Selling a pen labeled "this pen will refuse to sign certain orders" is not sabotage or malicious and is thus not a supply chain risk. The DoD is free to not buy from Anthropic, but designating them as a supply chain risk is incorrect, as well as arguably arbitrary and capricious given their public criticism of Anthropic's beliefs.

All of those verbs basically mean "degrade an existing system, after the fact". If anthropic states beforehand that certain use cases are not possible, it should be fine, no?

To give another (bad) analogy: The Pens aren't made to be weapons themselves, they are not intended for that. If the DoD now tries to shoot pens as projectiles and they just melt, that's no reason to classify the pen manufacturer as a supply chain risk, the product was not altered after the fact.

Of course, there _is_ a difference in "It could do that, but it shouldn't" and "It cannot do that". But it is not that large. That's why I don't see it as that clear cut.

It is not the textbook definition, because what Anthropic is doing is not sabotage, malicious, or subversive. Those are the key words in the definition. They are just refusing to add a feature to the military's specification. So their bid falls short of requirements.

The pen example makes sense if the intermediary were to ship the pen as part of the final product but not if the pen is simply used to draft designs of the final product. It seems that this designation would prohibit using the pen anywhere in the process which doesn't really make sense.

> so as to surveil

How does Android and iPhone meet the grade given apps have pretty consistently leaked locations, base layouts etc?

It's not a great analagy; it's more like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike orders, who then only ships pens with cameras and solenoids so that the point stays retracted until the camera verifies that the paper doesn't include a drone strike orders.

Anthropic took the position that our military’s decision making power should be subordinate to Anthropic’s constraints.

Any dependency on a company that thinks they have that moral authority and has the technical means to enforce it is absolutely a risk to the supply chain.

If you want to blame someone or something for this, we should start with Dario and “effective altruism”.

And then declared the other side a supply chain risk, claiming it is a potential vector for a national adversary to break in and cause unwanted bad things to happen unrelated to this contract.

It seems like absurdly bad faith starting at breaking the contract (over "you have to follow the law", no less!) and then to retaliate after that with trying to destroy the company's reputation and ability to do business. The boot licking going on here justifying the government operating in bad faith is both disappointing and short sighted. I didn't think the leopards would eat MY face!

The previous power plant manager had, of course, already signed a contract agreeing to those terms; the power plant is subsequently under new management and upset about being bound by this contract, so they designate that none of their suppliers of parts and fuel are allowed to have any commercial dealings with the pen manufacturer or use these pens for any purpose, even writing.

That analogy still makes this sound like a textbook designation. In that situation the pen manufacturer is expected to sell pens without a theory of what will happen next. The person who buys a pen might use it to kill someone or commit horrific legal/moral crimes and that has nothing at all to do with the pen manufacturer.

I can see how I might reasonably refuse to deal with that pen manufacturer. The pen manufacturer is unreasonably pushy and they're going to be massive trouble to deal with because they're all up in my business in a paranoid way and disrupting my use of their product. Companies have made my never-again list for far smaller slights.

This isn't like using pens in a nuclear plant. AI obviously has tremendous military applications. And it's completely unsurprising that the U.S. military--whose entire doctrine for the last century has been about having the most advanced technology--demands to use frontier models without non-military people imposing restrictions.

Have you seen the movie Oppenheimer? The U.S. military did not care about the moral opinions of the nuclear scientists--they were going to get nukes first. This is like Truman telling off Oppenheimer for being upset after the U.S. used the bomb: https://www.biography.com/political-figures/a44361438/why-ha... ("Blood on his hands; damn it, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it,” Truman said.... He called Oppenheimer a “cry-baby scientist” and said, “I don’t want to see that son of a b–– in this office ever again.”).

JAVA TECHNOLOGY IS NOT FAULT TOLERANT AND IS NOT DESIGNED, MANUFACTURED, OR INTENDED FOR USE OR RESALE AS ONLINE CONTROL EQUIPMENT IN HAZARDOUS ENVIRONMENTS REQUIRING FAIL-SAFE PERFORMANCE, SUCH AS IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, DIRECT LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES, OR WEAPONS SYSTEMS, IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF JAVA TECHNOLOGY COULD LEAD DIRECTLY TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.

That is an analogy between one thing and another thing, but the topic of this thread is the designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk, which is not involved in your analogy. It is traditional that comments refer to the topic of discussion in some way.

For example, one might extend your analogy to "The nuclear power plant then declares that it will not buy the pens after all, and the pen manufacturer (who had banned them as a customer) sues them to force them to buy the pens after all."

A few things I can remember them doing are net neutrality, banning non-compete agreements for employees, a DMCA exception for allowing 3rd party repairs to McDonald's ice cream machines, and blocking the Albertsons/Kroger merger.

> the modern Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party

I suspect this is changing. The DSA branch especially wants all contracts with Palantir eliminated.

"Because the modern Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party"

And Republicans did it because.... They're anticorporation?

> Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party. They haven't really had any hard hitting legislation nor legal regulation/rulings on corporations in easily the last 30 years.

Sarbanes-Oxley? Dodd-Frank? ACA? Now I'm sure you (like, every other living human) has a ton of nitpicks and criticism of bills like that. But they're real and they passed and they're largely-to-wholely partisan creations of the Democratic policy apparatus (SOX looked very bipartisan and was passed under Bush, but the actual bill was written mostly by democratic staffers).

I mean, fine, you'd like different regulation. But they're responsible for basically all the corporate regulation active in the US regime.

Bothsidesism is a very poor tool for this particular argument. Work with your allies, please.

Dodd-Frank? CFPB?

Because Democrats, being (at the moment, and relatively speaking) the party of government actually functioning according to laws, are extremely unlikely to do this in the other direction. The two sides are not the same. It is not possible to be the party aligned with institutions, rule of law, and predictability, while also using the power of government arbitrarily and vindictively. On the other hand, it's entirely possible to use the power of government arbitrarily when you're the party of greed and corruption. So "Republican-aligned companies" don't have to be nearly as worried, and otherwise-neutral companies will become Republican-aligned out of self-preservation, because one side is going to punish them for disobedience (legally or illegally) and the other side isn't.

I worry that they don't expect to leave power because they're acting like they will never be held accountable.

None of them really believe our economic or political systems will be recognizable by 2029. Everyone's playing for position in the short takeoff.

Whose fault is that?

>As I understand it cane down to one point: Anthropic wanted the ability to review actions that would have an effect on human life.

This is not at all what happened. The existing contract that Anthropic had with the government had two red lines: No autonomous weapons (i.e., do not build Skynet with Claude), and no mass domestic surveillance.

Anthropic did not, and does not want, any case-by-case veto power over the US Military's use of their AI models. The red lines were negotiated ahead of time.

Militaries have a lot of experience, and an exceptionally poor track record.

I don’t remember the last war that didn’t have credible evidence of war crimes occurring. Were bombing civilian infrastructure in Iran, Iraq had Abu Ghraib among all the Collateral Damage stuff, the Highway of Death in the Gulf was probably a war crime, Vietnam had My Lai, WWII was the advent of carpet bombing civilian infrastructure. I can’t think of any for Korea, but I also know very little so that doesn’t say much.

We still haven’t charged anyone for the second strike on that fishing boat in South America, and I haven’t heard a single rationale for why that’s not a war crime other than “fog of war”.

The US doesn’t even really have a meaningful system for finding and prosecuting these, because we aren’t signatories for the ICC and have a bill saying we’ll invade if they charge one of our service members with a war crime. We aren’t basically the furthest thing from having any experience prosecuting war crimes. I can probably count on my fingers the number of cases we’ve tried. We rarely charge our own service members, and we usually kill foreign combatants rather than capture and charge them.

Yes, that's exactly why they used AI to blow up a school murdering a load of kids.

That kind of extensive experience.

Anthropic did the morally right thing and are being punished for it. The case in point justifies their position.

As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

>Anthropic wanted the ability to review actions that would have an effect on human life.

They wanted assurances that it would not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. They did not request to be "in the loop".

Furthermore, even if Anthropic had requested that, it would be a reason for the DoD to cancel the contract because the terms were unacceptable, not to declare Anthropic a supply chain risk. Declaring them a supply chain risk requires proving that they intended to sabotage their own product, adding malicious functionality. There is no evidence whatsoever that they planned to do that.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthropic-pentagon-supply-chain...

You raise an interesting point. Although wouldn’t Anthropic be the best experts on when a model would be most applicable or likely to falter?

I guess my opinion would really depend on the exact wording and details of the arrangement. Lots of people jumping in with strong stances based on pretty limited details.

Is that a problem? Are there any special rules (genuinely curious) that allow the military to hijack the management of a private firm?

Every private citizen or corporation gets to do business (or not) with the military on their own terms. This is the difference between totalitarianism and a free country.

Anthropic’s position is also known as “having terms of service”.

To be clear the existing, signed ToS terms that Trump balked at were:

1. No mass surveillance of US civilians - illegal but we have all read the Snowden papers.

2. Fully unmanned kill chains on autonomous weapons - Anthropic have even stated they will support this eventually, they just didn’t think their models were ready and didn’t want the obvious, inevitable blowback.

The DoD is within its rights to cancel the contract if it doesn’t like the terms that it previously signed.

Yep, it’s obvious, in-your-face corruption

SCR explicitly refers to sabotage. Where is Anthropic sabotaging the US government?

DOW wanted to change the contract after the fact. Anthropic refused. That is not sabotage.

I do feel like "this company hacked the Australian government" is perhaps relevant when considering how much the military should trust them. Like, that seems very relevant when assessing the risks to the government military.

>> These are just very different things.OAI "hacking" anything isn't OAI telling the US Gov what they can and cannot do with their product.

OAI hacking the chinese government will definitely raise alarms in DC and will be bad for national security. Just because the country that was hacked (australia) is a weaker one doesn't mean the underlying action is not troubling.

Greg Brockman donated something like a million dollars to a MAGA super PAC. Check his wiki page

Isn't every subscription costing them money, still?

You'll note that I alluded to that in the parenthesis.