Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw310822 | Hacker News Reader

From the statement:

"Secretary Hegseth has implied this designation would restrict anyone who does business with the military from doing business with Anthropic. The Secretary does not have the statutory authority to back up this statement. Legally, a supply chain risk designation under 10 USC 3252 can only extend to the use of Claude as part of Department of War contracts—it cannot affect how contractors use Claude to serve other customers.

In practice, this means:

If you are an individual customer or hold a commercial contract with Anthropic, your access to Claude—through our API, claude.ai, or any of our products—is completely unaffected. If you are a Department of War contractor, this designation—if formally adopted—would only affect your use of Claude on Department of War contract work. Your use for any other purpose is unaffected."

View on HN

I'm wondering how this plays out in practice. Does the administration decide to strongarm contractors into cutting all ties? Will that extend to someone like google who provides compute to anthropic? Will the administration just plain ignore any court ruling? (as they've shown they're ready to do recently with the tarrifs situation)

If the legal system works as intended, the blast radius isn't too big here and something Anthropic will accept even if it hurts them. Maybe they even win and get the supply chain risk designation lifted. But I have zero faith that the legal system will make a difference here. It all comes down to how far the administration wants to go in imposing it's will.

Bleak.

It does NOT extend to compute.

GCP and AWS cannot use Claude to build anything part of a DoD contract, but they do not need to deny Anthropic access to compute itself.

> conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic

Surely that would cover both buying things from and selling things to Anthropic.

Yes but that part is an overreach (they don't actually have the authority to do this, regardless of what they say.)

They can also classify it as restricted data -- like nuclear weapons technology.

Sure, there will be a court battle, but I don't think these companies want to take that chance. They'll capitulate after the lawyers realize that option is on the table.

> They'll capitulate after the lawyers realize that option is on the table.

Hopefully their lawyers read HN comments so they can negotiate with your deeper understanding of the legal landscape.

> They can also classify it as restricted data -- like nuclear weapons technology.

Nuclear weapons technology is restricted under very specific legislative authority, where is the corresponding authority that could be selectively applied to a particular vendors AI models or services?

EDA software, software to design computer chips in general, has been classified as ITAR now under this administration. Trump can do that to AI.

agreed but the current administration is pretty adept at using the slimmest margin for justification and benefiting from the fact that the legal process playing out over years is extremely detrimental to everyone but the government

Reply on news.ycombinator.com