Private companies make products. When those products were plowshares or swords or missiles, the company didn't really have a say over how they were used, and could be compelled by the government to supply them. Now that new cloud and AI products that increase government command abilities live on servers controlled by private companies, private companies think they can tell government what to do and not do. No government will accept that, because the essence of government is autocratic sovereignty: the sovereign commands and is not commanded.
In this particular case Anthropic had a contract stating what the military could and could not use their models for. The military broke that contract. Anthropic declined to sign a revised one.
This is within their rights, and more to the point, the government should absolutely not be allowed to unilaterally alter contracts they’ve already signed!
Predictability is the whole point. Undermining it is how you destroy your own economy.
The problem is the branches of the government that Anthropic was doing business with found it infeasible to do this.
They had another problem. If one of their contractors used Claude to engineer solutions contrary to Anthropic’s “manifesto” would Claude poison pill the code?
Basically Anthropic wanted the angels halo and the devils horns and the govt said pick one.
That's not what the presidential announcement blacklisting Anthropic said. It said they're being punished for trying to require that the military follow their terms of service.
The media is usually flush with defending Anthropic. And yes - the supply chain risk label is too broad. But there is another side to the story and Anthropic isn’t an “innocent” as made out to be.
So he'll only accept systems developed by people who understand, as Sam Altman promised to, that the US military is not to be questioned.
*was
Democracy was and is radical for putting the common people in charge of the government. The right to petition for redress of grievances is literally in the first amendment. Government is a social contract, enforced with state violence on one end and mob violence on the other.
If you want to return to autocratic rule, I hear North Korea is lovely this time of year.
Governments are difficult customers for software firms, as most military folks get an obscure exemption from copyright law at work. Anthropic finding other revenue sources is a good choice, if and only if the product has actual utility (search is an area LLM are good at.) =3