Ignore the (pre-established) name of the rule, and focus only on what it does: it allows the DoD to exclude a supplier from competitive bidding.

It stop any one with government contracts from using anthropic. Not just bidding on government contracts.

The latter is how the former is accomplished. Government employees cannot simply choose not to work with an otherwise winning bidder, so the government has pre-defined rules that allow pre-exclusion from the bidding process. This is one.

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.

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.

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?

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:

https://www.acquisition.gov/far/52.204-30

> 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.

So other parts of the government are allowed to work with companies that have been determined to be "supply chain risks"? That sounds unlikely.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

> 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.