This is not an abstract disagreement at all. The red lines that the Department of War wanted to cross were made extremely clear: They want to build Skynet with Claude, and build a mass domestic surveillance system. Now they will have to make do with building those two systems with Gemini and ChatGPT.
that's the mobster-loyalty mentality, and it's not how successful (read: desirable for the most people) governments function
What the orange turd is going is rather petty bullshit in a market where many options exist.
it is a bizarre company which also inherits the authoritarian infrastructure of cloud services.
that is: remote control of the software, spying on customers, etc.
The military ran Anthropic models on their own infrastructure; Anthropic had no access to it. "They might disable Claude in the middle of an emergency" was never a possibility.
anthropic did a prigozhin, got cocky and went behind the DOD's back to palantir and asked them questions about the use of claude.
a big tyrant does not like to be usurped or undermined by a little tyrant.
after pissing off the DOD by trying to get palantir to rat out classified deployments, dario went to the pentagon and behaved like himself in front of pete hegseth. anthropic was not going to come back from that.
fable is on AWS govcloud. but anthropic get the chat logs. specifically section F: [https://www.anthropic.com/legal/service-specific-terms]. this is an anthropic requirement.
notably, fable is not on IL5 or above. the best you can get is palantir AIP opus 5 in AWS IL5. i suspect, because of anthropic demanding that AWS rat out its customers.
But that's not at issue here. Obviously everyone agrees that the Pentagon can issue RFQ's to whatever specifications it wants. They can buy whatever they want, for the same reason that you or I are free to sell whatever we want.
The subject at hand is an attempt to use national security regulatory power to coerce Anthropic into selling a product it doesn't want to sell.
It would be naive to think that a private company could deny the government access to any tech if they want it for military or surveillance etc usage. In this case the government isn't forcing Anthropic to do it, they have alternatives and are perhaps making an example of Anthropic for refusing.
You could even make a case that the "supply chain risk" designation DOES make sense. If Anthropic are opposed to certain uses of their software, then doesn't that potentially impact companies that are part of the supply chain as well?
A supply chain risk is specifically an entity that is likely to maliciously sabotage the US military's operations, such as Chinese companies that are controlled by the CCP. It is not simply a decision to "not buy from this company", but rather a wide-ranging decision that this particular company is a national security threat.
Is it coersion when people refuse to buy anything but free range chicken eggs?
DoD just refuses to buy a product. Anthropic just lost a customer because their product didn't fit the requirements of the customer.
Right, and if they chose independently to do so it would be their right. What makes this problematic is that "all those companies" did not choose to not to work with the Pentagon (or with Anthropic spefically, for that matter). They were compelled to using using a regulatory tool which was originally intended to combat hostile foreign espionage.
That's not a "choice" made by those third party suppliers. The Pentagon is using the Supply Chain Risk designation as a contract negotiating tactic.
That's not what happened. DOD bought a product, with terms precluding specific applications of the product. DOD decided to change the terms, vendor said no. DOD threw a hissyfit (well, Hegseth did) and said, "No one can use it if they do business with us!"
If they had just terminated their contracts with Anthropic, then there would likely be no issue beyond having to pay out any penalties for terminating a contract early. They could then go to Grok (as they did) and OpenAI and used them instead. Or even kept the contract with Anthropic and its limitations, and just used the others for the cases where Anthropic was not permitted.