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We Will Not Be Divided

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Re: We Will Not Be Divided

#801

This has much broader implications for the US economy and rule of law in the US. If government procurement rules intended for national security risks can be abused as a way to punish Anthropic for perceived lack of loyalty, why not any other company that displeases the administration like Apple or Amazon? This marks an important turning point for the US.

i genuinely do not understand why anyone is acting like this is something new; has this not been the status quo since forever?

futhermore this is kind of a naive framing painting the state as somehow separate from majority of the capital...

Re: We Will Not Be Divided

#802

This has much broader implications for the US economy and rule of law in the US. If government procurement rules intended for national security risks can be abused as a way to punish Anthropic for perceived lack of loyalty, why not any other company that displeases the administration like Apple or Amazon? This marks an important turning point for the US.

Its called corporatism and is a part of classical fascism.

*capitalism ftfy

Re: We Will Not Be Divided

#803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Anthropic can certainly make the call to deny access this way, but then the US govt can choose not to make contracts with Anthropic. So what's the issue?

The whole reason this is a story is that the government won't just refuse to contract, it will put the equivalent of soft sanctions on the company because Anthropic refuses to contract.

Re: We Will Not Be Divided

#805

This has much broader implications for the US economy and rule of law in the US. If government procurement rules intended for national security risks can be abused as a way to punish Anthropic for perceived lack of loyalty, why not any other company that displeases the administration like Apple or Amazon? This marks an important turning point for the US.

i genuinely do not understand why anyone is acting like this is something new; has this not been the status quo since forever? futhermore this is kind of a naive framing painting the state as somehow separate from majority of the capital...

Are you claiming it has been status quo for the US government to king make companies through the usage of the defense protection act when one entity refuses to remove safeguards? Do you have any examples or is this just the worldview that aligns with your own?

Re: We Will Not Be Divided

#806

This has much broader implications for the US economy and rule of law in the US. If government procurement rules intended for national security risks can be abused as a way to punish Anthropic for perceived lack of loyalty, why not any other company that displeases the administration like Apple or Amazon? This marks an important turning point for the US.

i genuinely do not understand why anyone is acting like this is something new; has this not been the status quo since forever? futhermore this is kind of a naive framing painting the state as somehow separate from majority of the capital...

Sure, the state has always had theoretical power to do this, but when was the last time something remotely like this actually happened?

Re: We Will Not Be Divided

#808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s because no company who has ever sold weapons to the government has ever been brazen enough to tell the government how they can and cannot use their purchase. It’s unprecedented because most companies that sell to the government are publicly traded and have a board that would never let this happen. It’s unprecedented because Anthropic is behaving like a reckless startup. That’s what they will argue, anyway.

This is just factually incorrect. To begin with, the existing contract included the language on usage. Other companies also have such language about usage. It's fairly standard, and is little more than licensing terms. The idea this is unprecedented is some PR talking point nonsense.

> the existing contract included the language on usage. Other companies also have such language about usage.

The existing contract is only a few dozen months old. It didn’t hold up to scrutiny under real world usage of the service. The government wants to change the contract. This is not the kill shot you think it is. It’s totally normal for agreements to evolve. The government is saying it needs to evolve. This is all happening rapidly and it’s irrelevant that the government agreed to similar terms with OpenAI as well. That agreement will also need to evolve. But this alone doesn’t give Anthropic any material legal challenge. The courts understand bureaucracy moves slowly better than anyone else, and won’t read this apparent inconsistency the same way you are.

Re: We Will Not Be Divided

#809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government isn't banning Anthropic because using it harms national security. They are banning it in retribution for Anthropic taking a stand. You might be completely right about their real motivations, but try to steelman the other side. What they might argue in court: Suppose DoD wants to buy an autonomous missile system from some contractor. That contractor writes a generic visual object tracking library, whi…

I would hope the DoD would test things before using them in the theater of war.

But there will always be deficiencies in testing, and regardless, the point is that Anthropic is intentionally introducing behavior into their models which increases the chance of a deficiency being introduced specifically as it pertains to defense.

The DoD has a right to avoid such models, and to demand that their subcontractors do as well.

It’s like saying “well I’d hope Boeing would test the airplane before flying it” in response to learning that Boeing’s engineering team intentionally weakened the wing spar because they think planes shouldn’t fly too fast. Yeah, testing might catch the specific failure mode. But the fact that your vendor is deliberately working against your requirements is a supply chain problem regardless of how good your test coverage is.

Re: We Will Not Be Divided

#810
> Label the company a "supply chain risk"

Are they not a huge supply chain risk? Anthropic, being second chicken to OpenAI for a long time, decided to integrate tightly with the DoW. Now that their consumer products are doing better they're making decisions for the DoW as a supplier. This isn't about whether I agree with the DoW or not, it's just that behavior obviously would never fly with any customer.

The only real surprise is I haven't heard of the DoW considering Grok, which is not only a frontier model but has an existing gov cloud platform.

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