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@dang I'm formally petitioning you to bring down the banhammer upon this obvious troll account
@dang doesn't work.. you've been here long enough. > (..) email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Can you be more specific? I see a lot of uninformed takes, but no specific bias. Do you mean downvotes?
If you turn on the thing that shows 'dead' comments, there is a larger than normal number here.
But, this is a non-story, because those comments were correctly killed precisely so they wouldn't clog up this thread.
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I understand that, but I suspect the admin will now just have an informal, not-written-down policy that does exactly the same thing.
How would they implement such a policy? Amazon, Google, etc. aren't realistically going to terminate all business with Anthropic based on an informal policy that the DoD won't write down.
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Are you suggesting there is a government conspiracy to influence this dusty corner dive bar of the Internet?
Are there tech workers who don't know what HN is? It's a pretty reasonably sized social media site.
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If you turn on the thing that shows 'dead' comments, there is a larger than normal number here.
Indeed, and the dead comments (from new users!) overwhelmingly favor the government position. But, this is a non-story, because those comments were correctly killed precisely so they wouldn't clog up this thread.
What's the point of a supply chain risk distinction if you can't mark a company as a risk if they express that they will be a risk?
Is this question supposed to have anything to do with the situation at hand, where what they did was refuse to perform certain categories of service?
Anthropic wanted to have the power over what the government could or couldn't do. If there was any false positive on something that was supposed to be allowed the government would have to work with Anthropic and get permission from them to do something they are allowed to do. This to me is the risk that Anthropic was giving to the government. If Anthropic expresses that they want this level of power over what the military can do I think that such intention can justify being a risk. That is how it relates to my comment.
Is the practical outcome much different? I doubt they'll get contracts either way, so the labelling was just a formality. If anything it seems the label was just intended to give a veneer of legitimacy to the admin by using an existing mechanism and terminology, rather than saying "we're going to block your access because we feel like it".
The point of the supply chain risk designation was not just to have the DoD stop using Anthropic (they could have done that by just cancelling the contract). Their intended effect was to force every company that sells to the US government, no matter how indirectly, to not use Anthropic in any way, which would effectively destroy them because almost every company is in the supply chain (for example my company is https…
If that’s true, then what you’re suggesting is absurd. Because it’s not enough for the pentagon to merely stop contracting with Claude, because that was never the problem in the first place from their risk model. Their problem was they had a prime contract with Palantir for their wargaming service, and Palantir subcontracted with Anthropic as an LLM provider. So if DoD ceased to contract with Anthropic directly, it would have no impact on the risk that Anthropics new posttraining limits potentially posed to their mission insofar as they are reliant on Palantir and it’s services and there would be nothing preventing Palantir from continuing to contract with Anthropic.
I have to ask, what other tool do you think they have to protect themselves from this? You can argue that these guardrails from Anthropic are useful and important and DoD should just accept that, and that’s fine, but it really is (and ought to be) the departments decision about whether they’re comfortable with that or not. It’s their call. They have access to information on our adversaries that the public doesn’t. And they’re the ones responsible when lives are lost. And if they’re not comfortable with trusting service member lives to a specific post trained Opus 4.6 model, I’m not sure what other avenue they have to solve that problem across their entire prime contracting space other than a supply chain risk designation.
Any sort of backroom dealings where they whisper off the record to defense CTOs that they have a problem with anthropics leadership and would prefer that they sub out to OpenAI or Gemini instead for LLM services would be totally illegal and a violation of procurement law. So they definitely can’t do that. A supply chain risk designation is the only real tool they have to single out a single company.
One thing worth noting: Anthropic is a PBC, which is a new corporate structure that makes it relatively unaccountable to traditional profit motives. But those traditional profit motives are precisely the carrot that the DoD relies on dangling in front of the industry to motivate companies toward its mission. Traditional for profit companies are lead by people who have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit by serving the government. The entire procurement process relies on companies being motivated by profit and competing through bids. But PBCs are specifically designed to remove that incentive structure from their decision making, which makes them entirely unalike every other defense contractor which is publicly traded and can be held legally responsible by shareholders for putting personal beliefs above increasing shareholder value. That sounds like… exactly the kind of thing you don’t want in your military supply chain.
Is the practical outcome much different? I doubt they'll get contracts either way, so the labelling was just a formality. If anything it seems the label was just intended to give a veneer of legitimacy to the admin by using an existing mechanism and terminology, rather than saying "we're going to block your access because we feel like it".
I believe designating an entity a supply chain risk has far deeper implications than the DoD avoiding that entity, and goes as far as a lawful prohibition for any contractor of the USG being also prohibited from using or working with the entity so designated. Ironically enough, if the comments in this discussion are true that Palantír uses Claude, Palantír would've also been prohibited as well.
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The point of the supply chain risk designation was not just to have the DoD stop using Anthropic (they could have done that by just cancelling the contract). Their intended effect was to force every company that sells to the US government, no matter how indirectly, to not use Anthropic in any way, which would effectively destroy them because almost every company is in the supply chain (for example my company is https…
This whole event was precipitated by Palantir using Claude in the Maduro raid, and news of this surprising Anthropic and resulting in them asking questions and maybe suggesting in private discussions that they took issue with this and wanted to introduce more posttraining limits on the ways their model was used by the department. This has been widely reported and I don’t think anyone is really disputing that. If that…
It doesn't seem they'd be subject to any kind of effective enforcement to me
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The point of the supply chain risk designation was not just to have the DoD stop using Anthropic (they could have done that by just cancelling the contract). Their intended effect was to force every company that sells to the US government, no matter how indirectly, to not use Anthropic in any way, which would effectively destroy them because almost every company is in the supply chain (for example my company is https…
Fun fact: Palantir is powered entirely by Claude and was what was used for the Venezuela operation and for targeting for the Iranian operation.
Haha what, OpenAI has been in bed with them and their models used by them since before Anthropic was even a thing. Claude will just have been picked because they considered it the strongest at the task at that point in time.
It's crazy to see this kind of misinformation.