uncompromising, militaristic, inhumane, and having simple, memorable iconography that instills fear - the more allusions to real life fascists, the better. But that enjoyment follows from their ideology and what they want to do in the world, not the other way around.

[Schmerika]

And as an aside to this: even the people coopting the rebel iconography are supporting genocide, atrocities and war crimes.

Like, Mark Hamill himself is a massive Israel + Biden supporter [0].

Guys, George Lucas didn't make the Empire thinking about Trump, or Republicans. He made it about America.

0 - https://www.nme.com/news/film/hollywood-stars-sign-open-lett...

[johnfn]

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...

[Teknoman117]

I just wish there was a stronger source on this. I am inclined to agree you and the source you cited, but unfortunately

> [1] This story requires some reading between the lines - the exact text of the contract isn’t available - but something like it is suggested by the way both sides have been presenting the negotiations.

I deal with far too many people who won't believe me without 10 bullet-proof sources but get very angry with me if I won't take their word without a source :(

[hirako2000]

It isn't about commercial agreements, it's about patriotism. The national industry is supposed to submit to the military's wishes to the extent that they get compensated. Here it's a question or virtue.

The Pentagon feels it isn't Anthropic to set boundaries as to how their tech is used (for defense) since it can't force its will, then it bans doing business with them.

[lesuorac]

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.

[MeetingsBrowser]

This is quite literally the norm for things with known dangerous use cases.

Go look at the package on a kitchen knife and it says not to be used as a weapon

[kranke155]

They also have other vendors.

Claude Opus is just remarkably good at analysis IMO, much better than any competitor I’ve tried. It was remarkably good and complete at helping me with some health issues I’ve had in the past few months. If you were to turn that kind of analytical power in a way to observe the behaviour of American citizens and to change it perhaps, to make them vote a certain way. Or something like - finding terrorists, finding patterns that help you identify undocumented people.

[nelox]

Yep. Choosing not to renew a contract with a provider who has voluntarily excluded itself from your use case is respecting that provider's choice and acting accordingly.

[uncletammy]

Not in software though. Clear precedent has been established via EULAs. Software companies set the rules and if users don't like, they can piss off. I don't see why it would be any different for the government.

[xdennis]

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

Utter nonsense. When the US built the Blackbird, it could only use titanium because of the heat involved in traveling at that speed. But they didn't have enough titanium in the US. So the the US created front companies to purchase titanium from the Soviet Union.

Do you think the US should have informed the Soviet Union what it wanted to do with the metal?

[SubiculumCode]

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

[drewda]

Yes, it's officially still the Department of Defense.

If this were a news outline writing "Department of War" I would be concerned. But in the case of the Anthropic CEO's blog post, I can understand why they are picking their fights.

[yomismoaqui]

I first read about DoW on a post by Anthropic and thought it was some kind of jab to the government.

[miltonlost]

It's a silly shibboleth, but I automatically ignore anyone who calls it the Department of War or Gulf of America. Hasn't steered me wrong yet. They're telling me they're the kind of people who only care about defending fascism.

[fancymcpoopoo]

Well I think we have an actor congress

[arduanika]

They can, however, rename their Twitter/X accounts and vacate the @SecDef handle, which seems to be up for grabs now, if anyone wants to do the funniest thing...

[testing22321]

Or all the stupid shit this regime has done, this is the most sane.

They want the department to fight wars. At least they’re being honest.

[yodsanklai]

Of all the silly things that Trump did, I think this one is the most reasonable. This has always been a department of war. Calling it defense was propaganda.

[n0x1103]

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

[runlaszlorun]

You pretty much nailed it. I can't even get outraged at any given instance now that the trendline is so staggeringly clear.

I can't see anyway this ends well for the US. I say this as both an American and a military veteran.

[afavour]

And they don’t think anything through. If they do this then Amazon, Google and the rest will need to terminate their involvement with Anthropic. Trump will be getting a call from some Wall Street bigwigs imminently and it’ll get rolled back, I bet.

[pohl]

Contract law will certainly be a casualty once Rule of Law has completely been broken. I don’t understand why the business sector isn’t pushing back more. Surely they must all know that the legal legal context itself, within which they all operate, is at mortal risk and that Business as Usual will vanish once autocratic capture is complete.

[nijave]

They still think they can bribe their way out

[safety1st]

My main takeaway from all of this is that Hegseth seems deeply unfit for his job. First there was the Signal leak and now this.

Look, Anthropic is not going to be designated a supply chain risk. 80% of the Fortune 500 have contracts with them. Probably a similar percentage of defense contractors. Amazon is a defense contractor for example. They'd have to remove Claude from their AWS offerings. Everyone running Claude on AWS, boom gone. The level of disruption to the US economy would be off the charts, and for what? Why? Because Hegseth had a bad day? Because he's a sore loser?

If he's decided he doesn't like the DoW's contract then he can cancel it, fine. To try and exact revenge on the best American frontier model along with 80% of the Fortune 500 in the process, to go out of his way to harm hundreds or perhaps thousands of American firms, defies all reason. This is behavior you would expect any adult would understand as petty and foolish, let alone one who's made it to the highest ranks of government.

So I think it's just not going to happen, Trump's statement on the matter notably didn't mention a supply chain risk designation. This suggests to me that Hegseth went off half cocked. The guy is a liability for Trump at this point, I'm guessing he won't last much longer.

[tripzilch]

> Everyone running Claude on AWS, boom gone. The level of disruption to the US economy would be off the charts

seriously? :)

[bhawks]

| then they went back and said no, you need to remove those safeguards to which Anthropic is (rightly so) saying no.

So one thing to call out here is that the assumption that DoW is working on specifically these use cases is not bullet proof. They simply may not want to share with anthropic exactly what they are working on for natsec issues. /we can't tell you/ could violate the terms.

It is also dumb that DoW accepted these terms in the first place.

[throwawayb2025]

Is this matter about publicly available model or private model? For publicly available model like opus 4.6, bad actors can do whatever they want and Anthropic won't know. If this is only about private custom model, designating public model as supply chain risk doesn't make sense as others can use it.

[hughw]

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)

[ks2048]

Only Congress can declare war and Congress has the "power of the purse".

"You can just do things" (evil edition).

[yonz]

It's so fishy, I spent the morning reading sam'AMA and it's a classic whitewashing act. OpenAI is claiming their setup is stronger and that DOW has agreed to their red lines but read the agreement below, it only says use in compliance with laws and executive order.

Anthropic wouldn't have walked away from a multi million contract if their two redlines could be respected. OpenAI on the other hand is a fast, willing and ready company. I would love to see Anthropic's proposed contract

In our agreement, we protect our red lines through a more expansive, multi-layered approach. We retain full discretion over our safety stack, we deploy via cloud, cleared OpenAI personnel are in the loop, and we have strong contractual protections. This is all in addition to the strong existing protections in U.S. law.

We believe strongly in democracy. Given the importance of this technology, we believe that the only good path forward requires deep collaboration between AI efforts and the democratic process. We also believe our technology is going to introduce new risks in the world, and we want the people defending the United States to have the best tools.

Our agreement includes:

1. Deployment architecture. This is a cloud-only deployment, with a safety stack that we run that includes these principles and others. We are not providing the DoW with “guardrails off” or non-safety trained models, nor are we deploying our models on edge devices (where there could be a possibility of usage for autonomous lethal weapons).

Our deployment architecture will enable us to independently verify that these red lines are not crossed, including running and updating classifiers.

2. Our contract. Here is the relevant language:

The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful purposes, consistent with applicable law, operational requirements, and well-established safety and oversight protocols. The AI System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control, nor will it be used to assume other high-stakes decisions that require approval by a human decisionmaker under the same authorities. Per DoD Directive 3000.09 (dtd 25 January 2023), any use of AI in autonomous and semi-autonomous systems must undergo rigorous verification, validation, and testing to ensure they perform as intended in realistic environments before deployment.

For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives requiring a defined foreign intelligence purpose. The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.

[omgJustTest]

Contracts typically have escape clauses, especially for govt work.

They will just have to recompete!

[DivingForGold]

If anyone is the epitomy of arrogance, it is Hegseth.

No doubt the US Gov't will be using A I to perform automated military strikes without human supervision. and spying on US citizens (which they already have been doing for decades now).

Look no further than the case of patriot Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, exposed a massive NSA surveillance program in 2006, revealing that AT&T allowed the government to intercept, copy, and monitor massive amounts of American internet traffic. Klein discovered a secret, NSA-controlled room—Room 641A—inside an AT&T facility in San Francisco, which acted as a splitter for internet traffic.

[miltonlost]

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?

[dustinmr]

It’s the Department of Defense

[EasyMark]

I assume those agreements were probably signed before the current fascist regime running the US government and now they want to upend the terms of said agreement to allow in more fascism to aforementioned contract.

[reactordev]

You nailed it.

[madaxe_again]

Yeah, but in Might v Right, well, there’s only ever one victor.

[kalkin]

It's not recent news that Anthropic has (had?) DoD contracts. This is a lot of words to write while seeming ignorant of basic facts about the situation.

[fwipsy]

This is an interesting perspective, but I think the fallout from sticking to his guns here is probably greater than the public blowback he would receive from serving the DoD. Without this specific sticking point, the public would know that Anthropic was serving the DoD, but not what specifically the model was being used for, and it would be difficult to prove it wasn't something relatively innocuous.

[zephen]

> if the directive had never been made public, would that blog post exist?

You're ignoring the sequence of events on the ground.

If there hadn't been any been any internal pushback from Anthropic, would the directive have ever been made public?

[fluidcruft]

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.

[kranke155]

Yes, I assumed a mass surveillance Palantir program also. Interesting take on how it allows them to claim “we are not doing this” while asking Anthropic to do it.

Of course they can just say - we aren’t, Palantir is.

[alephnerd]

Network recon [0]

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47180540