Sorry I was a bit unclear - this was referencing the Administration not Anthropic.
The United States Department of Justice under the Trump administration, supported Phillips.[20][5] While the Department asserts that anti-discrimination laws are necessary to prevent businesses that provide goods and services from discriminating, these laws cannot be used to compel a business into expressing speech they do not agree with, nor used to provide goods and services with such expressions without the ability for the business to assert they do not agree with those expressions. [1]
> these laws cannot be used to compel a business into expressing speech they do not agree with
I don’t think they are preventing them. You can still buy some Anthropic. Heck, maybe you’re now doubly motivated to buy some out of spite. What Uncle Sam is saying is he doesn’t want anything to do with it. But Anthropic can produce whatever and others can buy it.
In their view just like businesses cannot be compelled so are the customers, they can’t be compelled to buy.
If they're designated a "supply chain risk", then any company that does any business with the military cannot be a customer. That includes basically all the largest companies, many of which have already adopted Claude. So the Pentagon is threatening Anthropic with terminating most of their private enterprise revenue and basically ruining their business model.
That's a little different than just denying someone government contracts.
> If they're designated a "supply chain risk", then any company that does any business with the military cannot be a customer.
Wrong.
Companies with military contracts cannot rely on Anthropic-supplied products and services for those contracts. (Yes, the cabinet member who misrepresents his own title and name of his department also publicly misrepresented the legal consequences of the designation. It's almost like ignoring the law and just making things up is a pattern with him and his boss.)
If you were a customer, what would you do? Keep paying for Claude but be extra careful about preventing all the people working on anything that might potentially be construed as related to the DoD work from using it, for fear of a retributive Hegseth? Or just use codex company-wide and not worry?
> The designation, typically reserved for foreign firms with ties to U.S. adversaries, could ban companies that work with the government from partnering with Anthropic.
> “You’re telling everyone else who supplies to the DOD you cannot use Anthropic’s models, while also saying that the DOD must use Anthropic’s models.”
I wouldn't put anything past this administration in terms of twisting rules and acting in bad faith to excerpt as much leverage as possible. They do it all the time. It's basically a government of patent trolls threatening everyone with meritless lawsuits that are nonetheless extremely effective.
If I was “one of the largest companies”, as was raised upthread as being impacted in all of their business, then I would be used to having many large public and private customers with different and conflicting contracting requirements and segregating support for those contracts, and for US defense contracts specifically, probably have a dedicated business unit for those that probably a subsidiary legal entity and which, in any case, is almost completely walled off in practice dedicate to defense contracts, provides all the shared services consumed by individual defense contracts independently of the parent corporation, and which adheres strictly to defense contracting rules and charges the compliance costs back to those defense contracts at a healthy profit, while having basically no impact on how the rest of the company does business.
You can imagine all sorts of hypothetical scenarios where Anthropic doesn't suffer too much. You can also imagine them losing a lot of big business. The point is that the DoD is sending a very clear signal: "if you don't do what we say, we will punish you until you do". If they didn't want to punish anthropic, they would simply go to a competitor like OAI. The fact that they're threatening several different potential revenge plots proves otherwise.
The govt has so many levers it could pull that it's technically not allowed to but that this administration has made very clear it loves doing. Things like spurious lawsuits prosecuted by a perpetually unconfirmed AG, or capriciously interfering in mergers or permitting processes. There's not a single norm too far for these guys. You're Dario Amodei. You would not be comforted by the idea that they're "not allowed" to punish you.
> If they're designated a "supply chain risk", then any company that does any business with the military cannot be a customer.
That's not how it works, they'll just have to show how they mitigated the "risk". That doesn't mean not doing business with Anthropic that may mean not using Anthropic for any deliverables or any projects involving the specific contracts.
> they'll just have to show how they mitigated the "risk"
If Hegseth is the one who decides whether the risk has been mitigated (he is), you think he's gonna be overcome by a sudden spirit of good faith and make impartial judgements? Or just do the thing that maximizes his leverage, gratifies his ego, and pleases his boss.
> Or just do the thing that maximizes his leverage, gratifies his ego, and pleases his boss.
It doesn't really work that way. Both parties want something from each other. If he is not "overcome by a sudden good faith" judgement all of the sudden no more Windows updates and it's RHEL Linux for everyone. Or if IBM says no, then what? Write your own OS? The system doesn't really work as a charity, it's corrupt but parties want something from each other. If he knows they need something and there is no other way to get the spirit of "good faith" will descend like lightning upon him. In this case he knew there is Google and OpenAI in play, and just like magic OpenAI made a deal pretty quickly.
It's normal to simply go to a competitor when one supplier isn't giving you what you want. It's not normal to try to ruin their business relationships with everyone else in retribution.
You know the only reason we used double spaces between sentences in the typewriter days was because everything was monospaced, right? Modern variable width fonts provide additional space automatically.
How do Google and Apple plan to deal with the immense influx of personal apps that AI will help non developers build?
Recently, I was thinking that AI might force Apple to open their devices, because if Apple’s competitor allows sideloading, then the creatives and builders most likely to build their own apps will migrate to the platform providing less friction to getting custom apps onto their device. But apparently THIS is the time that Google has chosen to start locking down their devices as well?!
AI is not yet at the point where non-developers could use it to build useful apps. I've tried. It gave me a good start that saved me a ton of time setting things up but the result was buggy and had a lot of bad code, so I still had to read and understand it all and fix the issues.
You’re confused. If you know of ANY US state that has a flow of traffic law that allows cars to exceed the speed limit so long as they are keeping up with other traffic, I’d love to see a link to their traffic codes. Speeding doesn’t suddenly become legal because two or more drivers do it together.
This has nothing to do with the expectation that slower traffic stay in the rightmost lanes, which is what GP is addressing.
> Speeding doesn’t suddenly become legal because two or more drivers do it together.
That's not true. Examples:
I once pulled out my local newspaper where local judges were petitioning to have speed limits raised because they were throwing out speeding tickets due to excessive fines. This was in Massachusetts, in the late 1990s or early 2000s, about a road in Shrewsbury near lake Quinsigamond. The context was that the speed limit was 25, traffic flowed at 40-45, and they would throw out tickets for people doing 50.
I was once pulled over in a Massachusetts tollbooth even though I was the slowest driver on the road. (2004, I90 westbound at the intersection of 128, when EZ Pass still had to go through actual tollbooths.) If I was given an actual ticket, I would have point-blank told the judge that I was going half the speed of everyone else and feared getting rear-ended; then the case would have been dismissed. (The cop also knew this, because he recognized me from traffic court and knew that I'd make him look like a fool for pulling over the slowest driver.)
And where do you think AIs learned to use em dashes? Anyone who knows a modicum of typography uses em dashes. There’s a reason devices like iOS automatically convert double hyphens to em dashes (or straight quotes to curly quotes).
Only young people who grew up texting and eliding standard punctuation find em dashes unfamiliar.
Modified version of Signal sent copies of messages to a central server for record retention compliance, but hackers have demonstrated the messages can be accessed on the server.
Ironically, I’ve read through many of the top comments and although there are many different opinions, I hadn’t seen any that came across as hostile until I read your comment.
