Opinions on the merits vary, but in this instance, the government's actions were undeniably overbearing and unilateral. It is encouraging to see the judiciary successfully function as a check and balance against such executive overreach.
The issue of course is that the Judge can't change the knowledge that the head of the executive doesn't want people down the chain using this product, so they won't. Anthropic is a dead letter in government circles until the next Presidential election.
That may be, but the government doesn't need to declare Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" in order to just not do business with it. A simple clause in all RFPs is all that is needed.
The problem with this declaration by the government is that now any company doing any business with the US government would be effectively forbidden from using Anthropic ANYWHERE within their company, which is a huge deal, because the government does want to vet any vendors' software development practices.
But as long as the Judge in this case pushes back against such an action by the government, that leaves companies free to use Anthropic for their own internal uses. And most companies WILL continue to use them if it makes economic sense.
Perhaps. But certainly those companies will factor in the risk that this is overturned, or that the government pursues other extrajudicial means to punish those who do business with Anthropic.
All things equal, you’d be better off not exposing yourself to risk of financial harm or other punitive measures. Which is the whole point of the government’s action in the first place.
The type of contract they had was optional anyway. They could have just not done business with Anthropic in the first place. Really I think this has only promoted their platform as being sane and moral.
Eh, it’s not going to be transitively problematic for Anthropic the way the supply chain risk designation would’ve been.
Amazon isn’t going to have to divest from Anthropic because of this. Yes, they probably won’t be able to get a contract with Raytheon, but that wasn’t the main risk of being tagged with the supply chain risk designation.
Had this conversation with a friend, but I think as an America you can be very optimistic about the institutional strength of democracy in the country.
People are very pessimistic recently, but if anything, we are seeing that our system works well. A person got into power that a majority voted for, but when he oversteps, the courts and other institutions (even judges and fed reserve chairs he picked!) seem to hold him to the rules.
I get the pessimism, but for the most part, I kinda think the system is working.
lol judges have ruled 100s or 1000s of ICE detentions in various states illegal by now. None of that has stopped ICE from doing what it's doing. This kind of optimism in the law seems naive today because there is no mechanism to actually enforce it. All federal agents have very substantial legal & civil immunity, heads of departments have immunity as well. The head of the legal system is Pam Bondi who isn't even prosecuting child rapists, or Donald Trump who is one.
Even after Kristi Noem ruined countless lives and was responsible for deaths of innocent people, the only consequence she faced is being demoted to some made up job where she still gets paid to do nothing - no fine, no jail, no accountability, no justice. None of the ICE agents involved have faced any consequences besides a leave either, we don't even know most of their names.
People who don't follow the news like most of the tech community are living in some dreamland of a system or treating it as a purely mental battle of optimism/pessimism vs. actually seeing what is happening.
What are you smoking? The DoD will not be compelled by the judicial branch to contract with a company they believe poses a risk to service member lives during an active war where American lives have been lost. That’s just the way it is, and it should be obvious to you if you have a basic understanding of history or law.
This is a Biden appointee with two years on the job, and this will immediately be taken up by a higher court and blocked until a ruling on the merits is made. It will be appealed. DoD might have to go to the Supreme Court before this is all said and done, but they will win in the end, and this ban will stay in place until that happens.
Did you read the order? It directly addresses your comment:
> More importantly, as discussed above, no one is entitled to conduct business with the Federal Government, see Perkins, 310 U.S. at 127, and irrespective of the challenged actions, DoW and other federal agencies are free to terminate its contracts and agreements with Anthropic, as Anthropic readily admits.
This entire event came about because Anthropic raised concerns with Palantir and the Department around how Palantir used Claude when the Pentagon used Palantir in the Maduro raids.
The pentagon can terminate its direct contract with Anthropic but it does nothing to address the risk that Anthropic poses to the reliability of Palantir’s services, which are (at this point) critical to the way that the Department operates.
People keep repeating this lie and I’m sick of it. The direct usage of Claude by the pentagon is not what they’re trying to address, it’s the usage of Claude by Palantir that they’re trying to address. And this is the legal way for them to do that.
Again, for the third time in this thread, they MAY NOT ask Palantir off the record to just not use Anthropic. This would be extremely illegal and would give Anthropic standing to sue to the government.
I don't understand how to square your story about what motivated the government against what actually happened. This is the statement that the President of the United States made when announcing that Anthropic would be cut off:
> THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW
A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW
OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! That
decision belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF and the
tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military.
The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS
MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and
force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our
Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at
risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in
JEOPARDY.
> Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United
States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of
Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and
will not do business with them again! There will be a Six Month
phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are
using Anthropic’s products, at various levels. Anthropic better get
their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I
will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with
major civil and criminal consequences to follow.
> WE will decide the fate of our Country — NOT some out-of-control,
Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the
real World is all about. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Perhaps you've not seen this statement before; there are a number of people who find it inconvenient that US policy is driven by insane social media rants, and prefer to make up more sensible rationales for the same policies. But there's no part of the actual published announcement that discusses the relationship between Palantir and Anthropic.
DoD would like to use Palantir. DoD also believes Anthropic is pursuing posttraining in future models that will limit the effectiveness of Palantir tooling, if used by Palantir, for the purposes of DoDs mission.
What other legal mechanism do they have to prevent Palantir from specifically not subcontracting out to Anthropic, other than a supply chain risk designation? Note that directly asking Palantir to prefer Google or OpenAI over Anthropic is a violation of procurement law and highly illegal.
They can say "sorry Palantir, we will only sign a contract with you if you commit not to use Claude to provide services" and then Palantir is free to decide if they want to accept the terms of the contract or not. This is how business works.
That would be illegal and ripe for corruption. It would also require the DoD to renegotiate the thousands of existing defense contract it has outstanding.
That’s the entire reason this law exists, because what you’re suggesting is impractical. The department has to confidentially document its rationale for marking a company as a supply chain risk. It’s in the confidential record of this very court case. That’s the legal way to do this.
Again, did you read the order? The judge's order explicitly said this would be legal and cites the law permitting it, then goes on to explain why this action did not satisfy it:
> Covered procurement actions include “[t]he decision to withhold consent for a contractor to subcontract with a particular source or to direct a contractor . . . to exclude a particular source from consideration for a subcontract.” 10 U.S.C. § 3252(d)(2)(C).
Covered procurement actions are the things the Secretary can do after making a supply chain risk designation under 3252. The designation is a prerequisite. You can’t direct a contractor to exclude a subcontractor under (d)(2)(C) without first going through the 3252 determination process.
You’re literally posting evidence for why this is the only legal avenue for DoD.
Yes, it turns out our laws make it hard for the government to do a lot of things because making it easy for them to do things leads to some deeply authoritarian bullshit.
What a beautiful/horrifying inversion of logic. The government does it the legal way, through an existing law, and you’re short circuiting and pattern matching to “the government is trying to work around the law”.
The DoD is not trying to sneak its way out of behaving legally. On the contrary, they’re doing it the legal way and you’re suggesting that they could just do it the illegal way.
The DOD is labeling a domestic company a supply chain risk - label generally reserved for hostile foreign powers and their cooperators - because that domestic company didn't agree to its contract terms.
Judge Lin's order finds that it do so specifically to harm that company, without due process and without the remedies Congress specifically requested be used when it drafted the law. The DOD was, in essence, using a law illegally.
The version of events you present does not seem to be tethered to reality.
They don’t? Anthropic is suing for the right to deal in weapons and surveillance, you realize? They’re not fighting for the right to not be compelled to deal in weapons in surveillance. They’re fighting for the right to be a part of the defense industrial complex supply chain.
Lost in the cacophony is the fact that Anthropic fumbled a strong lifeline while hemorrhaging cash without a business model. It’s fun to look down at OpenAI but they may not get another chance like this again.
Claude has had such a massive increase in usage since being labeled a supply chain risk the service has been struggling to scale to meet increase demand.
On top of that, the prevailing opinion seemed to be that courts would overrule the supply chain risk designation, allowing the government and its subcontractors to use Claude again.
It’s hard to see how they could have navigated this better
Anthropic is the leading enterprise LLM provider. All they have to do is keep building a best-performing product, charge what they need, and keep costs as far down as possible. If my company knew there were an LLM 1.5x as good as Opus, they would be willing to pay 3x the cost. If it were being sold by Anthropic, they’d be even more likely to pay, since we could easily keep our same tooling.
This government contract was a very small part of anthropic revenue. Almost negligible. Their 2026 revenue is projected to be $14 billion to $20 billion. This contract was $200M over 2 years.
It's fun to say that Anthropic doesn't have a business model, but clearly they do. Hopefully they can achieve it while maintaining their standards, even if in the eyes of some that's 'fumbling a strong lifeline'.
OpenAI smells desperate, and is already understood to be overextended. It isn't Anthropic that retired their flashy video gen platform, ceding competitive ground to Google.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
They're specifically referring to the dead comments from new users in this thread, so it's not insinuation. They're pointing out a higher-than-normal quantity of shill bots flocked to this thread.
The fact that the comments are dead means the system is working as intended, but it's not unreasonable to point out the nature of the comments.
I wouldn't call something a non-story just because the ultimate end-goal was mitigated. The fact that it was attempted is a story, especially when it's a meta commentary on story about trying the same thing _officially_.
Eh. The actors that use these features use a shotgun approach. The result is you see a bunch of dead comments and assume the system is working as intended, while a couple of the less inconspicuous comments persist. This happens frequently on specific topics.
> Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government
What issue do you take with that statement or the outcome here? I think Anthropic’s position on what the tech should not be used for was well reasoned.
It feels like the govt. flipped out based on their public messaging and this whole ordeal - instead of them themselves being more measured and just choosing not to use Anthropic’s services if they take an issue with it.
I deeply wish for people who say things this cryptic and opinionated to actually speak their mind and back up their positions. Comments like these add little to the discussion.
Is the practical outcome much different? I doubt they'll get contracts either way, so the labelling was just a formality.
If anything it seems the label was just intended to give a veneer of legitimacy to the admin by using an existing mechanism and terminology, rather than saying "we're going to block your access because we feel like it".
The point of the supply chain risk designation was not just to have the DoD stop using Anthropic (they could have done that by just cancelling the contract). Their intended effect was to force every company that sells to the US government, no matter how indirectly, to not use Anthropic in any way, which would effectively destroy them because almost every company is in the supply chain (for example my company is https://calaveras.ai/ because we sell to AI companies who in turn sell to DoD).
> Fun fact: Palantir is powered entirely by Claude
Haha what, OpenAI has been in bed with them and their models used by them since before Anthropic was even a thing. Claude will just have been picked because they considered it the strongest at the task at that point in time.
This is not really possible. My guess is that the government is not willing to spend the necessary quantity of money to get e.g. Amazon or Google to divest of Anthropic and stop providing them computing resources.
The point is that if DoD's supply chain restriction does what Hegseth seems to want, all contractors involved with Anthropic would have to divest. That includes Amazon and Google, who are both DoD contractors who provide massive quantities of capital and compute to Anthropic. It's irrelevant that Anthropic provides Claude through Palantir.
I'm not sure that's how the supply chain risk thing works. AFAIK, it has to be part of the supply chain for the products delivered to the DoD to count. I don't think just because Amazon is unrelatedly involved with Anthropic, this forces them to sever that relationship. I'm not sure if Hegseth thinks otherwise, but it's entirely possible that he is wrong or that being wrong is expedient to his threats.
I believe you are correct, but they could still weaponize it by requiring the contractors to document proof of not using Anthropic products and can drag that out as long as they want to.
No you don’t understand, they can’t accomplish the same by an informal policy.
Both Google and Amazon are government contractors. With the designation, they might have had to divest their positions in Anthropic and be unable to serve their models.
> I'm not sure that's how the supply chain risk thing works. AFAIK, it has to be part of the supply chain for the products delivered to the DoD to count. I don't think just because Amazon is unrelatedly involved with Anthropic, this forces them to sever that relationship. I'm not sure if Hegseth thinks otherwise, but it's entirely possible that he is wrong or that being wrong is expedient to his threats.
How would they implement such a policy? Amazon, Google, etc. aren't realistically going to terminate all business with Anthropic based on an informal policy that the DoD won't write down.
Same as they already pressure these companies. Remove access to the admin thus giving them unfavorable terms on other issues compared to their rivals. Tell them as much in private and what they can do to rectify it. That's this admin's whole modus operandi, is it not? There's a reason all the CEOs clamor to go to the relevant WH events.
A CEO's time isn't that valuable. Even if you count an amortized fraction of their total compensation, sending them to a White House event for an evening is orders of magnitude less costly than giving up access to the best software development tools.
This whole event was precipitated by Palantir using Claude in the Maduro raid, and news of this surprising Anthropic and resulting in them asking questions and maybe suggesting in private discussions that they took issue with this and wanted to introduce more posttraining limits on the ways their model was used by the department. This has been widely reported and I don’t think anyone is really disputing that.
If that’s true, then what you’re suggesting is absurd. Because it’s not enough for the pentagon to merely stop contracting with Claude, because that was never the problem in the first place from their risk model. Their problem was they had a prime contract with Palantir for their wargaming service, and Palantir subcontracted with Anthropic as an LLM provider. So if DoD ceased to contract with Anthropic directly, it would have no impact on the risk that Anthropics new posttraining limits potentially posed to their mission insofar as they are reliant on Palantir and it’s services and there would be nothing preventing Palantir from continuing to contract with Anthropic.
I have to ask, what other tool do you think they have to protect themselves from this? You can argue that these guardrails from Anthropic are useful and important and DoD should just accept that, and that’s fine, but it really is (and ought to be) the departments decision about whether they’re comfortable with that or not. It’s their call. They have access to information on our adversaries that the public doesn’t. And they’re the ones responsible when lives are lost. And if they’re not comfortable with trusting service member lives to a specific post trained Opus 4.6 model, I’m not sure what other avenue they have to solve that problem across their entire prime contracting space other than a supply chain risk designation.
Any sort of backroom dealings where they whisper off the record to defense CTOs that they have a problem with anthropics leadership and would prefer that they sub out to OpenAI or Gemini instead for LLM services would be totally illegal and a violation of procurement law. So they definitely can’t do that. A supply chain risk designation is the only real tool they have to single out a single company.
One thing worth noting: Anthropic is a PBC, which is a new corporate structure that makes it relatively unaccountable to traditional profit motives. But those traditional profit motives are precisely the carrot that the DoD relies on dangling in front of the industry to motivate companies toward its mission. Traditional for profit companies are lead by people who have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit by serving the government. The entire procurement process relies on companies being motivated by profit and competing through bids. But PBCs are specifically designed to remove that incentive structure from their decision making, which makes them entirely unalike every other defense contractor which is publicly traded and can be held legally responsible by shareholders for putting personal beliefs above increasing shareholder value. That sounds like… exactly the kind of thing you don’t want in your military supply chain.
> Any sort of backroom dealings where they whisper off the record to defense CTOs that they have a problem with anthropics leadership and would prefer that they sub out to OpenAI or Gemini instead for LLM services would be totally illegal and a violation of procurement law. So they definitely can’t do that.
It doesn't seem they'd be subject to any kind of effective enforcement to me
I believe designating an entity a supply chain risk has far deeper implications than the DoD avoiding that entity, and goes as far as a lawful prohibition for any contractor of the USG being also prohibited from using or working with the entity so designated. Ironically enough, if the comments in this discussion are true that Palantír uses Claude, Palantír would've also been prohibited as well.
I think that's what the common reporting implies, but I'm not confident that it's true. My understanding is that a supply chain risk must specifically be involved in the supply chain, hence the name. It may be that the admin hypes up their powers for the purposes of instilling fear, but as evidenced by this very post, they can be wrong.
The Supply Chain Risk label requires every single company in the supply chain of a product or service provided to the US Government to either drop Anthropic or get dropped themselves. This is not just suppliers, but also includes suppliers of suppliers all the way down. This is a much larger chunk of the economy (approaching 100%) than the Pentagon/DOW.
Aaand that would get challenged in court, remember they had to get Congress to create this designation in the first place because it is not de-facto legal for the USG to discriminate between individuals or corporations.
So much for all that alarmism a month ago. Just got to be patient and wait for cooler heads to prevail. Or it goes to show how Anthropic handled it well, by making their case as persuasively and assertively without delay as they had done.
This is entirely procedural. This preliminary injunction does not take effect for a week (eg: the order does not take effect for another week and the ban stays in place in the interim), which is done precisely to give the DoD the time to appeal to a higher court, whereupon this preliminary injunction order will very likely be reversed/blocked until the lower court has time to rule on the merits.
This case means nothing since the administration can simply say well we’re gonna treat them that way, even if they aren’t officially labeled and if you’re doing business with them, we’re gonna cancel your contract. Mob tactics don’t extend to the courtroom..
I completely disagree with the idea that a court not allowing the Secretary of Defense to bankrupt a company for disagreeing with him means it's wrong to be alarmed that he tried. It remains extraordinarily alarming that the guy who runs the US military thinks anyone who tries to stop him from doing what he'd like is a threat.
I think the verdict has been in for years now that there is nothing that Americans will mobilize against if it’s only the principles of freedom and liberty on the line. I think it will take being poked with a rather large stick to see some movement. Crippling the economy might be that stick. Unfortunately we all get to suffer their idiocracy.
As I've told people in the past, what you have to understand is that the First Amendment gives Americans wide latitude to mobilize in ways which don't code as mobilization. There's a nationwide protest scheduled for Saturday based on the premise that Trump is a tyrant and we the people won't let him do what he wants. But it's legal and common for people to say that; indeed, it's even legal to say (and I do say) that Trump should be overthrown. So what would be "mobilization" in a lot of places is just another weekend.
I don't understand what the analogy means in this context. Do I think that it's illegal or impossible to oppose the US government? No, I do so routinely.
As many, many people more intelligent and good-faith than you have pointed out, the government is free to stop using Anthropic‘s services at any time: nobody disputes that. What they are not free to do is impose a corporate death sentence because their contract counterparty wouldn’t submit to forceful changing of terms they had previously both agreed on.
>was refuse to perform certain categories of service?
Anthropic wanted to have the power over what the government could or couldn't do. If there was any false positive on something that was supposed to be allowed the government would have to work with Anthropic and get permission from them to do something they are allowed to do. This to me is the risk that Anthropic was giving to the government. If Anthropic expresses that they want this level of power over what the military can do I think that such intention can justify being a risk. That is how it relates to my comment.
Yes, anthropic wanted that power through a legal agreement. Not by spying on the pentagon , or training their AI model to lie to them etc, which seems more appropriate for supply chain risk. The government in this case can just cancel its legal agreement with Anthropic and move on, which was always its expected move. Trying to unilaterally destroy Anthropics business for a contractual disagreement is not fair and I’m glad the judicial is pushing back.
Anthropic wanted power over what the government would do with the servers Anthropic runs. That's not weird and that's not being a risk. It's normal business negotiation.
This is not about the usage restrictions in the agreement. As shown by OpenAI's agreement getting similar restrictions. It is about Anthropic's attitude in how Anthropic has the ultimate power in its usage. If RTX started demanding that they should be the ones to decide who Tomahawk missiles can be used on when they are launched. And RTX said that the government should file a support ticket to appeal a decision, then I would not be surprised that such actions could lead to considering them to be a supply risk. Even if it was just part of "business negotiation." It is the mindset that the other company has which clearly is showing signs of risk.
What the court found is that Anthropic demanded no such thing. The government lied and claimed that they did as part of their attempt to punish Anthropic.
Yes, they can work with someone else. Marking them as a supply risk is one way they can avoid using them and instead use someone else for their needs. So now it seems like we are in a limbo where the government knows that Anthropic is a risk to work with, but they can't official put them on a list that states that.
Well, you could also say what's the point of laws when courts can interpret them however they like? There's never a neat answer in such multi-valent systems, is there?
To act as a safety valve against foreign companies acting as proxies for an adversary. Not for use against an American company that won't let you retroactively violate already agreed to terms. Anthropic isn't jeopardizing the supply chain, they simply will not let the Government force them into providing services they otherwise wouldn't.
As everyone will see it for what it is when Hegseth reports for his prison sentence. I regret that you see American democracy protecting itself as a plot by "the Left", and hope you'll have the wisdom to abandon ship before the aspiring autocrats drag you down with them.
The problem with this declaration by the government is that now any company doing any business with the US government would be effectively forbidden from using Anthropic ANYWHERE within their company, which is a huge deal, because the government does want to vet any vendors' software development practices.
But as long as the Judge in this case pushes back against such an action by the government, that leaves companies free to use Anthropic for their own internal uses. And most companies WILL continue to use them if it makes economic sense.
All things equal, you’d be better off not exposing yourself to risk of financial harm or other punitive measures. Which is the whole point of the government’s action in the first place.
Amazon isn’t going to have to divest from Anthropic because of this. Yes, they probably won’t be able to get a contract with Raytheon, but that wasn’t the main risk of being tagged with the supply chain risk designation.
People are very pessimistic recently, but if anything, we are seeing that our system works well. A person got into power that a majority voted for, but when he oversteps, the courts and other institutions (even judges and fed reserve chairs he picked!) seem to hold him to the rules.
I get the pessimism, but for the most part, I kinda think the system is working.
(I'll show myself out)
Even after Kristi Noem ruined countless lives and was responsible for deaths of innocent people, the only consequence she faced is being demoted to some made up job where she still gets paid to do nothing - no fine, no jail, no accountability, no justice. None of the ICE agents involved have faced any consequences besides a leave either, we don't even know most of their names.
People who don't follow the news like most of the tech community are living in some dreamland of a system or treating it as a purely mental battle of optimism/pessimism vs. actually seeing what is happening.
A majority of people who voted. Not a majority of eligible voters and certainly not a majority.
There’s absolutely 0 reason to be optimistic towards a court stacked explicitly in his favor.
This is a Biden appointee with two years on the job, and this will immediately be taken up by a higher court and blocked until a ruling on the merits is made. It will be appealed. DoD might have to go to the Supreme Court before this is all said and done, but they will win in the end, and this ban will stay in place until that happens.
> More importantly, as discussed above, no one is entitled to conduct business with the Federal Government, see Perkins, 310 U.S. at 127, and irrespective of the challenged actions, DoW and other federal agencies are free to terminate its contracts and agreements with Anthropic, as Anthropic readily admits.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
The pentagon can terminate its direct contract with Anthropic but it does nothing to address the risk that Anthropic poses to the reliability of Palantir’s services, which are (at this point) critical to the way that the Department operates.
People keep repeating this lie and I’m sick of it. The direct usage of Claude by the pentagon is not what they’re trying to address, it’s the usage of Claude by Palantir that they’re trying to address. And this is the legal way for them to do that.
Again, for the third time in this thread, they MAY NOT ask Palantir off the record to just not use Anthropic. This would be extremely illegal and would give Anthropic standing to sue to the government.
> THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! That decision belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military. The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY.
> Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again! There will be a Six Month phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic’s products, at various levels. Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow.
> WE will decide the fate of our Country — NOT some out-of-control, Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Perhaps you've not seen this statement before; there are a number of people who find it inconvenient that US policy is driven by insane social media rants, and prefer to make up more sensible rationales for the same policies. But there's no part of the actual published announcement that discusses the relationship between Palantir and Anthropic.
What other legal mechanism do they have to prevent Palantir from specifically not subcontracting out to Anthropic, other than a supply chain risk designation? Note that directly asking Palantir to prefer Google or OpenAI over Anthropic is a violation of procurement law and highly illegal.
What other mechanism do they have?
That’s the entire reason this law exists, because what you’re suggesting is impractical. The department has to confidentially document its rationale for marking a company as a supply chain risk. It’s in the confidential record of this very court case. That’s the legal way to do this.
> Covered procurement actions include “[t]he decision to withhold consent for a contractor to subcontract with a particular source or to direct a contractor . . . to exclude a particular source from consideration for a subcontract.” 10 U.S.C. § 3252(d)(2)(C).
I strongly suggest reading the order. I have included the link again: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
Covered procurement actions are the things the Secretary can do after making a supply chain risk designation under 3252. The designation is a prerequisite. You can’t direct a contractor to exclude a subcontractor under (d)(2)(C) without first going through the 3252 determination process.
You’re literally posting evidence for why this is the only legal avenue for DoD.
The DoD is not trying to sneak its way out of behaving legally. On the contrary, they’re doing it the legal way and you’re suggesting that they could just do it the illegal way.
Judge Lin's order finds that it do so specifically to harm that company, without due process and without the remedies Congress specifically requested be used when it drafted the law. The DOD was, in essence, using a law illegally.
The version of events you present does not seem to be tethered to reality.
Idiot.
Nothing in their suit, or this ruling, says the DoD has to buy things from them.
If they are comfortable without being in that supply chain, whoever’s supply chain that is (exercise to the reader), why are they suing?
On top of that, the prevailing opinion seemed to be that courts would overrule the supply chain risk designation, allowing the government and its subcontractors to use Claude again.
It’s hard to see how they could have navigated this better
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The fact that the comments are dead means the system is working as intended, but it's not unreasonable to point out the nature of the comments.
Not about people using HN. But even being aware the site exists.
But, this is a non-story, because those comments were correctly killed precisely so they wouldn't clog up this thread.
Said dipshits tend have an unnecessarily high degree of self regard.
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72379655/134/anthropic-...
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/3252
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/06/claudes-consumer-growth-su...
What issue do you take with that statement or the outcome here? I think Anthropic’s position on what the tech should not be used for was well reasoned.
It feels like the govt. flipped out based on their public messaging and this whole ordeal - instead of them themselves being more measured and just choosing not to use Anthropic’s services if they take an issue with it.
If anything it seems the label was just intended to give a veneer of legitimacy to the admin by using an existing mechanism and terminology, rather than saying "we're going to block your access because we feel like it".
Haha what, OpenAI has been in bed with them and their models used by them since before Anthropic was even a thing. Claude will just have been picked because they considered it the strongest at the task at that point in time.
It's crazy to see this kind of misinformation.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/palantir-faces-challenge-...
Both Google and Amazon are government contractors. With the designation, they might have had to divest their positions in Anthropic and be unable to serve their models.
No informal rule accomplishes that.
> I'm not sure that's how the supply chain risk thing works. AFAIK, it has to be part of the supply chain for the products delivered to the DoD to count. I don't think just because Amazon is unrelatedly involved with Anthropic, this forces them to sever that relationship. I'm not sure if Hegseth thinks otherwise, but it's entirely possible that he is wrong or that being wrong is expedient to his threats.
If that’s true, then what you’re suggesting is absurd. Because it’s not enough for the pentagon to merely stop contracting with Claude, because that was never the problem in the first place from their risk model. Their problem was they had a prime contract with Palantir for their wargaming service, and Palantir subcontracted with Anthropic as an LLM provider. So if DoD ceased to contract with Anthropic directly, it would have no impact on the risk that Anthropics new posttraining limits potentially posed to their mission insofar as they are reliant on Palantir and it’s services and there would be nothing preventing Palantir from continuing to contract with Anthropic.
I have to ask, what other tool do you think they have to protect themselves from this? You can argue that these guardrails from Anthropic are useful and important and DoD should just accept that, and that’s fine, but it really is (and ought to be) the departments decision about whether they’re comfortable with that or not. It’s their call. They have access to information on our adversaries that the public doesn’t. And they’re the ones responsible when lives are lost. And if they’re not comfortable with trusting service member lives to a specific post trained Opus 4.6 model, I’m not sure what other avenue they have to solve that problem across their entire prime contracting space other than a supply chain risk designation.
Any sort of backroom dealings where they whisper off the record to defense CTOs that they have a problem with anthropics leadership and would prefer that they sub out to OpenAI or Gemini instead for LLM services would be totally illegal and a violation of procurement law. So they definitely can’t do that. A supply chain risk designation is the only real tool they have to single out a single company.
One thing worth noting: Anthropic is a PBC, which is a new corporate structure that makes it relatively unaccountable to traditional profit motives. But those traditional profit motives are precisely the carrot that the DoD relies on dangling in front of the industry to motivate companies toward its mission. Traditional for profit companies are lead by people who have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit by serving the government. The entire procurement process relies on companies being motivated by profit and competing through bids. But PBCs are specifically designed to remove that incentive structure from their decision making, which makes them entirely unalike every other defense contractor which is publicly traded and can be held legally responsible by shareholders for putting personal beliefs above increasing shareholder value. That sounds like… exactly the kind of thing you don’t want in your military supply chain.
It doesn't seem they'd be subject to any kind of effective enforcement to me
> I suspect the admin will now just have an informal, not-written-down policy that does exactly the same thing.
For example, in certain outcomes, Anthropic may not be used by the Pentagon, but still be used by the IRS.
It’s not really unexpected.
> (..) email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
last i checked the german military is held down by stupid obligations forced onto it by its government that make it both inefficient and obsolete
Anthropic wanted to have the power over what the government could or couldn't do. If there was any false positive on something that was supposed to be allowed the government would have to work with Anthropic and get permission from them to do something they are allowed to do. This to me is the risk that Anthropic was giving to the government. If Anthropic expresses that they want this level of power over what the military can do I think that such intention can justify being a risk. That is how it relates to my comment.