bediger4000 2026-02-27 15:45 UTC link

I agree. This is a spectacular mistake. Anthropic has the best "AI" on the planet. Anthropic can spin up a giant "Claude" and plan rings around the Pentagon. DoD better get used to losing that fight.

riffic 2026-02-27 16:28 UTC link

the Pentagon is the name of a building (pretty much a very large bikeshed). I see the actual agency is named by the author as the Defense Department and one of the officials in question is a Defense Secretary. Interestingly, the bikeshed itself has its own spokespeople.

nubg 2026-02-27 16:31 UTC link

This whole standoff could set a very important precedent of the Trump administration not getting what they want, and not in a "maneuvered out of the news spotlight" kind of way (e.g. Greenland), but in a public "FUCK OFF right in your face" kind of way.

The worst that can happen to Anthropic is one of the two things mentioned; loosing some contracts or some fake forced management from the Pentagon. maybe Dario having to leave, certainly a loss for him and people who believe in him but probably nothing world-changing.

The worst that can happen to the Trump administration is the beginning of its end, when people realize you can simply stand up to their bullying and with all the standoffs they have going on in parallel, maybe they will die a death by a thousand cuts?

delichon 2026-02-27 16:34 UTC link

Anthropic has an excellent balance sheet. It basically has fuck you money that would let it walk away from the federal trough without existential risk. And hopefully extra dollars from users like me could compensate and then some in the fullness of time.

TimorousBestie 2026-02-27 16:37 UTC link

Article doesn’t demonstrate a good understanding of DoW’s relationship with contractors. Anthropic wanted those sweet, sweet, taxpayer dollars—well, this is what happens when you make a Faustian bargain.

> One option is to invoke the Defense Production Act. . .

> Another threat would be to declare Anthropic to be a supply chain risk. . .

The first is a wrist-slap that still gets the government what they want; the second is an existential threat to Anthropic. Their main partners are all “dogs of the military”. Microsoft, Intuit, NVIDIA: all government contractors. I can’t find one company that they have a working relationship with that doesn’t hold at least one govt contract.

The idea that Claude could alignment fake its way out of a change in contractual terms is silly. The DoW has all sorts of legal and administrative tools it can choose to leverage against contractors that fail to perform. Usually it doesn’t, because of a “norm” that says the private defense sector runs more smoothly when the government doesn’t try to micromanage it.

Remind me again how good this administration is at upholding norms?

LogicFailsMe 2026-02-27 16:42 UTC link

I don't have a lot of hope here. When most of the creme de la creme of the billionaire class capitulated to Trump at the beginning of his term, that set the tone for everything that followed IMO. It's astounding to me that so many are willing to see him trample on the Constitution and separation of powers when they'd scream like stuck pigs if any other party attempted it. And that's the way a lot of influential Americans like it I guess. Like I said, not a lot of hope. YMMV.

owenthejumper 2026-02-27 16:47 UTC link

Everything about this situation is absolutely bonkers. Marking a US company as a supply chain risk hasn't been done before AFAIK, and is a guaranteed end of the company.

It's the US government basically unilaterally deciding to end a leading AI researcher company. Years of lawsuits will follow, comparisons to "communism", accusations of Trump/Heghseth being Chinese/Russia agents (because well, how else do you hand over the AI win to China than by killing one of your top 2?)

tokyobreakfast 2026-02-27 16:57 UTC link

Imagine one of the defense primes telling the DoW, "We won't build you these planes, they're just too darned lethal!"

Eggpants 2026-02-27 17:02 UTC link

What’s interesting is Anthropic being singled out here. That either means:

1- OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc have no problem with their products being used to kill people so no need to bully them.

2- These other products are so terrible at the task that the clown shoe wearing SecDef is forced to try to bully Anthropic.

jstummbillig 2026-02-27 17:04 UTC link

On the one hand it's fantastic that people are resisting and, if nothing else, raising awareness and buying time.

On the other hand, is autonomous war not obviously the endgame, given how quickly capabilities are increasing and that it simply does not require much intelligence (relatively speaking) to build something that points a gun at something and pulls a trigger?

It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it. I'd love to hear about different scenarios scenario.

khalic 2026-02-27 17:21 UTC link

I can't believe how many people take the anthropic statement at face value. You need to concentrate on what they are implicitly acknowledging. They will spy on non us citizens. How philanthropic

edit: how about the downvoters give a counterargument instead of trying to bury this comment?

dang 2026-02-27 17:49 UTC link

Related ongoing thread:

Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47173121 - Feb 2026 (1405 comments)

y-c-o-m-b 2026-02-27 17:50 UTC link

My belief is they are terrified of China and this seems evident when you take into account the moves they're making with Venezuela, Iran, and the increased adoption of authoritarian tactics. We're trying to play catch-up with China's rapid rise as a super-power and the AI infrastructure is one of the few major developments we still have control over, for now. I sympathize with Dario, he's stuck in a very bad position on this. We do not want China to operate on this level while we sit back with one hand tied behind our backs. On the other hand, this administration is making extremely poor decisions and arguably causing extensive harm domestically and internationally, so it's a lose-lose situation for Dario really.

snowwrestler 2026-02-27 17:56 UTC link

Use of the DPA can be litigated, and surely would be. Designation as a supply chain risk surely would be as well.

These court cases would produce bad outcomes either way. If the court finds for Anthropic, future DoD leadership will find itself constrained or at least chilled. Or if the court finds for the government, an expansive permissive view of the DPA might encourage future administrations to compel tech companies to make AIs break the law in other ways, for example by suppressing certain political points of view in output.

National defense is strongest if the military is extremely powerful but carefully judicious in the application of that power. That gives us the highest “top end” capability of performance. If military leadership insists on acting recklessly, then eventually guardrails are installed, with the result of a diminished ability to respond effectively to low-probability, high risk moments. One of many nuances and paradoxes the current political leadership does not seem to understand.

FrustratedMonky 2026-02-27 17:57 UTC link

Yeah it is. The Military has put itself in the position of arguing for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. In what way can that be spun as a positive.

They are arguing to do things that shouldn't be allowed anyway.

FrustratedMonky 2026-02-27 18:06 UTC link

NDAA (The "Huawei Rule") is for cases when a foreign entity has infiltrated or taken over the company in question.

But DOD wants to use Anthropic so is really confirming that there is no foreign entity issues. They want to use it.

So to use NDAA (The "Huawei Rule"), is nakedly false and being used as a punishment.

Which if allowed to happen, could be used against any US Corporation to enforce compliance with the regime..

mrexcess 2026-02-27 18:13 UTC link

Just want to note the emergence of a two-tiered imbalance. Frontier AI providers are stacking the guardrails so high that everyday citizens can't even ask an LLM what boobs are, but simultaneously providing government with AI lacking guardrails around "any lawful purpose".

That's fundamentally antidemocratic and it normalizes the departure from the Western Enlightenment standard of, "the same law governs everyone".

josefritzishere 2026-02-27 18:53 UTC link

It really is beyond the pale to threaten a private company in this way outside of war time. It's an unthinkable overreach.

CrossVR 2026-02-27 19:53 UTC link

> Dario Amodei published an essay warning about potential dangers from powerful AI — including domestic mass surveillance (which he brands “entirely illegitimate”)

Why is only domestic surveillance by an AI dangerous? I guess Europeans are not worth protecting from the dangers of AI?

wg0 2026-02-27 20:25 UTC link

I have a question. Is this Trump effect or Pentagon would have threatened otherwise too?

Genuine question.

smt88 2026-02-27 16:27 UTC link

Claude is the best, but Gemini with DoD money could get as good as Claude very easily

dyauspitr 2026-02-27 16:29 UTC link

The problem is they’re going to hit them with a wrench and no one will do anything because there’s no rule of law at that level left in the country. Just sycophancy and backroom deals.

jameskilton 2026-02-27 16:29 UTC link

"The Pentagon" has been the nomenclature for DoD / DoW for decades. Everyone knows what it means.

ulbu 2026-02-27 16:30 UTC link

there is also a figure of speech used soo often, called metonymy.

loloquwowndueo 2026-02-27 16:36 UTC link

It’s called a metonym. Look it up.

harimau777 2026-02-27 16:36 UTC link

The Pentagon is a synecdoche for military leadership in the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche

georgemcbay 2026-02-27 16:39 UTC link

The White House is also the name of a building.

News sources have been using both building names (and several more I can think of off the top of my head) as short hand for the people who work inside of them for my entire life.

afavour 2026-02-27 16:43 UTC link

It has an excellent balance sheet that it’s actively chewing through, though.

denverllc 2026-02-27 16:43 UTC link

Do they? Are they different than OpenAi which I know has lots of debt and is losing money quarter over quarter with declining user share.

oceanplexian 2026-02-27 16:44 UTC link

If they are deemed a supply chain risk under the DPA anyone doing business with them and has government contracts has to drop them, including Google and Microsoft. The $200M is small potatoes compared to this.

tokai 2026-02-27 16:45 UTC link

>not in a "maneuvered out of the news spotlight" kind of way (e.g. Greenland)

I what world has the Greenland stuff been anything but a fuckoff?

bpodgursky 2026-02-27 16:47 UTC link

The DoD can invoke the DPA on any company it wants. Not really sure how this becomes Anthropic's fault.

stackskipton 2026-02-27 16:48 UTC link

Being declared Supply Chain Risk means if you do ANY business with US government, you cannot use something.

So many companies have US Government contracts. Maybe they are not majority of their business like Lockheed Martin or RTX but look at F10, on that list, MAYBE Walmart is only one without US Gov Contract, everyone else likely does.

mingus88 2026-02-27 16:48 UTC link

Benito Mussolini: 'Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.'

That is the reason why they would cry if the other party broke the rules to this degree. The other party is more aligned with regulations; taking power from corporations instead of giving it to them.

JumpCrisscross 2026-02-27 16:48 UTC link

> is a guaranteed end of the company

Why do you say this?

cogman10 2026-02-27 16:49 UTC link

> Remind me again how good this administration is at upholding norms?

When it comes to killing and spying on people with flimsy justifications that's a pretty bipartisan norm. Hell, Anthropic isn't even saying they won't help the DoW do just that, they just want to make sure there's a human in the loop.

The "USA Freedom Act" [1], which made most of the Patriot act permanent, had bipartisan support.

I'm all for reversing the continual ramp up of the police state and the industrial military complex. We need to recognize, however, that it's being funded and pushed by both parties. Generally playing on fears of the scary other. (Muslim terrorists in 00s, Mexicans today).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Freedom_Act

m0llusk 2026-02-27 16:51 UTC link

Just imagine if this move cascaded out of control and it ended up being the Trump administration that got blamed for pricking the AI bubble. This could become one of the most expensive power grabs in all of history.

mlsu 2026-02-27 16:55 UTC link

The executives at these huge corporations already know that they can stand up to the Trump administration, and that it will fold immediately. "TACO" is printed in the Wall St. Journal.

They willingly don't, because they know that they can use the administration to cement their market power. The surveillance state being built is one where would-be competitors, labor, well-meaning reformists, can be crushed on a whim for sham political reasons. A massive contraction of USA wealth, influence, and power, a loss of our living standard and place in the world -- that is the price everyone else has to pay, to keep the existing power structure in place. They will not release their grip on the wheel. Not until the ship hits the bottom of the sea.

mikkupikku 2026-02-27 17:00 UTC link

Planes are fairly predictable, they can more or less be relied on to do that leadership asks them and not more. This stuff is more akin to nerve gas, there's no telling where it will go once deployed.

phkahler 2026-02-27 17:02 UTC link

Not even a close comparison. A regular plane does not make a decision to fire on a target.

Arubis 2026-02-27 17:04 UTC link

The DoD is those defense contractors and companies' _primary target customer_. That doesn't just mean they're dependent on them as a customer. That means everyone working with, for, and adjacent to them has knowingly signed up to work with a defense contractor and to sell to someone that wants to use weapons in anger. That means these companies were mostly _founded_ to do that.

So instead, I invite you to imagine a medical supply company refusing to sell medical-grade sodium thiopental to the Bureau of Prisons.

saalweachter 2026-02-27 17:04 UTC link

So the cornerstone of one of the most common types of scam, affinity fraud, as well as a cornerstone of salesmanship, is convincing an audience that you're just like them. You have the same likes and dislikes, the same hobbies, the same cultural references, the same beliefs and values and hopes and dreams.

And then you use that affinity to manipulate them, to get them to do what you want, to get them to give you money.

I think the tech worker / engineering / online crowd has really let themselves get duped.

Sure, maybe some tech billionaires did start out in a similar place as many of us.

But a lot of what they tell us as part of selling us their brand is just affinity fraud, telling us they're just like us with the same values of privacy and open source and some hippie notion of peace, love and understanding.

But it's just a trick, and they just want money, power and fame.

It's not so much as the billionaires capitulating, it's that they never were the people they pretended to be, and keeping up the act is no longer how they get what they want.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2026-02-27 17:07 UTC link

It's not that they are too lethal. It's "we will not build a weapon system that is fully autonomous and acts without a human in the loop".

The big boy defense contractors won't touch that shit either because as soon as you mention the idea the engineers start shouting you down from the top of their lungs out of shear unbridled terror and the lawyers come storming in due to the endless legal risk said design would bring.

Mass Domestic surveillance sure they might do no problem but fully autonomous killbots or drones are gonna be a no go from pretty much every contractor other that doesn't carry a "missing the point of Lord of the Rings" name

kristjansson 2026-02-27 17:08 UTC link

> Anthropic wanted those sweet, sweet, taxpayer dollars

The sold services to a willing counterparty at mutually agreed upon terms. And now the other side of that deal has recalled that they're Twelve and You're Not My Real Mom You Can't Tell Me What To Do, and so wishes they had agreed to different terms and is throwing a tantrum to attempt to force a change.

And that's Anthropic's fault? That's a risk they should have predicted?

lkbm 2026-02-27 17:09 UTC link

Anthropic already went through the process of getting approved to work in secure network. (I think xAI may have as well, but the others just don't have that access.)

Enginerrrd 2026-02-27 17:10 UTC link

> it simply does not require much intelligence (relatively speaking) to build something that points a gun at something and pulls a trigger?

I could not disagree more. A big part of that is also knowing when NOT to pull the trigger. And it’s much harder than you’d think. If you think full self driving is a difficult task for computers, battlefield operations are an order of magnitude more complex, at least.

PaulDavisThe1st 2026-02-27 17:19 UTC link

There is no "DoW". Federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, are named by Congress. Just because the current administration wants to use a different name means nothing ... unless everyone just complies in advance. Will Congress actually rename it? Hard to say, but it doesn't seem very likely.

mediaman 2026-02-27 17:22 UTC link

It's not either of those. Anthropic put a lot of effort into getting FedRAMP approved so the DOD could use them; they are now being punished for that, and the government at present has no other good options. Other options could of course be developed, but other vendors may question how unreliable and untrustworthy the current DOD leadership is as as customer.

gom_jabbar 2026-02-27 17:25 UTC link

> It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it. I'd love to hear a different scenario.

Other players just need to assume that one player might do it in the future. This virtual future scenario has a causal effect on the now. The overall dynamic is that of an arms race (which radically changes what a player is).

ACCount37 2026-02-27 17:28 UTC link

It's not that hard. DoD could find a contractor to do it. But Anthropic wants no part of it, and I get why.

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