Dario wanted to sell a $200 million chat bot to the US military and also dictate how it could be used. The government said no. And because of that Claude also cannot be deployed to the GenAI.mil AI infrastructure. This means that any sensitive work for the DoD that uses Claude will go through Anthropic's infrastructure, not the US military-hosted backend.
So yes obviously defense contractors are forbidden to use it.
If the government wanted to put iPhones in missiles, and apple said "we won't sell you iPhones to put in missiles" would the correct government response be to say "no government contractor can ever use an iPhone".
The DoD and US military does not allow contractors to use iPhones or anything else that is not backed by government-hosted or compliant infrastructure, such as GovCloud. The fact that the Pentagon and Anthropic could not come to an agreement on the usage and deployment to GenAI.mil means that it can't be used.
The reasons why are incidental to that requirement for defense contractors.
Go into a random defense contractor office and (assuming you can get in to do this) ask them how many of their iPhones are managed by the company. The percentage who say theirs are will be close to 0%. Most are personal devices, and they use them to call into meetings with DOD officials all the time with no special precautions taken.
Exercising its power as a purchaser is "not buying it" or "choosing a competitor." Instead, this is arbitrarily and capriciously using an administrative mechanism in a novel way to punish a company.
Probably not, no private company has the ability to tell all its suppliers "thou shalt not do business with ". They lack the pull to compel them to do so. The closest would be things like what MS did back in the 90s, and got them in hot water with the anti-trust case against them.
That's not what happened here and you know this. It was, literal quote, "“[e]ffective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.”
Fair, and still not something most companies can pull off. Again, without risking running into anti-trust laws like MS did.
Do you seriously think that you can go to all your vendors (if you were a business owner) and tell them, "You can't use Atlassian when working on anything you sell us." How will your business actually compel all those vendors to drop their use of Atlassian for that work? How will you verify compliance and why should any of them sign a contract with you with these restriction? And if they do, how will you avoid anti-trust violations because almost certainly the only way you could talk them into signing such a contract would be to be a massive company throwing your weight around (like MS did with hardware OEMs back in the 90s, among other things).
They are not "just a purchaser" though. It's the world's most powerful organization that is funded by the people and is supposed to be for the people. I'm all for businesses making FAFO decisions, but expect a lot more here.
The fact that it’s a publicly funded entity is more reason for it to adopt hardball tactics, not less. It’s similar to FDR’s comments on public sector unions. When the government is the buyer, it’s even more important to get the best deal and terms possible, because it’s the public’s money’s you’re spending and the public’s interest you’re serving.
Exactly, setting policy for Americans and American companies is extremely important and should not be ego driven. These deals are to improve America, not to look strong.
The U.S. military’s policy has always been to secure the absolute best technology for killing people. So the DOD quite reasonably believes that it’s in America’s interest to have the best technology for building AI killing machines with no restrictions from non-military people on how it’s used.
Anthropic did not host the model that the Department of War used. It had, and still has no control over the models it has deployed in classified environments.
It's always irked me. It's like saying a Photoshop binary is "open source" just because you can (theoretically) run it on your own computer instead of through a SaaS web app.
I mean if you push it, all software you can get your hands on is open source, it's just that binary code is a bit tougher to read than the form it was compiled from.
Also since you brought it up, I'd argue the difference between SaaS and local is way more important than "open source" vs "closed source". Closed source you can decompile. SaaS on someone else's cloud, you can do fuck all about.
> given the leeway the government gave that predatory website.
They are only blocking it because the French gambling mafia/authority is not getting their cut. They do not care in any way at all about a "predatory" gambling website.
I don't care about sports betting. I care about government blocking websites just because it exists on the internet. It was already illegal for Polymarket to accept bets from French people.
FanDuel cannot operate in France but their website isn't blocked. So how do we explain this?
France, EU, Italy, Spain, La Liga are just consistently making fools out of themselves trying to block everything on the internet when they don't like it.
Maybe it's just because regulatory censorship is inconsistent and doesn't make any sense. It's like the China firewall but even dumber and less effective.
Your entire argument is based on the fact that France cannot fight all websites at once? Will you change your opinion if Fanduel and others are blocked in 6 months as well?
So if something is illegal you don't think it's moral to enforce that people don't do it because just being illegal should be enough?
Note there's no liability on the ISPs, they do not have to pay a fine for not having blocked it, they do not have to ban alternative DNS. In Europe there is apparently a legal mindset that you can recruit a third party to conduct an action that is not onerous to enforce a blockade. A court can point to someone who has a DNS server and order them to block certain lookups.
reply