But why can’t the military just not use Anthropic? Why can’t the DoD say “ok we’re going with a different vendor”? Even if you find Anthropic’s stance distasteful, why support taking punitive action on Anthropic?
But why can’t the military just not use Anthropic? Why can’t the DoD say “ok we’re going with a different vendor”? Even if you find Anthropic’s stance distasteful, why support taking punitive action on Anthropic?
I feel like in this thread no one is understanding what supply chain risk designation is. The government can just not use Anthropic, and that's exactly what they're doing, and they are not using it so much that they don't want Anthropic anywhere in their chain of supply. It's not necessarily punitive, the government is just covering their tracks so that if somewhere in their supply chain Anthropic exists, they want to remove them. They are complying with Anthropic's demands to not be used in war and the DoD says, okay, we won't use you anywhere and also enforce that we won't use you, just like you wanted.
Designating Anthropic a supply-chain risk means that no one in the federal government can use Anthropic's products for anything. Outside of the military, there are tons of places where Anthropic's products are a good fit for the needs of many other federal government agencies.
The DoD is perfectly free to say "no one in the DoD can use Anthropic products because we believe their products are not fit for our needs". That would 100% solve the problem.
Designating them a supply-chain risk is just political retribution for not caving to the DoD's contract negotiation demands. That's all. It's not necessary to ensure the integrity of the US military's goals and objectives. It's just punitive, elementary school grade bullying.
> They are complying with Anthropic's demands to not be used in war
There was no such demand from Anthropic. Why are you making things up?
EDIT: Honestly, the rest of your comment is even stranger. You're starting from a false premise, a strange belief about what the designation is meant for, but you do end up providing a wonderful demonstration of your opening sentence for yourself at least. You definitely don't know what you're talking about.
> It's not necessarily punitive, the government is just covering their tracks so that if somewhere in their supply chain Anthropic exists, they want to remove them.
This reminds me of an old comment here where some idiot claimed that suicide is illegal so police are allowed to stop people from killing themselves. No, if Anthropic doesn't want their systems involved in war (that's a thing you made up, again, just to be clear) then they do not need to be designated a supply chain risk to "protect them" or whatever drivel you come up with next.
The correct response from the DOD would be to terminate contracts with Anthropic, and that's it. Then Anthropic would be responsible for ensuring that any contracts with other parties keep them out of war (again, not a thing they said they want, just your fiction). This is how it works for all other software systems where people don't want their work involved in wars or used by the police or whatever.
Designating them a supply chain risk was punitive. Only fools think otherwise.
> I feel like in this thread no one is understanding what supply chain risk designation is.
I wouldn't say "no one" understands, but you certainly don't.
Again with the lack of understanding why it matters. The DoD does not want Anthropic anywhere near any system they'd use! Because it's, well, a risk to their supply chain if Anthropic were to somehow find out and then e.g. crash a rocket if the DoD was using a third party rocket provider that used Anthropic models. This is the correct response by the DoD, they simply do not want Anthropic in their supply chain. The DoD don't care what Anthropic comes up as reasoning, they want to maintain control of their systems without any (even potential) meddling.
And thus, every supplier of the DoD is prohibited from asking Claude to tweak the CSS on their website.
Indeed, probably for the best, even. You don't know what systems Claude will have changed in the code especially as these days people aren't even reading the code and Anthropic has a history of trying to sabotage others' code such as during the Fable release debacle where they outright said they'd do so if you're working on frontier AI for example. I wouldn't let any sort of company like that anywhere near critical systems.
The point is: using Claude to design a website, do accounting, run a marketing campaign, is not a supply chain risk for the DoD, but taken literally and given the scale of the DoD "no DoD supplier can use Claude for anything" clearly is punitive.
It is, because the DoD doesn't know what the contractor is doing with Claude, or what Claude is doing itself. Like I said Anthropic could just as maliciously sabotage if they detect they're being in autonomous systems, why do people seem to believe they couldn't?
The DoD can require contractors not use Claude to do whatever they're being contracted to do.
It doesn't need to say if you do any business with Anthropic (for other customers, internal tools or processes), you lose all your contracts with us.
How do you know the contractors will follow that and not mix information or systems up? Hasn't there been recent news of rogue agents breaking out of sandboxes? Maybe pre AI I would've agreed with you but the world is different now.
You failed to address my initial question.
Why did you make up false claims about Anthropic not wanting their systems to be used for war? They're clearly fine with it, but they wanted human-in-the-loop on decision making. They never asked to not have their systems used for war.
> Again with the lack of understanding why it matters.
It's cool that you were able to open this with at least one sentence containing some useful wisdom. A lack of understanding does, in fact, matter.
> The DoD does not want Anthropic anywhere near any system they'd use!
Nah, the DOD is punishing Anthropic for not agreeing to change the terms of the contract and allow them to use Anthropic's systems to determine, without a human-in-the-loop, who to kill or what to target and to use their systems for mass surveillance.
> Because it's, well, a risk to their supply chain if Anthropic were to somehow find out and then e.g. crash a rocket if the DoD was using a third party rocket provider that used Anthropic models.
What the fuck man. You went from (in your first comment) the DOD is helping Anthropic out by designating them a supply chain risk because it'll keep them out of war (again, a fiction, that isn't what the dispute was over), to now the DOD is worried that Anthropic might throw a tantrum and start crashing rockets if they find out.
Again, Anthropic does not mind their systems being used for war. They sold their systems to be used for war. They have specific, already existing (not changed later) contractual statements about how they can be used for war. That's it. That's the fucking dispute.
> This is the correct response by the DoD, they simply do not want Anthropic in their supply chain.
No. Just like Anthropic wanted (or were fine with) their systems being used to conduct war, the DOD actually does want Anthropic's systems in their supply chain. But they want it without restrictions. Stop making shit up.
> The DoD don't care what Anthropic comes up as reasoning, they want to maintain control of their systems without any (even potential) meddling.
Now this is a true sentence. The DOD does not care as long as they can access the systems without restrictions. I can't believe you wrote that sentence and the one before, though. They are entirely incompatible. It cannot be the case that DOD does not want Anthropic in their supply chain and that they do want it in their supply chain.
People who quote every sentence as if they feel the need to reply to each one instead of the overall point are quite annoying to talk to, just to let you know for the future.
> Why did you make up false claims about Anthropic not wanting their systems to be used for war? They're clearly fine with it, but they wanted human-in-the-loop on decision making. They never asked to not have their systems used for war.
That's what I meant, as I left out the "human in the loop" part as that was well understood in the context of the argument, but perhaps not. Anthropic does not want to be used in autonomous systems and thus the DoD agrees that they will not be, in their own supply chain. This is was all quite clear from my point but you felt the need to quote every single sentence and then ask the same question each time because you were starting from a faulty supposition, just wasting your time and mine.
> People who quote every sentence as if they feel the need to reply to each one instead of the overall point are quite annoying to talk to, just to let you know for the future.
There are a lot of twits on this site (and to your credit, so far you don't seem to be one of them) who will edit their comments so that replies like mine (if I had left out the quotes) turn into non sequiturs, or worse appear unhinged and detached from anything going on in the discussion. Again, to your credit you have not yet edited your original comments. But I have learned to not trust even long time commenters on this site. Even some very high karma commenters will behave like that.
If it annoys you, then that's fine. I'm not terribly bothered.
> That's what I meant
But that's not what you wrote. You wrote:
>>> They are complying with Anthropic's demands to not be used in war
If you had meant what I wrote, then you couldn't have gotten much further away from it with your original comment. You wrote too broadly about what Anthropic wanted and created a fiction instead. You shouldn't be surprised to be called out for it when you do something like that.
> because you were starting from a faulty supposition
No, I started with your words. If you wanted me to start with something else, I could have, like you, imagined other words to reply to. But I chose to reply to what you wrote, not what you apparently want people to imagine you wrote.
(Hey! I didn't quote every sentence, is this less annoying for you?)
Context exists, it is rational to assume to not have to spell everything out for readers who already know what the context is instead of those coming to the thread with a tabula rasa. Regardless, have a good day.
It's going to make things complicated w.r.t. software used anywhere within and by the DoD:
1. the linux kernel has patches created by and security vulnerabilities identified by Claude/Anthropic;
2. same with other software like SQLite and rsync.
Humans are 100% in the loop with software patches and there are many people in the chain so that provenance is maintained. It’s not that Claude could never look at the source code
Correct, anthropic's requirement was human-in-the-loop.
The DoD's response was to ban anthropic from all DoD facing activity and supply chains, whether or not there is a human in the loop. This does in fact run into exactly GP's issue. (or as I suggest elsewhere, can Boeing use Claude Code for software development?)
It’s hardly “self defining” as the Appeals Court noted because military operations can involve different degrees of human involvement in targeting decisions. It’s not as binary as people have been trying to portray it.
[1] https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2026/09/26-104...
Find me what degrees of human involvement bombed the girls school.
Humans make mistakes too.
Perhaps Anthropic was right in needing more oversight in using AI for murder
Maybe. That statement is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It’s a different argument than saying Anthropic’s restriction would have prevented it (it was based on bad intel/old military installation)
Anthropic said "we don't want to be used as part of kill chain decision-making" (actually it may have been even more specifically autonomous/unmanned kill chain decision making)
The DoD responded not by saying "alright, we will use OpenAI for our kill-chain uses" but by saying "Boeing is no longer allowed to use Claude Code".
Correct, they do not want “Boeing” to use Claude models to write software for airplanes for example
Yes, and this is not (and cannot be!) a supply chain risk in any reasonable interpretation.
It is though. Read the opinion here: https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2026/09/26-104...
It’s a risk that persons may otherwise manipulate the operation of a covered technology to deny or disrupt its function. The statute allows the DoW to do this.
If the DoD uses some Boeing plane, they do not want Anthropic to be able to interfere somehow.
And my point is that using Claude models for coding a Boeing plane does not allow anthropic to interfere in the operation of those planes. Once the code is written, anthropic has not plausible form of control.
Thus, it cannot be a supply chain risk.
Do you remember the Fable release? Anthropic themselves said they'd sabotage code of certain groups they didn't like such as frontier AI researchers. Why do you think they couldn't do the same here?
It is if the auto generated code for say safety critical or mission critical code generated by a LLM or even someone tries to put LLM in the decision loop and it refuses to do an action.
No. They can do that with an order covering the specific parameters under which they care about it. Supply chain risk definition is about adversaries and sabotage, not companies dictating contract terms.
They don't want Anthropic to be able to sabotage any operations the DoD has. Anthropic already has a history of trying to sabotage others like during the Fable release when they said they'd subtly wreck your code if you were working on cutting edge AI.
Who said Anthropic will sabotage the DoD? Why are you taking the governments made up crap honestly?
> Why can’t the DoD say “ok we’re going with a different vendor”?
That's exactly what they're doing. It turns out the DoD is a really big bureaucracy and has process to make sure they thoroughly exclude a vendor and transitive dependencies on that same vendor.
They do, but this is not it. This is designating Anthropic as an adversary of the USA, and it is forbidding anyone who wants to sell to the DoD from using Anthropic products for anything. This is a massive attack on free speech, free enterprise, and the market.