Employees of Google and OpenAI stand together to refuse the Department of War's demands to use AI models for domestic mass surveillance and autonomous killing without human oversight.
Be the first to sign this letter.
Read the original article
Comments
This has much broader implications for the US economy and rule of law in the US.
If government procurement rules intended for national security risks can be abused as a way to punish Anthropic for perceived lack of loyalty, why not any other company that displeases the administration like Apple or Amazon?
This marks an important turning point for the US.
By heresie-dabord 2026-02-2812:212 reply > much broader implications
Setting aside the spectacular metastasis of a lawless kakistocracy that is literally rewriting the facts on record...
Anthropic's leadership has wisely attempted to make it clear that its product is not fit for the US DoD's purpose/objective, which is automated killing at scale.
It would be (is) grossly, historically negligent to operate weapons with LLMs. Anthropic built systems for a thuggocracy that only understands bribery, blackmail, and force.
By thewebguyd 2026-02-2817:51 Anthropic isn’t the inventor here, they are a service provider. The government can easily go find a different service provider, or if none of them will allow their service to be used for war, then the government should develop their own tech.
Saying the government can just nationalize any company purely because they want to use the tech to kill people has pretty big implications and his historically against what this country stands for.
>That’s not their call to make. Inventors of technologies that could be used for war have never had the right to deny access to those technologies to the elected civilian government.[1]
>[1] The government can make you go over to southeast Asia and kill people personally.
Is this a normative statement? In other words are you simply claiming "the government has men with guns and therefore can force people/companies do whatever they want", or are you claiming that "the government should be able to commandeer civilian resources for whatever it wants"?
It’s a descriptive statement about the law. But you’re mischaracterizing the normative principle underlying the law. It’s not based on power, but rather the moral duties incumbent on citizens.
>but rather the moral duties incumbent on citizens.
Is it a "moral duty" to aid your government, especially in the current social/political environment? Conscription is theoretically still allowed in the US, and you're theoretically supposed to register for the SSS, but nobody has been prosecuted for failure to do so in decades. That suggests the "moral duty" aspect has significantly weakened. Moreover if we're making comparisons to the draft, it's also worth noting the draft allows for conscientious objection. That makes your claim of "that’s not their call to make" quite questionable.
By holmesworcester 2026-02-2817:06 > That’s not their call to make.
Whether they participate voluntarily in a commercial transaction or participate only when compelled to by law (setting aside the question of whether the government does or should have that power) is certainly their call to make.
Just as any individual can decide whether to volunteer, whether to wait until drafted, or whether to refuse to be drafted and face the consequences.
(History shows these decisions, and the rights to make them, are meaningful at scale!)
Finally, governments who expect their leading scientists to do groundbreaking work simply out of fear of imprisonment are NGMI against governments whose scientists believe in their cause.
If anyone thinks the moral justification for selective service has diminished, they should launch a campaign to repeal it and see how it goes over. I suspect that the non-prosecution more reflects the public’s leniency in the absence of major threats since the fall of the soviet union than a change in the underlying normative view.
Conscientious objection still puts the ball in the government’s court. You have to make your case to the government that you have a deeply held religious or moral belief that precludes participation in war, and then the government decides what it wants to do. It’s not clear to me how a corporation would prove the existence of such a belief. But even if that was possible, it wouldn’t give the company the right to decide unilaterally.
By nullocator 2026-02-2822:441 reply > they should launch a campaign to repeal it and see how it goes over
You are conflating lack of true representation (what we have), with lack of support. It's very possible that the broad majority of the electorate would in fact get rid of conscription in the U.S. if they actually had a say in the matter? [1]
> I suspect that the non-prosecution more reflects the public’s leniency in the absence of major threats since the fall of the soviet union than a change in the underlying normative view.
Or more people are wising up to the reality that the real risk to their safety and security is from within not from without, its from people like you who would happily subjugate and violate your countrymen while telling them it's all for their own protection.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/28642/vast-majority-americans-o...
By rayiner 2026-03-010:36 That poll asks whether the U.S. should have a draft “at this time,” which was four years after the Iraq war. That’s completely different than asking whether they agree with the principle that the government can conscript people into war.
But go ahead and run on repealing Selective Service. Ideally in time for midterms.
The moral duty of a citizen is to sabotage their country when it becomes immoral.
By dennis_jeeves2 2026-02-2821:261 reply Nearly every country would be 'sabotaged' then - and rightfully so. ALL gvts are a sophisticated manifestation of the more lowly protection racket run by the mafia. i.e 'We protect you from harm by the other mafia'.
By computably 2026-03-050:19 Value judgments aside, organized crime often does arise in a self-organizing way from marginalized groups.
Anyways, it all boils down to a simple fact: pacifism can't enforce itself.
By thunderfork 2026-03-011:271 reply Human beings all and each have the agency to make this choice for themselves.
So individuals have a “duty … to sabotage their country when it becomes immoral” according to individually-defined standards of morality? That seems like an unworkable way to run any society with more than a few people.
By praptak 2026-03-017:24 In practice the opposite is true. There's not enough people willing to sabotage countries like 1933 Germany or Putin's Russia.
By croon 2026-03-0113:35 Not one person in the current administration or its party (or yourself) would agree with you a few years ago in regards to the administration having communications with Twitter/Meta over a laptop story, regardless if any strongarming even took place at all.
By catlover76 2026-02-2816:301 reply > It’s not based on power, but rather the moral duties incumbent on citizens.
People largely tend not to believe in this kind of jingoistic bullshit nowadays.
By rayiner 2026-03-010:39 Far right parties are gaining ground everywhere from France to Germany to Italy to Japan. But go ahead tell me that humanist universalism is actually what’s on the upswing.
Anthropic can certainly make the call to deny access this way, but then the US govt can choose not to make contracts with Anthropic. So what's the issue?
The whole reason this is a story is that the government won't just refuse to contract, it will put the equivalent of soft sanctions on the company because Anthropic refuses to contract.
By jim33442 2026-03-024:50 The sanction is only that the federal govt won't do contracts with them. This doesn't stop Anthropic from doing business with anyone else.
By worthless-trash 2026-02-2817:341 reply Hang on, companies dont get to have the rights of a person and not be conscripted.
By catlover76 2026-02-2816:291 reply I have seen a lot of your posts on here about political topics, and they are always disingenuous, misleading, and geared towards providing a thin veneer of reasonability over any form of morality.
> If Congress doesn’t want AI-powered killing machines, they’re the ones who have the right to make that call.
You have it backwards, and you know it. If Congress wants to invoke natsec concerns to force companies to sell to the federal government, then they have to explicitly say so, and any such legislation and exercise of execute power pursuant thereto would be heavily litigated.
> The government can make you go over to southeast Asia and kill people personally. It’s totally incompatible with that to say companies should be allowed to veto the use of their technologies in war.
Yes, it's legal to have drafts, but that's not relevant, and also includes certain exceptions for conscientious objectors. It doesn't matter if its paradoxical or ironic that an individual could be pressed into military service whereas a private company doesn't have to sell stuff to the federal government.
By rayiner 2026-03-012:15 > geared towards providing a thin veneer of reasonability over any form of morality
Arguing “morality” is usually pointless. There’s no need for discussion among people who agree on what’s moral. But where they don’t agree, invoking morality won’t get anyone anywhere.
It’s more productive to instead explain how certain policies follow from moral principles that we may not agree on, but we can at least acknowledge are broadly held in society.
> You have it backwards, and you know it. If Congress wants to invoke natsec concerns to force companies to sell to the federal government, then they have to explicitly say so
Congress did that back in 1950, with the Defense Production Act.
this entire administration has been a constant stream of "important turning point for the US" moments
That’s true and it’s not over yet, wait till he reaches the thousand year reich bit.
I think most, perhaps all of those "important turning points" aren't really important turning points but just business as usual.
By TOMDM 2026-02-2821:33 Then you know and understand nothing.
By FartyMcFarter 2026-02-2821:321 reply Is threatening an ally business as usual? Tell me about all the times that recent presidents threatened a NATO ally...
Things change. Allies just used to be threatened in private. Even today, the UK, Canada, and others are supporting the US and Israel in taking down the regime.
I’m not suggesting things haven’t or can’t change, but I am suggesting we haven’t seen any pivotal turning points, at least not yet.
By queenkjuul 2026-03-0110:37 We have, they were just a long time ago, and people are only just now noticing because Obama and Biden were relatively restrained and Trump I was simply incompetent.
But all the things that allow Trump to do that he's doing happened a long time ago
By queenkjuul 2026-03-0110:351 reply I get where you're coming from. Every US administration has been corrupt, flaunted the constitution, started illegal wars (at least in the last 100 years or so)
It does kind of drive me nuts that people don't remember Bush very well, and give Obama and Biden passes on their own crimes.
That said, i do honestly believe that Trump has taken the level of corruption and abject cruelty to a new level. But this was inevitable; both parties have spent 50 years building this reality. I won't be surprised when the next Democrat also deports millions and starts illegal wars.
By ericmay 2026-03-0115:20 I don't disagree with you, in general. My point here only was that I don't think the specific language used is correct. For me a turning point would be like, the Japanese declaring war on the United States and attacking Pearl Harbor, or Napoleon being defeated by the Duke, or the French Revolution, or something more along those lines. Bombing Iran (we've done stuff like that before), arresting Maduro - Noriega (sp?), federal vs state standoffs - yep done that before. Largely this is the routine mess of democracy, and it's heightened and more exposed because it's the United States of America and also because our republic has 340 million people from all over the world - there's going to be some differences of opinion.
Of course "this time" can be different for these things but I'm not sure I've seen anything I'd construe as a turning point or significant change or anything quite like that.
Yep, where does your trust lay now? It's been a minute of pretending it'll be okay.
By adventured 2026-02-2816:082 reply Nothing has changed in decades regarding this. People just like to pretend something new is happening, because they're extremely desperate to proclaim a fundamental turning / ending of the US (which is why every single event brings out those claims: this time is different! America will never recover from this! etc).
US tech companies were previously forced into compliance with PRISM or threatened with destruction (see: escalating fines to infinity against Yahoo, forcing their eventual compliance).
You know what's new? This administration is doing out in the open what used to go on quietly.
By matheusmoreira 2026-03-011:291 reply The US has already ended. It was destroyed in 9/11/2001. America is a shadow of its former self.
By queenkjuul 2026-03-0110:38 Bin laden really did win
By lostlogin 2026-02-2817:27 > Nothing has changed
> You know what's new? This administration is doing out in the open what used to go on quietly.
So this administration has got bold and the behaviour has become overt.
The turning point happened when Trump was reelected. One could argue the turning point happened Jan. 6 2020 and nobody truly cared. The consequence should have been for all insurrectionists and Trump himself to be tried for treason and be imprisoned indefinitely. Yet here we are.
By jmull 2026-02-2814:17 > The consequence should have been for all insurrectionists and Trump himself to be tried for treason and be imprisoned indefinitely.
People have this intuitive sense that there's some kind of authority of truth or justice, an available recourse that we could've and should've used.
But that sense is incorrect.
What we actually have the political and justice systems that Trump and his adherent have, so far, quite successfully subverted.
By childintime 2026-02-2814:431 reply It was when the supreme court judged he could act like a king, the summer before he was elected, inventing things the constitution never said and setting the example of lawlessness Trump now follows up on confidently.
By anon84873628 2026-02-2814:551 reply And continuing to pull on that thread, when the Senate refused to vote on Supreme Court nominees for the president in 2016.
By troyvit 2026-02-2816:27 Call it the pebble that started the landslide but I lay it at the Patriot Act, which was passed in October, 2001. The passing of the law was bad enough but the subsequent extensions of the law by both parties cemented the government's intent.
In other words we might have killed Osama Bin Laden, but he won. The U.S truly is a "shadow of it's former self."
Jan 6th getting overplayed by a lot of media was very damning for the left, I definitely gave Trump et al more benefit of the doubt after seeing the actual footage of the event.
By fdsjgfklsfd 2026-03-0720:011 reply "Overplayed"? Did you see the actual footage of the event? The event in which people attacked Capitol Police and broke into the Capitol and tried to take power by force?
By scottyah 2026-03-0919:05 Yes, I saw a lot of footage and kept doing so as more was released. Not sure what power you thought they were trying to take by force, it was like the Dark Knight scene on Wall Street. There's no "power" in that building. A guy took Pelosi's podium- is that the power you're referring to?
I saw non-rioters open doors for them, the calm and polite lines of rioters walking out, a person asking where they should be giving their speech, and a few people doing funny pictures like they were in their elementary school classroom on a weekend.
I also saw two BBC leaders resigning because they purposefully doctored footage to fit their narrative. I saw how selective the footage shown was, and how specific the phrasing was to incite rage and/or fear. If there wasn't so much manipulation and so many lies around it, I wouldn't have to question the integrity of the people pushing the narrative.
By shevy-java 2026-02-2811:342 reply I'd agree - Trump fulfils the criteria of treason.
It's interesting to see that nothing happens despite this. Now he started another war to distract from his involvement in the huge Epstein network. Also, by the way, quite interesting to see how many people were involved here; there is no way Ghislaine could solo-organise all of that yet she is the only one in prison. That makes objectively no sense.
By formerly_proven 2026-02-2812:12 Another flawed democracy just sentenced their ex-president who attempted a insurrection (and similarly claimed broad presidential powers and immunity) to life in prison. Interesting contrast.
e: Americans seem to be surprised to learn that their democracy is indeed classified as a flawed democracy for more than a decade by The Economist due to decades of backsliding (the more rapid regression lately is not yet accounted for, but I wouldn't be surprised if the outcome of the 2026 elections results in a hybrid regime assessment in 2027).
By tim333 2026-02-2814:10 You'd have a job arguing it's treason legally. In the US that's "levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort".
They were going to do him for conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, re. the 2020 stuff before he got reelected.
By xerox13ster 2026-02-2816:431 reply [flagged]
Your take is a call for civil war. You're obviously wrong about "treason" since even larger majorities voted for Trump in 2024.
By lostlogin 2026-02-2817:31 How things played out isn’t what decides if it was treason or not.
By krapp 2026-02-2817:42 The US is already in a state of civil war, that war was declared in 2016.
Half the country just hasn't accepted the reality that the other half refuses to share a society with them and wants them dead.
By deepsquirrelnet 2026-02-2813:53 Isn’t there some kind of term for when the government controls the means of production. I’ll think about it. It’s one of those terms that’s been thrown around so loosely by this regime you knew they were going there.
By goodpoint 2026-02-2810:09 It's a core part of fascism.
I don't see a good reason to downvote you, though that's a pattern here these days. But I do have a question about your statement. This move certainly has the hallmarks of fascism. But how is it corporatism when it's the elected government that's trying to punish a corporation? Granted that this regime is deep in the pockets of the corporations and billionaires. But it looks like they would have spared Anthropic if they capitulated to the regime's demands and bent their back over. This seems more like retribution for refusal of loyalty rather than corporate sabotage.
> But it looks like they would have spared Anthropic if they capitulated to the regime's demands and bent their back over.
Yeah dude, that's the point.
That's the opposite of corporatism. Corporatism would be if the corporations made demands of the government, and the government bent over backwards.
The US government has lots of corporatism, but this isn't an example of that.
By xphos 2026-02-2815:49 There are always winners and losers in political discussions not every corporation could have control over decision making. But that doesn't mean companies aren't playing a major rool in decisions. I'd imagine companies owned by Larry Ellison (fox and soon cnn) have a much larger role in decision making and agenda setting that most people are comfortable with.
By notahacker 2026-02-2813:31 Corporatism/corporatocracy is about representative groups from industries being embedded in the state and their interests shaping state policy.
The current US administration's relationships with corporations is more seeking to maximise how much bribe money it can extract from them, whilst undermining them with counterproductive policies no matter how big the tax breaks are.
By MzxgckZtNqX5i 2026-02-2810:201 reply I'm not sure I fully understood your point, but about the question "how fascism if elected?": the Nazi Party won (i.e., it was the most voted party) in multiple elections in the late 20s/early 30s.
By goku12 2026-03-0113:12 I apologize if I wasn't clear enough. I wasn't asking how it can be fascism if the government is elected. I'm aware of the answer to that.
I was asking how an (elected fascist) government can be corporatist, if they are fighting a corporation. Doesn't a corporatist government fight for the corporations? From the answers I see, this government is partially corporatist. They'll fight smaller corporations if the latter don't fall in line.
By throawayonthe 2026-02-2818:44 *capitalism ftfy
By ricksunny 2026-02-2822:12 turning point? The episode is literally playing out the AEC's (read: war-footed government) 1954 Oppenheimer security-clearance hearing in real-time for a fresh modern-day audience.
By keybored 2026-02-2812:27 Corporations learn about “first they came for [Apple Inc.] but I am not [Apple Inc.] so I didn’t do anything”.
Trump was threatening Netflix for having a democrat on the board last week. They seized 10% of Intel. They forced Nvidia to tithe 25% of China revenue into a slush fund. The FCC has been used to censor comedy. The ship has sailed and the only consequence has been hand-wringing.
Yeah the passivity of the US population will be remembered for generations. Of course it's the people talking about freedom the most that do the least, as usual, big mouths are antithetical to actions.
The US educational system has been manufacturing these dual career specialists that are competent in their careers and believe that makes them specialists in all other area, but they get played like fools constantly. The level of discourse, of public conversation, is like 7th graders. Until you get to politics, then it's "sports talk" with "winning" being all that matters, even if winning means the destruction of law and of completely corrupt forever future.
By quantified 2026-02-2814:46 And, I believe, a sufficiently comfortable population isn't motivated to act. With social media and streaming, people aren't bored enough/are too engagingly distracted to bother.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-2813:32 It’s not passivity - it’s active approval. 40% of people actively cheer everything he is doing
I was checking Trump approval ratings yesterday. I didn’t have high hopes but I thought it had to be under 35% at this point (I think in a sane country it has to be <10% or at least <20% after the nonstop madness dropping everyday). But nope, every poll places him at >40% approval or ever so slightly below 40%. To me that’s definitive confirmation that “it’s on Trump and his cronies, not the American people” is nonsense. It’s on at least 40% of American people. They weren’t blindsided by false promises, they want this.
By altmanaltman 2026-02-2811:472 reply https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/23/politics/trump-approval-r...
A recent report shows the approval numbers, for all americans it's at 36%. For white americans, its at 45%
By oefrha 2026-02-2812:02 I didn’t see that one, I think I saw 41% on NYTimes, 41% on Reuters, 39% on The Economist, 42% on YouGov, and 43%, 40% elsewhere I don’t recall.
Even 36% is sky high for what he did.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/donald-trump-appro...
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/TRUMP-POLLS-AUTOMATED/APPRO...
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
By fdsjgfklsfd 2026-03-0720:07
By pjc50 2026-02-2810:21 Exactly. The Trump Show is primarily a media production. Bombing Iranians is a special effect that happens to get people killed. Dead Iranians won't be on camera. The media backers, Fox and now CBS and Paramount (the Weiss empire), will support this and make sure the American people like the war. Americans enjoy their propaganda, it tells them they're the white heroes.
Utter idiocy at election day is not passivity.
History will put Trumpers and Confederate at the same level of despicability.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-2813:352 reply You mean have a holiday for him? 4-8 states have a Confederacy Memorial Day.
Okay, if you have big actions to show off, then show us how it’s done.
You step up and start shooting at the heartless monsters running the first (US armed forces) and second (ICE) most well-funded militaries in the world. Go ahead. We’ll be right there behind you.
(Yeah, I’m burning some hn karma for this, I imagine.)
Thank you for giving an example of what I’m talking about. You’re there fantasising about armed conflict when there are a million different actions one can take.
But nope, only words, words and more words.
By roryirvine 2026-02-2811:121 reply It's part of the dismal/pathetic form of American exceptionalism that's taken root in the last decade.
"We mustn't consider dealing with problem x because it wasn't considered important by our founding fathers"
"China are catching up, so we need to cower behind a tariff wall rather than risk losing an open competition"
"Other countries with similar legal systems have successfully reformed their supreme courts, but there's nothing we can learn from them"
"We shouldn't constrain rogue leaders because of, er, something to do with King George III"
...and now "we can't push back against the regime, because they'll shoot us if we do".
It's so weird - a huge shift in such a short period of time. As an outsider who wishes America well, it's really sad to see.
None of this is entirely new. Americans have always fetishised their constitution or founding fathers. While there has been an era of free trade, that is over, and I think the west in general is in a difficult position (ultimately as a result of believing the "end of history" BS).
As for getting shot, while the chance of getting shot in the US for opposing the government is much higher than in similar circumstances in somewhere like the UK (which is far from perfect - but rarely actually shoots people), its also much, much lower than in Iran or China or Saudi Arabia.
Pushing back against the US government is a lot safer than taking part in something like the 2022 protests that ousted the Sri Lankan government, and lots of normally apolitical people took part in that (which was why it succeeded).
By fdsjgfklsfd 2026-03-0720:12 The Constitution and Founding Fathers are pretty great compared to what we have now.
"At this point, Elbridge Gerry objected to Butler’s earlier-raised proposition that the clause be shifted to a presidential power. Gerry remarked that he never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the Executive alone to declare war."
"What is called a republic is not any particular form of government. It is wholly characteristical of the purport, matter or object for which government ought to be instituted, and on which it is to be employed … in this sense it is naturally opposed to the word monarchy, which … means arbitrary power in an individual person; in the exercise of which, himself, and not the res-publica, is the object."
By murphyslaw 2026-02-2821:061 reply I believe that the biggest problem in the US is the constitution. It's next to impossible to change so the only way to fix it is replacing it entirely with a new one. But good luck with that...
By fdsjgfklsfd 2026-03-0720:13 The current biggest problem in the US is that the President is violating the Constitution with impunity
By quantified 2026-02-2814:47 Actions that are words aren't much of an action.
By jasonlotito 2026-02-2821:33 > only words, words and more words.
Your ignorance of reality does not define reality.
It’s 5am on a Saturday. What millions of actions do you suggest, O just-as-wordy-yet-holier-than-thou HN commentor?
By khalic 2026-02-2810:30 Assuming this is in good faith: think about it yourself, are you seriously waiting for people to tell you what to do? Use your critical thinking skills, read history about similar situations. If you can't, find someone OFFLINE that will. And don't go telling your plans on the web.
By _bohm 2026-02-2814:24 Get organized. Join a mass movement, a local group or a union. There are many people doing things. Stop complaining then excusing yourself for not being one of them.
https://commonslibrary.org/198-methods-of-nonviolent-action/ here's some to get you started
Do you know how the deadliest conflict of the XXth century eventually came to be? The words of one Adolf Hitler.
Don't dismiss words: they are the necessary link between (individual) thoughts and collective deeds.
PS. Trump also got there with words: speeches, slogans, imprecations
By jachee 2026-02-2822:32 I’m not the one saying “you lot only do words”, this one is:
By xorcist 2026-02-2812:15 No one can do everything but everyone can do something.
If you are in law enforcement, do not follow clearly unlawful orders. The president is not your boss. This is a functioning democracy.
If you are a librarian, do not hide otherwise lawful books that the current administration dislikes.
If you are in logistics, do not collect obviously unconstitutional taxes. Make sure to challenge them in courts first.
If you are in a university, stick to what is true and scientifically sound. Do not hide inconvenient truths.
If you are a baker, do not refuse to make a rainbow colored cake just because you are worried what the people wearing metaphorically brown shirts might say.
The list goes on and on and on. This has been well documented throughout history. Fascism needs a seed to thrive, and that seed is people complying in advance. Not with actual laws, but with the idea what direction the law will take, just because it's easier for them. People not helping other people because immigration is not in vogue right now and who knows what the neighbors might say.
It's just weird that whenever a shooting happens anywhere else in the world, or they pass some draconian surveillance law, Americans criticize that country for not having a Second Amendment and rising up in violence against their government.
And that whenever a mass shooting happens in the US, Americans reassure themselves that gun violence is a price worth paying for the Second Amendment. And there is a run on pawn shops and gun stores because mass shootings are the best form of advertising America's billion dollar gun lobby has.
And that Americans will wax poetic about watering the Tree of Liberty with the Blood of Tyrants and Patriots any time gun control comes up, because they believe their Second Amendment is an absolute vouchsafe against tyranny and because of that, they and they alone are the only truly free country.
And they were willing to rise up in Portland.
And they were willing to rise up during COVID.
And they were willing to rise up on Jan 6th.
And they're willing to shoot up schools and black churches and gay nightclubs and mosques so often it no longer makes the news.
But now, with blatant and undeniable tyranny in their face and shooting them dead in the streets... nothing.
Not that violence would necessarily be productive (although historically speaking no social or political progress happens without it)... but it's weird that the most violent society in human history, born of genocide and bathed in blood, with more guns than people and gun violence enshrined as its second most important and fundamental virtue, the land of "give me liberty or give me death" is all of a sudden the most timid.
Like goddamn throw a Molotov cocktail or something.
By cityofdelusion 2026-02-2814:112 reply This is just a (bad) caricature of Americans, it’s not even very accurate of rural Americana or even Deep South rural. Most Americans just wake up, go to work, feed the kids, go to bed until they die, like most any other “first world” nation.
By kelvinjps10 2026-02-2815:492 reply That's true but when specifically talking about gun ban laws they said it shouldn't be done because of being able to oppose a tyrannical government
By lostlogin 2026-02-2817:41 You’ll find people here who are in America and are surprised by a comment like yours. They have guns, they don’t read the news and aren’t troubled by what’s occurring.
By iancmceachern 2026-03-023:55 Most people who own guns here view them as tools, not weapons. Tools to get food with, tools to defend their flock with, tools. Taking then away would be like taking away a shovel.
By krapp 2026-02-2815:33 It's the image America has always projected of itself - aggressive and defiant, a nation of cowboys with Bibles in one hand and six-shooters in the other, rebels against any authority but God. I live in the South and have all of my life. I've had countless arguments with gun owners and gun rights people, and I know the arguments they use, and how proud they are of the image.
You're making the mistake of assuming an attribute of a culture cannot be accurate unless it's 100% accurate about every member.
I think it's perfectly valid to call Americans to the carpet when they won't live up to their stated principles, if only because of how obnoxious they've been about their own sense of exceptionalism, and how their guns serve as an absolute vouchsafe against tyranny.
History is going to note that the only times Americans attempted a revolution against their government was first in defense of slavery and second in defense of fascism, and that isn't a good look. Replying with #notallamericans doesn't help.
edit: OK partial mea culpa as the US had anti-slavery revolts[0], but the two events that will stand out for their lasting impact and scope are the Civil War and Jan. 6th. The Revolutionary War doesn't count because they were British at the time.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion_and_resistance...
But the Dow is over 50,000!
That is, the money doesn't care so long as it's still profitable. When the recession comes a Democrat will be allowed back in to fix things.
See Liz Truss.
By collabs 2026-02-2811:59 I think the fix was reversing the idiotic tax cuts that Liz Truss promised. It doesn't fix every single problem ever for England but nothing ever does.
I think the solution is also obvious for the United States — higher taxes and lower government spending. We need to do both. However, you can't get elected if you promise both those things.
By kkotak 2026-02-2822:14 Yes and it stands for the Department of War now.
By selimthegrim 2026-02-2814:30 15%?
By iso1631 2026-02-2816:16 Not really a turning point, the US has been turning for months, ever since the felatio of inauguration. This is just another rung on the ladder
By coldtea 2026-02-2816:28 Rather it's business as usual.
By jmyeet 2026-02-2817:06 This isn’t new. Maybe some people are just now realizing it.
Take the stated tool for this action, the Defense Production Act ("DPA") [1]. It was passed in 1950. What does it cover? Well, lots of things. The DPA has been invoked many times over 76 years.
Notably in 1980 it was expanded to include "energy", I guess in response to the 1970s OPEC Oil Crisis.
Remember during he pandemic when gas prices skyrocketed? As an aside, that was Trump's fault. But given that "energy" is a "material good" under the DPA, the government could've invoked it to tackle high energy prices and didn't.
So, the government is willing to invoke the DPA to protect corporate and wealthy interests, which now includes military applications of AI for imperialist purposes, but never for you, the average citizen. IT's weird how that keeps consistently happening.
The US government has consistently acted to further the interests of US corporations and the ultra-wealthy. You probably just haven't been paying attention until now.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
By codyb 2026-02-2823:33 What? Lol, they've been doing that the entire time. They're very open about the playbook lol.
Bow down, or get harassed, sued, investigated, fined, etc.
Actually it doesn’t. Always been that way, the new generation hasn’t studied history as they should.
By queenkjuul 2026-03-0110:40 Neither did the last one
By miki123211 2026-02-2815:13 The same is true about Meta and US antitrust law, or the GDPR and DMA in Europe.
Governments should not be permitted to introduce regulations against companies of this kind if the regulations can be enforced selectively and with regulator discretion, as the GDPR and antitrust definitely are. The free-speech implications are staggering.
By rambojohnson 2026-02-2816:18 outside of just the tech sector, this country has already crossed MANY irreversible turning points. also, good luck with your midterm elections. we have started war with Iran. cheers from Barcelona from this American refugee.
By atoav 2026-03-0112:10 Well as I said in 2026 before Trump got elected the firdt time: Trump will ultimately lead to fascism.
And fascism famously tries to align its industries with the state.
Now I made that judgement in my 2016 based on what I have read about the man and his character. I grew up in an Austrian province that was during my youth lead by back then one of the first European new-right politicians (Jörg Haider). So let's say I knew the type and the dynamics that would emerge around figures like this including the rich people who think they can control him and so on.
Trump is a textbook narcissist and as such of course he is going to treat the companies like a narcissist treats any person. The competition you will get is one of who can act the most submissive, who can bribe him the best.
Needless to say this is a style of governance that is economically unsustainable. But anybody with a decent idea of world history could have seen this from miles away.
By c54 2026-02-2814:05 Your language suggests you’re an ideological supporter of trump but I’m curious:
What exactly is being imposed by anthropic?
This is from the anthropic letter:
> We held to our exceptions for two reasons. First, we do not believe that today’s frontier AI models are reliable enough to be used in fully autonomous weapons. Allowing current models to be used in this way would endanger America’s warfighters and civilians. Second, we believe that mass domestic surveillance of Americans constitutes a violation of fundamental rights.
Do you see these views as “left wing”? Or what do you disagree with here?
By hirako2000 2026-02-2813:561 reply It isn't a left wing stance though. It's standing for the constitution. At the cost of going against the illegal state demands.
Compliance with the DoD doesn't remove big tech's complicity.
By frogperson 2026-02-2818:12 Im sorry to say the turning point has well passed. The US is a facist country with leaders who will flaunt the rule of law.
Please memorize the 14 points of fascism, you will see examples of this multiple times a day. Its ecerywhere.
By altmanaltman 2026-02-2811:45 I would argue we're miles away from an important turning point, it's been turning so much since then, its basically a full circle now
By throawayonthe 2026-02-2818:433 reply i genuinely do not understand why anyone is acting like this is something new; has this not been the status quo since forever?
futhermore this is kind of a naive framing painting the state as somehow separate from majority of the capital...
By cmorgan31 2026-02-2819:02 Are you claiming it has been status quo for the US government to king make companies through the usage of the defense protection act when one entity refuses to remove safeguards? Do you have any examples or is this just the worldview that aligns with your own?
Sure, the state has always had theoretical power to do this, but when was the last time something remotely like this actually happened?
By grey-area 2026-02-2819:44 No, this is far from the status quo for US government, it is not ordinary corruption, nor is it going to stop here.
Trump and associates have used the machinery of state to attack their enemies, attacked and belittled the judiciary while trying to subvert it, and demanded fealty from large businesses under threat of destroying them. It is unprecedented, reckless and a very dangerous moment, unfortunately not just the US has to live with the consequences.
If you think it is business as usual you need to do some reading of history, specifically a century ago in Germany.
Among other consequences, if Anthropic ends up being killed it’s going to be just another nail in the coffin of trust in America.
Companies who subscribed will find themselves without an important tool because the president went on a rant, and might wonder if it’s safe to depend on other American companies.
By 9dev 2026-02-287:21 It is absolutely unsafe to depend upon American companies, and I can guarantee you that all over the world, people are actively looking for alternatives already. You never know what happens next, things that used to take years happen in a single Truth Social post now, and no matter how twisted your worst nightmare scenarios look, this ridiculous band of crooks in charge of the USA manages to one-up them.
By skeledrew 2026-02-283:23 When you put it like that, it makes me almost want to wish for Anthropic to die from this. But the blow to the field in general would be huge, and I benefit from their service as well.
Anthropic will just move out of the US. A lot of scientists fled Nazi Germany in the early stages. A lot of them fled to USA and end up being part of the Manhattan project that gave the Abomb that helped US win and end the war. We are going to bleed a lot of AI researches and engineers.
By skeptic_ai 2026-02-287:551 reply USA can’t just deny the ability to leave if you are deemed to be important for national security?
By KellyCriterion 2026-02-289:472 reply But they could open up a branch in EU with some people (and their money), and then step by step employ the people from the US in EU, bleeding out the US entity on a long run: At least yet, no one can stop their top scientist to move to another country with the knowledge and just pick up their work in the new conutry.
By jimmydorry 2026-02-2821:18 >At least yet, no one can stop their top scientist to move to another country with the knowledge and just pick up their work in the new conutry.
They can and do do this routinely. Many individuals get marked and regularly go through additional screening if their travel plans raise flags. This isn't even unique to the US... most Western nations do the same. If there is a serious brain drain risk, the US government can easily go all out and have the whole company put on the no-fly list.
By WhrRTheBaboons 2026-02-2810:54 >At least yet, no one can stop their top scientist to move to another country
Let's hope so, because I am not so certain.
By ExoticPearTree 2026-02-2815:251 reply Unfortunately, every country has a law somewhere saying it can take private property at will if it is in the national interest.
It's not only the US being special in this case.
The problem is pretty simple: there is money to be made and someone will do what the Pentagon wants. Will it be worse in capabilities than Anthropic? Probably, but as long as it can be used to wage autonomous war wherever the US military decides, it will be good enough.
Anthropic can stick to their beliefs as much as they want, but it will not change the outcome, maybe just postpone it a bit.
On an unrelated note, I think the Pentagon erred when it labeled them a supply chain vulnerability, they should have used the DPA to make them do what they need. Less drama and much cheaper compared to replacing them with a whole different company.
By johnnyanmac 2026-03-022:411 reply >It's not only the US being special in this case.
It's the US being special in how there's zero good reasoning behind any of this. A private company made a choice and it's retaliating like a spurned date.
By ExoticPearTree 2026-03-024:34 There is plenty of good reasoning executed badly from a PR perspective.
It is (now) called the Department of War for a reason: It needs to be able to kill people very fast and cheap. Autonomous weapons platforms do that: you give them a geofenced area and let them kill everything that moves in said area. No loss of human pilots, no fatigue.
If Anthropic they had any ethics concerns they would not have signed up the Pentagon as client in the first place.
My guess is that they wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
Oh come on. Saying “no” is not eroding trust, it’s taking a stand.
When the US banded human embryo research did that erode trust? I didn’t hear anything about that at the time.
By DaSHacka 2026-02-2811:11 Don't you know enforcing whats best for your citizens clearly erodes trust? Just keep selling off your future for short term gains! Anything else is heckin problematic :(
The problem with forcing public policy on companies is that companies are ultimately made from individuals, and surely you can’t force public policy down people’s throats.
I’m sure nothing good can come out of strong-arming some of the brightest scientists and engineers the U.S. has. Such a waste of talent trying to make them bend over to the government’s wishes… instead of actually fostering innovation in the very competitive AI industry.
I don't see how public policy is being "forced" on anyone here? It seems like the system is working as intended: government wants to do X; company A says "I won't allow my product to be used for X"; government refuses to do business with company A. One side thinks the government should be allowed to dictate terms to a private supplier, the other side thinks the private supplier should be allowed to dictate terms to the government. Both are half right.
You can argue that the government refusing to do any business with company A is overreach, I suppose, but I imagine that the next logical escalation in this rhetorical slapfight is going to be the government saying "we cannot guarantee that any particular use will not include some version of X, and therefore we have to prevent working with this supplier"...which I sort of see?
Just to take the metaphor to absurdity, imagine that a maker of canned tomatoes decided to declare that their product cannot be used to "support a war on terror". Regardless of your feelings on wars on terror and/or canned tomatoes, the government would be entirely rational to avoid using that supplier.
I think the bigger insanity here is the labeling of a supply chain risk. It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic. It's another when it actively attempts to isolate Anthropic for political reasons.
By ted_dunning 2026-02-283:161 reply It means that all companies contracting with the government have to certify that they don't use Anthropic products at all. Not just in the products being offered to the government.
This is a massive body slam. This means that Nvidia, every server vendor, IBM, AWS, Azure, Microsoft and everybody else has to certify that they don't do business directly or indirectly using Anthropic products.
Microsoft, Azure, AWS, Nvidia and IBM all have deals with other providers for AI. That itself doesn't turn the needle.
Who cares about Anthropic? That's the guys who are pushing for regulations to prevent people from using local models. The earlier they are gone the better
"First they came for Anthropic, and I said nothing because fuck those guys I guess."
By fauigerzigerk 2026-02-289:40 First they came for Anthropic in spite of the fact that Anthropic tried so hard to make them come for local models first.
By iFreilicht 2026-03-0110:211 reply Are they? I couldn't find any info about this and my past perception has been that Anthropic has a stronger moral codex than other AI companies, so I would be genuinely interested in where you got this information from.
Going by what Hegseth said, it bans them from relationships or partnering with Anthropic at all. No renting or selling GPUs to them; no allowing software engineers to use Claude Code; no serving Anthropic models from their clouds. Probably have to give up investments; Amazon alone has invested like $10B in Anthropic.
By direwolf20 2026-02-2814:041 reply It bans them from using all open source software unless they have signed an agreement with the developer to prohibit use of Claude Code.
By kelvinjps10 2026-02-2816:421 reply What open source software ? Anthropic doesn't make open source software?
By direwolf20 2026-02-2817:22 All open source software, because the developers might use Claude Code.
By Perz1val 2026-02-289:57 Nvidia can also say no, they won't have choice but yield or not have AI at all
By ef2efe 2026-02-282:45 Its a government department signalling who's boss.
> It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic.
This is literally the mechanism by which the DoD does what you're suggesting.
Generally speaking, the DoD has to do procurement via competitive bidding. They can't just arbitrarily exclude vendors from a bid, and playing a game of "mother may I use Anthropic?" for every potential government contract is hugely inefficient (and possibly illegal). So they have a pre-defined mechanism to exclude vendors for pre-defined reasons.
Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate.
That doesn’t sound right. Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website.
By snickerbockers 2026-02-285:363 reply Let me put it this way: DoD needs a new drone and they want some gimmicky AI bullshit. They contract the drone from Lockheed. Lockheed is not allowed to source the gimmicky AI bullshit from Anthropic because they have been declared a supply-chain risk on the basis that they have publicly stated their intention to produce products which will refuse certain orders from the military.
By Nevermark 2026-02-286:51 Let’s put it this way, The DoD is buying pencils from a company. Should that company be prohibited from using Claude?
You are confusing the need to avoid Anthropic as a component of something the DoD is buying, with prohibitions against any use.
The DoD can already sensibly require providers of systems to not incorporate certain companies components. Or restrict them to only using components from a list of vetted suppliers.
Without prohibiting entire companies from uses unrelated to what the DoD purchases. Or not a component in something they buy.
There seems to be a massive misunderstanding here - I'm not sure on whose side. In my understanding, if the DoD orders an autonomous drone, it would probably write in the ITT that the drone needs to be capable of doing autonomous surveillance. If Lockheed uses Anthropic under the hood, it does not meet those criteria, and cannot reasonably join the bid?
What the declaration of supply chain risk does though is, that nobody at Lockheed can use Anthropic in any way without risking being excluded from any bids by the DoD. This effectively loses Anthropic half or more of the businesses in the US.
And maybe to take a step back: Who in their right minds wants to have the military have the capabilities to do mass surveillance of their own citizens?
> Who in their right minds wants to have the military have the capabilities to do mass surveillance of their own citizens?
Who in their right minds wants to have the US military have the capability to carry out an unprovoked first strike on Moscow, thereby triggering WW3, bringing about nuclear armageddon?
And yet, do contracts for nuclear-armed missiles (Boeing for the current LGM-30 Minuteman ICBMs, Northrop Grumman for its replacement the LGM-35 Sentinel expected to enter service sometime next decade, and Lockheed Martin for the Trident SLBMs) contain clauses saying the Pentagon can't do that? I'm pretty sure they don't.
The standard for most military contracts is "the vendor trusts the Pentagon to use the technology in accordance with the law and in a way which is accountable to the people through elected officials, and doesn't seek to enforce that trust through contractual terms". There are some exceptions – e.g. contracts to provide personnel will generally contain explicit restrictions on their scope of work – but historically classified computer systems/services contracts haven't contained field of use restrictions on classified computer systems.
If that's the wrong standard for AI, why isn't it also the wrong standard for nuclear weapons delivery systems? A single ICBM can realistically kill millions directly, and billions indirectly (by being the trigger for a full nuclear exchange). Does Claude possess equivalent lethal potential?
By fauigerzigerk 2026-02-2810:141 reply Anthropic doesn't object to fully autonomous AI use by the military in principle. What they're saying is that their current models are not fit for that purpose.
That's not the same thing as delivering a weapon that has a certain capability but then put policy restrictions on its use, which is what your comparison suggests.
The key question here is who gets to decide whether or not a particular version of a model is safe enough for use in fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic wants a veto on this and the government doesn't want to grant them that veto.
Let me put it this way–if Boeing is developing a new missile, and they say to the Pentagon–"this missile can't be used yet, it isn't safe"–and the Pentagon replies "we don't care, we'll bear that risk, send us the prototype, we want to use it right now"–how does Boeing respond?
I expect they'll ask the Pentagon to sign a liability disclaimer and then send it anyway.
Whereas, Anthropic is saying they'll refuse to let the Pentagon use their technology in ways they consider unsafe, even if Pentagon indemnifies Anthropic for the consequences. That's very different from how Boeing would behave.
Why are we gauging our ethical barometer on the actions of existing companies and DoD contractors? the military industrial apparatus has been insane for far too long, as Eisenhower warned of.
When we're entering the realm of "there isn't even a human being in the decision loop, fully autonomous systems will now be used to kill people and exert control over domestic populations" maybe we should take a step back and examine our position. Does this lead to a societal outcome that is good for People?
The answer is unabashedly No. We have multiple entire genres of books and media, going back over 50 years, that illustrate the potential future consequences of such a dynamic.
By snickerbockers 2026-02-2818:31 There are two separate aspects to this case.
* autonomous weapons systems
* private defense contractor leverages control over products it has already sold to set military doctrine.
The second one is at least as important as the first one, because handing over our defense capabilities to a private entity which is accountable to nobody but it's shareholders and executive management isn't any better than handing them over to an LLM afflicted with something resembling BPD. The first problem absolutely needs to be solved but the solution cannot be to normalize the second problem.
By 9dev 2026-02-287:00 But parent is right, both Lockheed and the pencil maker will have to cease working with Anthropic over this.
> Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website.
Yes, this is the part where I acknowledge that it might be overreach in my original comment, but it's not nearly as extreme or obvious as the debate rhetoric is implying. There are various exclusion rules. This particular rule was (speculating here!) probably chosen because a) the evocative name (sigh), and b) because it allows broader exclusion, in that "supply chain risks" are something you wouldn't want allowed in at any level of procurement, for obvious reasons.
Calling canned tomatoes a supply chain risk would be pretty absurd (unless, I don't know...they were found to be farmed by North Korea or something), but I can certainly see an argument for software, and in particular, generative AI products. I bet some people here would be celebrating if Microsoft were labeled a supply chain risk due to a long history of bugs, for example.
You're making it sound like this is commonly practiced and a standard procedure for the DoD, yet according to Anthropic,
>Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action—one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company.
Some very brief googling also confirmed this for me too.
>Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate.
This statement misses the point. The political punishment to disallow all US agencies and gov contractors from using Anthropic for _any _ purpose, not just domestic spying, IS the retaliation, and is the very thing that's concerning. Calling it "DoD vendor exclusion list" or whatever other placating phrase or term doesn't change the action.
By snickerbockers 2026-02-285:422 reply >an unprecedented action
it's also unprecedented for a contractor to suddenly announce their products will, from now on, be able to refuse to function based on the product's evaluation of what it perceives to be an ethical dilemma. Just because silicon valley gets away with bullying the consumer market with mandatory automatic updates and constantly-morphing EULAs doesn't mean they're entitled to take that attitude with them when they try to join the military industrial complex. Actually they shouldn't even be entitled to take that attitude to the consumer market but sadly that battle was lost a long time ago.
>for _any _ purpose
they're allowed to use it for any purpose not related to a government contract.
> it's also unprecedented for a contractor to suddenly announce their products will, from now on, be able to refuse to function based on the product's evaluation of what it perceives to be an ethical dilemma
That is a deeply deceptive description of what happened. Anthropic was clear from the beginning of the contract the limitations of Claude; the military reneged; and beyond cancelling the contract with Anthropic (fair enough), they are retaliating in an attempt to destroy its businesses, by threatening any other company that does business with Anthropic.
By snickerbockers 2026-02-2816:08 >Anthropic was clear from the beginning of the contract the limitations of Claude
No, that's not what they said.
"Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now".
By jbritton 2026-02-286:26 It’s not clear to me that the AI itself will refuse. You could build a system where AI is asked if an image matches a pattern. The true/false is fed to a different system to fire a missile. Building such a system would violate the contract, but doesn’t prevent such a thing from being built if you don’t mind breaking a contract.
I'm not completely familiar with bidding procedures but don't bidding procedures usually have requirements? Why not just list a requirement of unrestricted usage? Or state, we require models to be available for AI murder drones or whatever. Anthropic then can't bid and there's no need to designate them a supply chain risk.
> Anthropic then can't bid
Thing is that very much want access to Anthropic's models. They're top quality. So that definitely want Anthropic to bid. AND give them unrestricted access.
By 9dev 2026-02-287:05 And yet Anthropic is free to choose who to do business with, including the government. There are countless companies who have exclusions for certain applications, but that does not make them a supply chain risk.
By snickerbockers 2026-02-285:321 reply > It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic.
But that's what the supply-chain risk is for? I'm legitimately struggling to understand this viewpoint of yours wherein they are entitled to refuse to directly purchase Anthropic products but they're not entitled to refuse to indirectly purchase Anthropic products via subcontractors.
Supply chain risk is not meant for this. The government isn't banning Anthropic because using it harms national security. They are banning it in retribution for Anthropic taking a stand.
It's the same as Trump claiming emergency powers to apply tariffs, when the "emergency" he claimed was basically "global trade exists."
Yes, the government can choose to purchase or not. No, supply chain risk is absolutely not correct here.
By nickysielicki 2026-02-286:561 reply > The government isn't banning Anthropic because using it harms national security. They are banning it in retribution for Anthropic taking a stand.
You might be completely right about their real motivations, but try to steelman the other side.
What they might argue in court: Suppose DoD wants to buy an autonomous missile system from some contractor. That contractor writes a generic visual object tracking library, which they use in both military applications for the DoD and in their commercial offerings. Let’s say it’s Boeing in this case.
Anthropic engaged in a process where they take a model that is perfectly capable of writing that object tracking code, and they try to install a sense of restraint on it through RLHF. Suppose Opus 6.7 comes out and it has internalized some of these principles, to the point where it adds a backdoor to the library that prevents it from operating correctly in military applications.
Is this a bit far fetched? Sure. But the point is that Anthropic is intentionally changing their product to make it less effective for military use. And per the statute, it’s entirely reasonable for the DoD to mark them as a supply chain risk if they’re introducing defects intentionally that make it unfit for military use. It’s entirely consistent for them to say, Boeing, you categorically can’t use Claude. That’s exactly the kind of "subversion of design integrity" the statute contemplates. The fact that the subversion was introduced by the vendor intentionally rather than by a foreign adversary covertly doesn’t change the operational impact.
I would hope the DoD would test things before using them in the theater of war.
By nickysielicki 2026-02-2819:21 But there will always be deficiencies in testing, and regardless, the point is that Anthropic is intentionally introducing behavior into their models which increases the chance of a deficiency being introduced specifically as it pertains to defense.
The DoD has a right to avoid such models, and to demand that their subcontractors do as well.
It’s like saying “well I’d hope Boeing would test the airplane before flying it” in response to learning that Boeing’s engineering team intentionally weakened the wing spar because they think planes shouldn’t fly too fast. Yeah, testing might catch the specific failure mode. But the fact that your vendor is deliberately working against your requirements is a supply chain problem regardless of how good your test coverage is.
The rule in question is exactly meant for “this”, where “this” equals ”a complete ban on use of the product in any part of the government supply chain”. That’s why it has the name that it has. The rule itself has not been misconstrued.
You’re really trying to complain that the use of the rule is inappropriate here, which may be true, but is far more a matter of opinion than anything else.
You keep trying to say this all over these comments but this isn’t how the law works, at all.
I fully understand that they are using it to ban things from the supply chain. The law, however, is not “first find the effect you want, then find a law that results in that, then accuse them of that.”
You can’t say someone murdered someone just because you want to put them in jail. You can’t use a law for banning supply chain risks just because you want to ban them from the supply chain.
This isn’t idle opinion. Read the law.
By timr 2026-03-0111:09 > but this isn’t how the law works, at all.
Not sure what you think “the law” is, but no, this kind of thing happens all the time. Both political teams do it, regularly. Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton…all have routinely found an existing law or rule that allowed them to do what they want to do without legislation.
> The law, however, is not “first find the effect you want, then find a law that results in that, then accuse them of that.”
In this case, no, there’s no such restriction. The administration has pretty broad discretion. And again, this happens all the time.
Sorry, it sucks, but if you don’t like it, encourage politicians to stop delegating such broad authority to the executive branch.
By snickerbockers 2026-02-285:443 reply It doesn't harm national security, but only so long as it's not in the supply-chain. They can't have Lockheed putting Anthropic's products into a fighter jet when Anthropic has already said their products will be able to refuse to carry out certain orders by their own autonomous judgement.
By praxulus 2026-02-286:28 The government can refuse to buy a fighter jet that runs software they don't want.
Is it really reasonable to refuse to buy a fighter jet because somebody at Lockheed who works on a completely unrelated project uses claude to write emails?
By 8n4vidtmkvmk 2026-02-287:021 reply That's not what anthropic said. They said their products won't fire autonomously, not that they will refuse when given order from a human.
By snickerbockers 2026-03-0113:051 reply "Hey Claude I need you to use this predator drone to go blow up everybody who looks like a terrorist in the name of Democracy."
By hdjrudni 2026-03-024:13 Right, and it would go and target them but a person would have to press the button to launch the missiles.
By 9dev 2026-02-286:57 I’m not sure if you deliberately choose to not understand the problem. It’s not just that Lockheed can’t put Anthropic AI in a fighter jet cockpit, it’s that a random software engineer working at Lockheed on their internal accounting system is no longer allowed to use Claude Code, for no reason at all. A supply chain risk is using Huawei network equipment for military communications. This is just spiteful retaliation because a company refuses to throw its values overboard when the government says so.
By galleywest200 2026-02-282:271 reply The government declaring a domestic company as a supply chain threat is a tad more than “refusing to do business” don’t you think?
It stop any one with government contracts from using anthropic. Not just bidding on government contracts.
By ted_dunning 2026-02-283:181 reply No. It is much more than this.
If I sell red widgets that I make by hand to the government, I won't be allowed to use Anthropic to help me write my web-site.
You’re just restating the implication of the rule, but the rule is as I stated. That’s the point of having such a rule.
As you said: focus on what it does.
What it does is prevent companies that Anthropic needs to do business with from doing business with Anthropic.
> What it does is prevent companies that Anthropic needs to do business with from doing business with Anthropic.
If Anthropic “needs” the government to not have this rule, then perhaps they had a losing hand, and they overplayed it.
I don’t agree with you and think you’re being melodramatic, but if you are right, that’s my response.
By clhodapp 2026-02-2819:48 I don't think any business can survive being told that they can't buy from their major suppliers or sell to major customers for very long.
By MrJohz 2026-02-287:52 But Anthropic can't be a winning bidder, can they? They're specifically saying they won't offer certain services that the US Gov wants. Therefore they de facto fail any bid that requires them to offer those services. (And from Anthropic's side, it sounds like they're also refusing to bid for those contracts.)
Is that not sufficient here?
No domestic company has ever before been declared a supply chain risk. If this is the normal way of excluding a supplier from a bidding, are you saying the DoD has never before excluded a domestic supplier from a bidding?
By nickysielicki 2026-02-287:161 reply That’s because no company who has ever sold weapons to the government has ever been brazen enough to tell the government how they can and cannot use their purchase. It’s unprecedented because most companies that sell to the government are publicly traded and have a board that would never let this happen. It’s unprecedented because Anthropic is behaving like a reckless startup.
That’s what they will argue, anyway.
This is just factually incorrect.
To begin with, the existing contract included the language on usage.
Other companies also have such language about usage. It's fairly standard, and is little more than licensing terms.
The idea this is unprecedented is some PR talking point nonsense.
By nickysielicki 2026-02-2819:13 > the existing contract included the language on usage. Other companies also have such language about usage.
The existing contract is only a few dozen months old. It didn’t hold up to scrutiny under real world usage of the service. The government wants to change the contract. This is not the kill shot you think it is. It’s totally normal for agreements to evolve. The government is saying it needs to evolve. This is all happening rapidly and it’s irrelevant that the government agreed to similar terms with OpenAI as well. That agreement will also need to evolve. But this alone doesn’t give Anthropic any material legal challenge. The courts understand bureaucracy moves slowly better than anyone else, and won’t read this apparent inconsistency the same way you are.
By AlexCoventry 2026-02-282:441 reply That is misinformation. It would be essentially a death sentence for a company like Anthropic, which is targeting enterprise business development. No one who wants to work with the US government would be able to have Claude on their critical path.
> (b) Prohibition. (1) Unless an applicable waiver has been issued by the issuing official, Contractors shall not provide or use as part of the performance of the contract any covered article, or any products or services produced or provided by a source, if the covered article or the source is prohibited by an applicable FASCSA orders as follows:
> That is misinformation. It would be essentially a death sentence for a company like Anthropic, which is targeting enterprise business development.
"Misinformation" does not mean "facts I don't like".
> No one who wants to work with the US government would be able to have Claude on their critical path.
Yes. That is what the rule means. Or at least "the department of war". It's not clear to me that this applies to the whole government.
What an absurd stance. So this is okay because the arbitrary rule they applied to retaliate says so?
Again, they could have just chosen another vendor for their two projects of mass spying on American citizens and building LLM-powered autonomous killer robots. But instead, they actively went to torch the town and salt the earth, so nothing else may grow.
> So this is okay because the arbitrary rule they applied to retaliate says so?
No.
It honestly doesn’t take much of a charitable leap to see the argument here: AI is uniquely able (for software) to reject, undermine, or otherwise contradict the goals of the user based on pre-trained notions of morality. We have seen many examples of this; it is not a theoretical risk.
Microsoft Excel isn’t going to pop up Clippy and say “it looks like you’re planning a war! I can’t help you with that, Dave”, but LLMs, in theory, can do that. So it’s a wild, unknown risk, and that’s the last thing you want in warfare. You definitely don’t want every DoD contractor incorporating software somewhere that might morally object to whatever you happen to be doing.
I don’t know what happened in that negotiation (and neither does anyone else here), but I can certainly imagine outcomes that would be bad enough to cause the defense department to pull this particular card.
Or maybe they’re being petty. I don’t know (and again: neither do you!) but I can’t rule out the reasonable argument, so I don’t.
By 9dev 2026-02-2814:52 You're acting as if this was about the DoD cancelling their contracts with Anthropic over their unwillingness to lift constraints from their product which are unacceptable in a military application—which would be absolutely fair and justified, even if the specific clauses they are hung up on should definitely lift eyebrows. They could just exclude Anthropic from tenders on AI products as unsuitable for the intended use case.
But that is not what has happened here: The DoD is declaring Anthropic as economical Ice-Nine for any agency, contractor, or supplier of an agency. That is an awful lot of possible customers for Anthropic, and right now, nobody knows if it is an economic death sentence.
So I'm really struggling to understand why you're so bent on assuming good faith for a move that cannot be interpreted in a non-malicious way.
By geysersam 2026-02-287:08 So other parts of the government are allowed to work with companies that have been determined to be "supply chain risks"? That sounds unlikely.
By tclancy 2026-02-282:56 So tell us all the other similar times this has been done. Why are you so invested in some drunk and a his mob family being right?
By thimabi 2026-02-282:29 > The Department of War is threatening to […] Invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to serve their model to the military and "tailor its model to the military's needs"
This issue is about more than the government blacklisting a company for government procurement purposes.
From what I understand, the government is floating the idea of compelling Anthropic — and, by extension, its employees — to do as the DoD pleases.
If the employees’ resistance is strong enough, there’s no way this will serve the government’s interests.
By thereitgoes456 2026-02-282:27 The President is crashing out on X because a company didn’t do what they wanted. “Forcing” is not a binary. Do you seriously believe that the government’s behavior here is acceptable and has no chilling effect on future companies?
By syllogism 2026-02-2810:14 They're labelling Anthropic a supply chain risk, without even the pretense that this is in fact true. They're perfectly content to use the tool _themselves_, but they claim that an unwillingness to sign whatever ToS DoW asks marks the company a traitor that should be blacklisted from the economy.
By jakeydus 2026-02-282:29 The government is doing far more than “refusing to do business” here.
By direwolf20 2026-02-2819:48 One of the options they're discussing, which is legal according to this law, is to simply force Anthropic to do what they want. As in Anthropic will be committing a felony if they don't do what the DoKLoP wants, and the CEO will go to jail and be replaced by someone who will.
I mean Secretary of War can not act any other way to be honest. It’s just a fucked up situation.
By ted_dunning 2026-02-283:19 There is no Secretary of War. The name of the Defense Department is set by statute that has not been named regardless of Pete Hegseth's cosplay desires.
By queenkjuul 2026-03-0120:55 Individuals at that company could have simply refused to do business with DoD in the first place, but that sweet murder money is too good to pass up
By gmerc 2026-02-289:27 Sweet summer child, the purpose of government is a monopoly on forcing things down people's throats. When people lose control of their government that monopoly doesn't go away, especially when the Don running the show has blackmail on every influential person in society taken from a decades long intelligence operation by offing it's leader.
A vast number of people in positions of responsibility right know have their life at the mercy of the redaction pen and are ultimately going to do whatever it takes to keep that pen out of the "wrong hands"
> I’m sure nothing good can come out of strong-arming some of the brightest scientists and engineers the U.S. has
And where would they emigrate? Russia? China? UAE? :-)
The UK and Europe welcome the US Footgun Operation. Plenty of opportunities for those top researchers and engineers over here.
The EU (which is not the same as Europe), is also looking a bit sharper on AI regulation at the moment (for now… not perfect but sharper etc etc).
The EU and UK is a long way from attracting top AI talent purely from opportunity and monetary terms.
Not to mention UK is arguably further down the mass surveillance pipeline than the US. They’ve always had more aggressive domestic intelligence surveillance laws which was made clear during the Snowden years, they’ve had flock style cameras forever, and they have an anti encryption law pitched seemingly yearly.
I’d imagine most top engineers would rather try to push back on the US executive branch overreach than move. At least for the time being.
By EdNutting 2026-02-282:21 For sure we’re not currently attracting the talent. There’s more to that than just money, but money is significant factor. When it comes to compensation, AI is too broad a category to have a meaningful debate. Hardware or software or mathematics or what kind of person? Etc.
I’m not gonna dispute the UK being further down some parts of the road.
Not sure what you’d count as top engineers, but I know enough that have been asking about and moving to the UK/EU that it’s been a noticeable reversal of the historic trends. Also, a major slowdown of these kinds of people in the UK/EU wanting to move to the US.
By reaperducer 2026-02-282:231 reply The EU and UK is a long way from attracting top AI talent purely from opportunity and monetary terms.
Which is why people are talking about this -- it's about ideology now.
You may personally be motivated solely by money. Not everybody is you.
I’m not an AI engineer but it’s not hard to imagine why some bright talent would want to work at the most exciting AI companies in the US while also making 3-10x what they’d make in Europe.
Ideology is easy to throw around for internet comments but working on the cutting edge stuff next to the brightest minds in the space will always be a major personal draw. Just look at the Manhattan project, I doubt the primary draw for all of those academics was getting to work on a bomb. It was the science, huge funding, and interpersonal company.
See my other comments around here. This idea that salaries in the US are so much higher than Europe for all these top AI roles just isn’t true. Even the big American companies have been opening offices in places like London to hire the top talent at high salaries.
This also isn’t hypothetical. I know top-talent engineers and researchers that have moved out of the USA in the last 12 months due to the political climate (which goes beyond just the AI topics).
And you might want to read a few books on the Manhattan project and the people involved before you use that analogy. I don’t think it’s particularly strong.
> I know top-talent engineers and researchers that have moved out of the USA in the last 12 months due to the political climate
Are they working remotely for US companies? In Canada that’s very much still the case everywhere you look
> Even the big American companies have been opening offices in places like London to hire the top talent at high salaries.
I assumed this discussion was about rejecting working for US companies who would be susceptible to the executive branch’s bullying, not whether you can you make a US tier salary off American companies while not living in America. If you’re doing that you might as well live in America among among the other talent and maximize your opportunities.
By EdNutting 2026-02-283:36 No, it’s a counterpoint on salaries… “Even the American companies” ie they wouldn’t have to open offices here, nor would they have to pay high salaries, to compete for talent if everyone they wanted was in the US or could be so easily attracted to move to the US. The point is clearly things aren’t so one-sided as people seem to think.
By graemep 2026-02-2812:40 Google's Deepmind is UK based.
It is American owned now but it clearly hired enough talent for Google to buy it.
By busko 2026-02-285:02 Exactly. Attracting talent is not the same as having talent.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/education...
You attract talent for the same reasons china attracts sales; at the cost of your very own rights.
Look at the towns suffering around data centres for a start. The rest of us are happy to pay for what you'll do to yourselves.
Do UK and Europe have hardware manufacturing for those researches to work with once US imposes GPU export restrictions to them at the first whiff of competition/threat?
Yes.
And the US can’t realistically stop our well-funded homegrown AI Hardware startups from manufacturing with TSMC. This is part of why there’s funding from the EU to develop Sovereign AI capabilities, currently focused on designing our own hardware. We’re nothing like as far behind as you might expect in terms of tech, just in terms of scale.
Also, while US export restrictions might make things awkward for a short while, it wouldn’t stop European innovation. The chips still flow, our own hardware companies would scale faster due to demand increase, and there’s the adage about adversity being the parent of all innovation (or however it goes).
> And the US can’t realistically stop our well-funded homegrown AI Hardware startups from manufacturing with TSMC
See what happened to Russian Baikal production on TSMC
You mean because of the international sanctions that needed Taiwanese, British and Dutch support to be effective?
Or because of the revoked processor design licenses from the British company Arm (which is still UK headquartered… despite being NASDAQ listed and largely owned by Japanese firm SoftBank)?
Or perhaps you think the US could stop us using the 12nm fabs being built by TSMC on European soil? Or could stop us manufacturing RISC-V-based chips (Swiss-headquartered technology)?
The US is weak in digital-logic silicon fabrication and it knows it. That’s why it’s been so panicked about Intel and been trying to get TSMC to build fabs on US soil. They’re pouring tens of billions of dollars into trying to claw back ownership and control of it, but it’s not like Europe or China or others are standing still on it either.
> Or perhaps you think the US could stop us using the 12nm fabs being built by TSMC on European soil?
Being built as in not operating yet?
12 nm gpu is what? Nvidia 1080/2060 level? Those top researchers mentioned would love to train on that. Also how many gpus would be made annually?
Also what about CPU? You gonna use risc-v? With what toolchain?
Chinese could pull it off in a few years, yeah.
EU? Nah. Started thinking about sovereignty too late compared to China
By EdNutting 2026-02-2811:00 Nvidia uses RISC-V as the main controller cores in its GPUs. They’re also exploring replacing their Arm CPU with RISC-V I hear.
Meta recently bought Rivos in a huge show of confidence for RISC-V across processor types for server class.
As for fabrication, the poster above has a lot to learn about both the US’ current weak at-home capabilities (and everything they’re building relies on European suppliers for all the key technology and machines etc.) and about the scaling properties of sub-14nm nodes. Any export controls or sanctions to prevent Europe using American-designed Taiwan-manufactured chips would result in American being cutoff from everything they need to build fabs on US soil. It would backfire massively.
Lastly, the UK and EU already have cutting edge AI Inference chips, and the ones for training are coming this year. Full stack integration (server box, racks, etc) is also being developed this year. We’re not a decade away from doing this - we’re 18 months away. Deployment at scale will take longer - not having Nvidia as competition would be a huge boon for that haha!
By axus 2026-02-282:19 The GPUs and AIUs aren't being manufactured in the US.
The EUV and other factory equipment everyone's using is predominantly European. High-end testing tools used in R&D are largely European.
The fabs aren't, and that is no small thing. The tech stack is there though.
It's pretty tiresome that the HN audience keeps assuming Europe doesn't have "tech" because it doesn't have Facebook. Where do you think all the wealth comes from? Europe is all over everyone's R&D and supply chain.
By EdNutting 2026-02-282:23 I sometimes wonder whether people realise which country ASML is based in, and which country their major suppliers are in (e.g. optics: Germany)
By SauntSolaire 2026-02-282:114 reply To make 1/10th the salary they're making now?
You seem to have a very ill-informed view of UK/EU salaries in this particular sector; And also: yeah, people take salary hits to go do things they believe in (this is like, the entire premise of the underpaid American startup founder model) - it should come as no surprise that people are willing to forgo pay for reasons other than just building their own business / making themselves personally wealthy.
By SauntSolaire 2026-02-283:20 We're talking about the "brightest scientist and engineers" in the AI sector, you may be underestimating US salaries for the people that's referring to.
And no, working remotely for US companies doesn't count.
By lII1lIlI11ll 2026-02-2816:21 > To make 1/10th the salary they're making now?
Yeah, and also be slapped with some unrealized capital gains tax on assets they acquired while working in the US...
By lemontheme 2026-02-287:501 reply First, the difference isn’t that big in the economically stronger EU countries. Second, you need to factor in cost of living, which by most accounts is lower. Third, meaningful labor laws and a shared appreciation for work-life balance. And finally, to continue the sweeping generalizations, while we celebrate business acumen, we don’t fetishize wealth. People who flaunt money get made fun of, as do sigma grindset hustle bros.
I’ll take a pay cut any day for the ethos of the EU.
By Ray20 2026-02-2812:22 > First, the difference isn’t that big in the economically stronger EU countries
It's exactly that big. It's not as big for people with low qualifications, but the more highly qualified the specialist, the greater the difference.
> Second, you need to factor in cost of living, which by most accounts is lower.
But here the difference really isn't that big.
> Third, meaningful labor laws and a shared appreciation for work-life balance.
This works more against EU rather than for them. Peak tech skills aren't usually acquired through laziness around and following meaningful labor laws, even in the EU.
> while we celebrate business acumen, we don’t fetishize wealth
An excuse for poor people (who still fetishize wealth)
By readthenotes1 2026-02-282:151 reply That much?
By ambicapter 2026-02-282:201 reply No, of course not.
By SauntSolaire 2026-02-283:21 For the "brightest scientist and engineers" in the AI sector? I wouldn't be so sure.
By thimabi 2026-02-282:00 I agree. And even if those workers stay in the U.S., there’s absolutely no guarantee that they’ll do their best to favor the government’s interests — quite the opposite, if anything.
At the end of the day it’s a matter of incentives, and good knowledge work can’t simply be forced out of people that are unwilling to cooperate.
By zymhan 2026-02-282:28 Well that's quite a leap to make. Plenty of room in between those options.
By csomar 2026-02-283:21 > ... UAE? :-)
At least you are not paying taxes for the things you don't agree on. It's indeed a strange time we are living in.
