Acronis did not have DOD contracts.
Other companies (Huawei) have been deemed risks under different laws, or by Congress, but they also didn't have direct DOD contracts.
Do you have any evidence for your assertion? Did you check if it is true before posting?
> “Supply chain risk ” means the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of a covered system so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise degrade the function, use, or operation of such system (see 10 U.S.C. 3252).
Naming a US company a "supply chain risk" is basically saying "this company is an adversary of the USA", which is FUCKING INSANE.
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.
I think your mistakenly thinking of it as an asset. It's not as asset like a house, it's a service. They have a service contract. They have uptime and SLA commitments. That contract has parameters, and changing those parameters means a new contract.
A similar service would be signing up a private company to do intelligence gathering and analysis for the DoD in Asia. They find a company that specializes in Asia and sign a contract. They give them work and the contractors fulfill it. Coming back and saying "we want you now to give us analysis for important decisions in South America." The company would reasonably reply "we don't have the skills to do that in South America. Our team knows nothing about South Am, we're no better than someone off the street at that. There is no credibility behind anything we'd say about South America. And on top our contract was foe Asia". If we want to discuss a plan for hiring people for South Am let's discuss it, but that's a new contract." And then the DoD saying they're a supply chain risk makes no sense.
Or if you want an even more and hyperbolic example they cant take those data analysis to and say we're sending them ti the front lines of Iran. The company say no, and the DoD replying "you're a supply chain risk". They are not renting people, they are signing for a service of data analysis. Similarly they are not renting hardware they are signing for an LLM/intelligence service.
Yes? I assume that it's not in a government owned and operated datacenter, but likely in AWS (govcloud or whatever) and maintained/serviced by Anthropic SREs like I suppose regular Claude is.
Or is, say, FedEx now a supply chain risk too, if they happened to offer parcel delivery services for the DoD and put in a clause excluding delivery to active war zones?
It would be like a spouse proposing restrictions and terms of their access to your phone contingent on you marrying them. Assuming guilt until proven innocent
It is easy to cherry pick one metaphor. We owe it to ourselves to think better than that.
What happens when you analyze this overall situation in all of its richness from multiple points of view and then seek synthesis? Speaking for myself, I would want to know your (1) probabilistic priors: the Bayesian equivalent of "disclosing your biases"; (2) supporting information; (3) conflicting information: I want to know that you aren't just ignoring it; (4) various theories/models you considered; (5) overall probabilistic take. All in all, I'm uninterested in analysis disconnected from the historical particulars.
Few people have the skillset and time to dig in properly. I suggest starting with "A Tale of Three Contracts" by Zvi Mowshowitz [1] In my experience, you would be hard-pressed to find anything around AI of this quality in the usual mainstream publications.
1. Last week I made a case for why DoD, if rational, would accept limited use under a consequentialist decision theory frame: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190039
2. One what basis is it rational to give the current administration (the leadership) the benefit of the doubt w.r.t. having a sincere drive towards advancing the national security of the United States? The evidence highly points in the other direction: towards corruption, political ends, and narcissistic whims.