[nickysielicki]

This could kill Anthropic.

The designation says any contractor, supplier, or partner doing business with the US military can’t conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Well, AWS has JWCC. Microsoft has Azure Government. Google has DoD contracts. If that language is enforced broadly, then Claude gets kicked off Bedrock, Vertex, and potentially Azure… which is where all the enterprise revenue lives. Claude cannot survive on $200/mo individual powerusers. The math just doesn’t math.

[cobolcomesback]

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.

[nickysielicki]

* * *

[alephnerd]

GovCloud revenue is in the tens of billions of dollars. Bedrock less so. Almost every FedRAMP product uses the same codebase for Fed and non-Fed, and this would force most FedRAMP vendors to blackball Anthropic.

[CobrastanJorji]

It will really depend on the fine details. If Amazon would lose its military contracts unless it dropped Claude, then Claude will be gone tomorrow. They just got a half billion contract for the Air Force earlier this year, and it's not their only military contract, and they're going to want to be well positioned next time something like the JEDI contract comes along.

Also, AWS has a long history of rolling over when politicians make noise about AWS customers, going back to when Joe Lieberman casually asked Bezos to please stop supporting Wikileaks.

[adastra22]

I don't think you understand. This supply chain risk designation is viral. Every Claude model provider now has to decide whether to (1) drop Anthropic models, or (2) drop every single government contract, every contract with government contractors, or any customer who has any customer to any degree of connection to a government contract [which is effectively everyone], or (3) go to jail.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I would find that a lot more plausible if people had not spent the past week giving me similar arguments, in precisely the same tone, for why this was an empty threat and would never happen in the first place. If Amazon and Google do not either bow down or immediately join a business coalition to get Trump out of power, Hegseth will be even happier to get an opportunity to prove his power by destroying them. Trump either doesn't want to stop him or has become too senile to stop him.

[thewebguyd]

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.

[techblueberry]

The language in the tweet was

" Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic."

Is that just his fantasy or?

[alephnerd]

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

I work in the enterprise SaaS and cybersecurity industry. There is no way to guarantee that amongst any FedRAMP vendor (which is almost every cybersecurity and enterprise SaaS or on their roadmap).

Almost all FedRAMP products I've built, launched, sold, or funded were the same build as the commerical offering, but with siloed data and network access.

This means the entire security and enterprise SaaS industry will have to shift away from Anthropic unless the DPA is invoked and management is changed.

More likely, I think the DoD/DoW and their vendors will force Anthropic to retrain a sovereign model specifically for the US Gov.

Edit: Can't reply

> This is the core assertion that is not clear nor absolute.

If Walmart can forcibly add verbiage banning AWS from it's vendors and suppliers, the US government absolutely can. At least with Walmart they will accept a segmented environment using GCP+Azure+OCI. Retraining a foundational model to be Gov compliant is a project that would cost billions.

By declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk, it will now be contractually added by everyone becuase no GRC team will allow Anthropic anywhere in a company that even remotely touches FedRAMP and it will be forcibly added into contracts.

No one can guarantee that your codebase was not touched by Claude or a product using Claude in the background, so this will be added contractually.

[monknomo]

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

[mcintyre1994]

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.

[robertjpayne]

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.

[roxolotl]

Yea strong odds this goes to court, the DoD’s clearly inconsistent logic is ridiculed by a judge, the designation is dropped, and everyone quietly goes about their way with the DoD continuing to use Claude according to the existing terms of the contract.

[stephencoyner]

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

[aveao]

That's what hegseth says, but the law doesn't really say that AFAICT.

[crooked-v]

There's going to be a TRO against the attempt by like 9 AM Monday, and the bad faith from the government couldn't be more obvious. All it's really going to do is cost them some extremely expensive lawyer time.

[hirvi74]

> This could kill Anthropic

I am both dumb and without access to Claude, thus I must ask: My fellow smart HN'ers, what kind of impacts would this likely have on the economy?

Has a lot of money and resources not been pumped into Anthropic (albeit likely less than OpenAI)? I imagine such a decision would not be the ROI that many investors expected.

[mkoubaa]

No, Anthropic could easily call their bluff.