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Comment by cobolcomesback | Hacker News Reader

None of the hyper scalers are going to stop offering Claude. All of the big 3 have invested billions of dollars into Anthropic, and have tens (if not hundreds) of billions more tied up in funding deals with them. Amazon and Google are two of the largest shareholders of Anthropic.

Anthropic is going to be fine. The DoD is going to walk this back and pretend it never happened to save face.

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and?

The cost of a company like Amazon or Google losing their piece of that $1T annual budget is greater than their exposure to the failure of Anthropic.

Not according to published Financials.

Also $1T is dishonest. DoD spends less than 0.1% of that on cloud services.

Source?

Half of that budget gets contracted out to Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrop, Boeing, General Dynamics, etc. Those companies absolutely do spend money on the hyperscalers.

Great. So you've gone down from $1T to "half of that budget".

If you're honest with yourself, you'll find the true number.

obviously, I was never suggesting that the DoD spends $961b a year on cloud computing.

Look, it’s a very simple question: Amazon has invested $8b into anthropic. Do you think if the DoD disappeared tomorrow that Amazon would lose more than $8b in revenue over the next 5 years?

I think you underestimate how large the DoD budget is and how many times that money changes hands in the pursuit of fulfilling contracts. $20b-$25b in revenue per year across all hyperscalers is a totally reasonable estimate.

Why on earth would you compare $8 billion of equity investment in another company (which is likely worth far more now) to $8b of revenue?

The DoD’s spend on cloud contracts is measured in single-digit-billions per year. It’s peanuts compared to the hyperscalers investments in Anthropic.

Think of it this way: each of the hyperscalers have built a handful of data centers specifically for government contracts. A handful each.

Meanwhile, AWS and GCP have dedicated over 50 new data centers solely for Anthropic to train new models, and more were announced today.

My bet is on Anthropic.

That $961 billion includes things like airplanes and bullets, tech companies are only getting a taste of that pie not anywhere close to the whole thing.

Obviously, but that's a huge number and some tens-of-billions amount of that absolutely does flow towards hyperscalers. Contractors need compute.

Amazon's stake in Anthropic is (was?) worth $61 billion.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ai-bet-anthropic-soar...

It will be interesting to see how they handle this.

> Anthropic is not even close to too big to fail.

Ironically, of all things Trump has done so far, closing Anthropic could set a new record for pissing off the highest number of people globally. Outside of HN with a group of dedicated people who is against it, the whole global software world is already running on CC.

I would find that a lot more plausible if people had not spent the past week giving me similar arguments, in precisely the same tone, for why this was an empty threat and would never happen in the first place. If Amazon and Google do not either bow down or immediately join a business coalition to get Trump out of power, Hegseth will be even happier to get an opportunity to prove his power by destroying them. Trump either doesn't want to stop him or has become too senile to stop him.

GovCloud revenue is in the tens of billions of dollars. Bedrock less so. Almost every FedRAMP product uses the same codebase for Fed and non-Fed, and this would force most FedRAMP vendors to blackball Anthropic.

The JWCC, which is larger than GovCloud, was only $9b, split across three companies, over ten years. It’s peanuts compared to the investments that the hyperscalers have with Anthropic.

JWCC is not the only project. Vendors like Crowdstrike also rely on hyperscalers to serve their products to federal customers, and the codebase is shared.

This announcement has made Anthropic toxic in the entire dependency chain because it means years of efforts and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars rearchitecting entire platforms and renegotiating contracts.

The entire cybersecurity industry has a TAM of $208 BILLION [0]

[0] - https://www.bccresearch.com/market-research/information-tech...

> because it means years of efforts and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars rearchitecting entire platforms and renegotiating contracts.

This is exactly why this announcement has not made Anthropic toxic. The entire industry knows how ridiculous this move is from Hegseth, and it’s going to be rolled back next week once the adults get back from their weekend.

I'm concerned there's not that many adults left, else they'd have advised Trump and Hegseth not to act this way.

This restriction is viral. If AWS hosts Claude models, Lockheed can no longer use AWS for anything. Every defense contractor will pull out. What if Lockheed uses Asana or Jira or Slack? Guess what, they better not use Claude ANYWHERE in their organizations, or else all defense contractors will have to drop these products. Any any other company whose product they use in the design or manufacture of their products - if anyone, anywhere is using Claude products, they have to be dropped.

The downstream effects of this are HUGE.

It will really depend on the fine details. If Amazon would lose its military contracts unless it dropped Claude, then Claude will be gone tomorrow. They just got a half billion contract for the Air Force earlier this year, and it's not their only military contract, and they're going to want to be well positioned next time something like the JEDI contract comes along.

Also, AWS has a long history of rolling over when politicians make noise about AWS customers, going back to when Joe Lieberman casually asked Bezos to please stop supporting Wikileaks.

I don't think you understand. This supply chain risk designation is viral. Every Claude model provider now has to decide whether to (1) drop Anthropic models, or (2) drop every single government contract, every contract with government contractors, or any customer who has any customer to any degree of connection to a government contract [which is effectively everyone], or (3) go to jail.

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