Has this happened before?
Not to a US company.
Pentagon formally labels Anthropic supply-chain risk
111–120 of 319 posts
Re: Pentagon formally labels Anthropic supply-chain risk
#112I 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. When the rule of law degrades into pay-to-play politics, the inevitable result is a mass exodus of both capital and top-tier talent. And to add to this quoting another commentat…
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 ... i…
> which is why modern governments have worked so hard to lower corruption
I would argue that they did not. They should have and some were better then others.
But, bulk of financial markets, all of predictionmarkets and crypto, startups and sillicon valley, Musk imperium, Thiel, Murdock, all run on corruption. And to large extend, Trump is the endgame of that.
Re: Pentagon formally labels Anthropic supply-chain risk
#113It was really easy to close out my ChatGPT account and switch to Claude. I was really only there out of inertia. I don’t do anything beyond occasional free tier stuff like rubber ducking but so far Claude is so much better.
Re: Pentagon formally labels Anthropic supply-chain risk
#114This is awful. That a disagreement tjat involves politics can make a company ruined is really awful. The civil society should be quite concerned about this kind of attacks.
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.
Re: Pentagon formally labels Anthropic supply-chain risk
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because it's not a military asset? It's a privately-owned asset. Are you under the impression that the military is submitting Anthropic API calls? Whatever model the military is using is as much of an asset as the F35 they purchased. Depending on their agreements, you could argue it's a rented asset. Doesn't change any calculus.
And the F35 comes with tons of contract terms in favor of the manufacturer. Like I've heard about how planes have been grounded because although an air base has the parts and mechanics rated to perform the repair on site, the servicing contract only allows it to be performed by the service contractors who needed to be flown in.
The DOD can't even force companies to hand over data, such as schematics, if it wasn't in the original contract without providing extra payment negotiated with the contractor, and they can't force the contractor to set a particular price. This has happened on numerous systems. One of the biggest I'm aware of was the H-60 where the DOD ended up reverse engineering the early helicopters in order to maintain them, all because the DOD program office forgot to include a data rights clause in the contract (Sikorski didn't forget, they just didn't remind the DOD).
Re: Pentagon formally labels Anthropic supply-chain risk
#116Writing out a thought I had, someone please critique my reasoning here... What if Anthropic just shrugged, dissolved the company and open-sourced all of the Opus weights? Could this harm OpenAI and advance AI in a reasonable way? Look I know it's an insane idea. I'm just curious what the most unhinged response to this might be.
> 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.
Re: Pentagon formally labels Anthropic supply-chain risk
#117The US Military's demand that the product they purchase is able to be used for all lawful purposes seems pretty reasonable, and is really the only valid line to draw. Forcing one's own ethics onto the military's use of your product is nonsensical on its face.
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).
Re: Pentagon formally labels Anthropic supply-chain risk
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Work is not good per-se.
Oh you’ll still work. As a supplicant on your hands and knees for your capitalist overlords.
If we could move past the empty rhetoric?
It turns out a working economy requires well paid workers because somebody needs to buy shit
Even "capitalist overlords" (why not "evil bourgeois swine", while we're here) realize that. The "all SWE replaced" jabbering is a sales pitch to the uninformed. I.e. it's more P.T. Barnum than Jay Gould.
Re: Pentagon formally labels Anthropic supply-chain risk
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Anthropic was very clear about the usage restrictions: They didn't want them being used to control autonomous kill drones or mass surveillance of the American public. That's it. DoW didn't like that -- for reasons that will probably soon become apparent.
Correct, it will be about silencing any opposition against this administration. OpenAI will be happy to let their models be used to persecute, kill, and destroy american democracy if it lines Sam's pockets.
Re: Pentagon formally labels Anthropic supply-chain risk
#120Exported all my chats and deleted my ChatGPT account yesterday. The current administration not liking you is the strongest signal I could possibly have to go all in on a particular company.
If Anthropic changes course will you move to Gemini? If all models do, local llama I assume?
Mistral is European and has competitive models.
DeepSeek is Chinese.
Avoiding the MAGA collaborators is not as difficult as you make it seem. Foundation models have genuine global competition.