| ▲ | thimabi 4 hours ago |
| The problem with forcing public policy on companies is that companies are ultimately made from individuals, and surely you can’t force public policy down people’s throats. I’m sure nothing good can come out of strong-arming some of the brightest scientists and engineers the U.S. has. Such a waste of talent trying to make them bend over to the government’s wishes… instead of actually fostering innovation in the very competitive AI industry. |
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| ▲ | timr 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I don't see how public policy is being "forced" on anyone here? It seems like the system is working as intended: government wants to do X; company A says "I won't allow my product to be used for X"; government refuses to do business with company A. One side thinks the government should be allowed to dictate terms to a private supplier, the other side thinks the private supplier should be allowed to dictate terms to the government. Both are half right. You can argue that the government refusing to do any business with company A is overreach, I suppose, but I imagine that the next logical escalation in this rhetorical slapfight is going to be the government saying "we cannot guarantee that any particular use will not include some version of X, and therefore we have to prevent working with this supplier"...which I sort of see? Just to take the metaphor to absurdity, imagine that a maker of canned tomatoes decided to declare that their product cannot be used to "support a war on terror". Regardless of your feelings on wars on terror and/or canned tomatoes, the government would be entirely rational to avoid using that supplier. |
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| ▲ | inkysigma 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think the bigger insanity here is the labeling of a supply chain risk. It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic. It's another when it actively attempts to isolate Anthropic for political reasons. | | |
| ▲ | ted_dunning 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It means that all companies contracting with the government have to certify that they don't use Anthropic products at all. Not just in the products being offered to the government. This is a massive body slam. This means that Nvidia, every server vendor, IBM, AWS, Azure, Microsoft and everybody else has to certify that they don't do business directly or indirectly using Anthropic products. | |
| ▲ | snickerbockers 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic. But that's what the supply-chain risk is for? I'm legitimately struggling to understand this viewpoint of yours wherein they are entitled to refuse to directly purchase Anthropic products but they're not entitled to refuse to indirectly purchase Anthropic products via subcontractors. | | |
| ▲ | tyre 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Supply chain risk is not meant for this. The government isn't banning Anthropic because using it harms national security. They are banning it in retribution for Anthropic taking a stand. It's the same as Trump claiming emergency powers to apply tariffs, when the "emergency" he claimed was basically "global trade exists." Yes, the government can choose to purchase or not. No, supply chain risk is absolutely not correct here. | | |
| ▲ | snickerbockers 20 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It doesn't harm national security, but only so long as it's not in the supply-chain. They can't have Lockheed putting Anthropic's products into a fighter jet when Anthropic has already said their products will be able to refuse to carry out certain orders by their own autonomous judgement. |
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| ▲ | timr 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic. This is literally the mechanism by which the DoD does what you're suggesting. Generally speaking, the DoD has to do procurement via competitive bidding. They can't just arbitrarily exclude vendors from a bid, and playing a game of "mother may I use Anthropic?" for every potential government contract is hugely inefficient (and possibly illegal). So they have a pre-defined mechanism to exclude vendors for pre-defined reasons. Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate. | | |
| ▲ | tshaddox 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That doesn’t sound right. Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website. | | |
| ▲ | snickerbockers 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Let me put it this way: DoD needs a new drone and they want some gimmicky AI bullshit. They contract the drone from Lockheed. Lockheed is not allowed to source the gimmicky AI bullshit from Anthropic because they have been declared a supply-chain risk on the basis that they have publicly stated their intention to produce products which will refuse certain orders from the military. | |
| ▲ | timr 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website. Yes, this is the part where I acknowledge that it might be overreach in my original comment, but it's not nearly as extreme or obvious as the debate rhetoric is implying. There are various exclusion rules. This particular rule was (speculating here!) probably chosen because a) the evocative name (sigh), and b) because it allows broader exclusion, in that "supply chain risks" are something you wouldn't want allowed in at any level of procurement, for obvious reasons. Calling canned tomatoes a supply chain risk would be pretty absurd (unless, I don't know...they were found to be farmed by North Korea or something), but I can certainly see an argument for software, and in particular, generative AI products. I bet some people here would be celebrating if Microsoft were labeled a supply chain risk due to a long history of bugs, for example. | | |
| ▲ | fooster 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | MIGHT be overreach to call this a supply chain risk?!? That is absolutely ludicrous. | | |
| ▲ | timr 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | To quote one of the greatest movies of all time: That’s just, like, your opinion, man. |
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| ▲ | dyslexit 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You're making it sound like this is commonly practiced and a standard procedure for the DoD, yet according to Anthropic, >Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action—one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company. Some very brief googling also confirmed this for me too. >Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate. This statement misses the point. The political punishment to disallow all US agencies and gov contractors from using Anthropic for _any _ purpose, not just domestic spying, IS the retaliation, and is the very thing that's concerning. Calling it "DoD vendor exclusion list" or whatever other placating phrase or term doesn't change the action. | | |
| ▲ | snickerbockers 23 minutes ago | parent [-] | | >an unprecedented action it's also unprecedented for a contractor to suddenly announce their products will, from now on, be able to refuse to function based on the product's evaluation of what it perceives to be an ethical dilemma. Just because silicon valley gets away with bullying the consumer market with mandatory automatic updates and constantly-morphing EULAs doesn't mean they're entitled to take that attitude with them when they try to join the military industrial complex. Actually they shouldn't even be entitled to take that attitude to the consumer market but sadly that battle was lost a long time ago. >for _any _ purpose they're allowed to use it for any purpose not related to a government contract. |
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| ▲ | inkysigma 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm not completely familiar with bidding procedures but don't bidding procedures usually have requirements? Why not just list a requirement of unrestricted usage? Or state, we require models to be available for AI murder drones or whatever. Anthropic then can't bid and there's no need to designate them a supply chain risk. | | |
| ▲ | skeledrew 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Anthropic then can't bid Thing is that very much want access to Anthropic's models. They're top quality. So that definitely want Anthropic to bid. AND give them unrestricted access. |
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| ▲ | ef2efe 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Its a government department signalling who's boss. |
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| ▲ | galleywest200 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The government declaring a domestic company as a supply chain threat is a tad more than “refusing to do business” don’t you think? | | |
| ▲ | timr 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | adrr 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It stop any one with government contracts from using anthropic. Not just bidding on government contracts. | | |
| ▲ | timr 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | ted_dunning 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | timr 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | clhodapp 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | AlexCoventry 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 | | |
| ▲ | timr 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | tclancy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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? |
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| ▲ | thimabi 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The Department of War is threatening to […] Invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to serve their model to the military and "tailor its model to the military's needs" This issue is about more than the government blacklisting a company for government procurement purposes. From what I understand, the government is floating the idea of compelling Anthropic — and, by extension, its employees — to do as the DoD pleases. If the employees’ resistance is strong enough, there’s no way this will serve the government’s interests. | |
| ▲ | jakeydus 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The government is doing far more than “refusing to do business” here. | |
| ▲ | thereitgoes456 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The President is crashing out on X because a company didn’t do what they wanted. “Forcing” is not a binary. Do you seriously believe that the government’s behavior here is acceptable and has no chilling effect on future companies? | |
| ▲ | jwpapi 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean Secretary of War can not act any other way to be honest. It’s just a fucked up situation. | | |
| ▲ | ted_dunning 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | There is no Secretary of War. The name of the Defense Department is set by statute that has not been named regardless of Pete Hegseth's cosplay desires. |
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| ▲ | piskov 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > I’m sure nothing good can come out of strong-arming some of the brightest scientists and engineers the U.S. has And where would they emigrate? Russia? China? UAE? :-) |
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| ▲ | EdNutting 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The UK and Europe welcome the US Footgun Operation. Plenty of opportunities for those top researchers and engineers over here. The EU (which is not the same as Europe), is also looking a bit sharper on AI regulation at the moment (for now… not perfect but sharper etc etc). | | |
| ▲ | dmix 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The EU and UK is a long way from attracting top AI talent purely from opportunity and monetary terms. Not to mention UK is arguably further down the mass surveillance pipeline than the US. They’ve always had more aggressive domestic intelligence surveillance laws which was made clear during the Snowden years, they’ve had flock style cameras forever, and they have an anti encryption law pitched seemingly yearly. I’d imagine most top engineers would rather try to push back on the US executive branch overreach than move. At least for the time being. | | |
| ▲ | EdNutting 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | For sure we’re not currently attracting the talent. There’s more to that than just money, but money is significant factor. When it comes to compensation, AI is too broad a category to have a meaningful debate. Hardware or software or mathematics or what kind of person? Etc. I’m not gonna dispute the UK being further down some parts of the road. Not sure what you’d count as top engineers, but I know enough that have been asking about and moving to the UK/EU that it’s been a noticeable reversal of the historic trends. Also, a major slowdown of these kinds of people in the UK/EU wanting to move to the US. | |
| ▲ | busko an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Exactly. Attracting talent is not the same as having talent. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/education... You attract talent for the same reasons china attracts sales; at the cost of your very own rights. Look at the towns suffering around data centres for a start. The rest of us are happy to pay for what you'll do to yourselves. | |
| ▲ | reaperducer 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The EU and UK is a long way from attracting top AI talent purely from opportunity and monetary terms. Which is why people are talking about this -- it's about ideology now. You may personally be motivated solely by money. Not everybody is you. | | |
| ▲ | dmix 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’m not an AI engineer but it’s not hard to imagine why some bright talent would want to work at the most exciting AI companies in the US while also making 3-10x what they’d make in Europe. Ideology is easy to throw around for internet comments but working on the cutting edge stuff next to the brightest minds in the space will always be a major personal draw. Just look at the Manhattan project, I doubt the primary draw for all of those academics was getting to work on a bomb. It was the science, huge funding, and interpersonal company. | | |
| ▲ | EdNutting 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | See my other comments around here. This idea that salaries in the US are so much higher than Europe for all these top AI roles just isn’t true. Even the big American companies have been opening offices in places like London to hire the top talent at high salaries. This also isn’t hypothetical. I know top-talent engineers and researchers that have moved out of the USA in the last 12 months due to the political climate (which goes beyond just the AI topics). And you might want to read a few books on the Manhattan project and the people involved before you use that analogy. I don’t think it’s particularly strong. | | |
| ▲ | dmix 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I know top-talent engineers and researchers that have moved out of the USA in the last 12 months due to the political climate Are they working remotely for US companies? In Canada that’s very much still the case everywhere you look > Even the big American companies have been opening offices in places like London to hire the top talent at high salaries. I assumed this discussion was about rejecting working for US companies who would be susceptible to the executive branch’s bullying, not whether you can you make a US tier salary off American companies while not living in America. If you’re doing that you might as well live in America among among the other talent and maximize your opportunities. | | |
| ▲ | EdNutting 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, it’s a counterpoint on salaries… “Even the American companies” ie they wouldn’t have to open offices here, nor would they have to pay high salaries, to compete for talent if everyone they wanted was in the US or could be so easily attracted to move to the US. The point is clearly things aren’t so one-sided as people seem to think. |
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| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | piskov 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Do UK and Europe have hardware manufacturing for those researches to work with once US imposes GPU export restrictions to them at the first whiff of competition/threat? | | |
| ▲ | EdNutting 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes. And the US can’t realistically stop our well-funded homegrown AI Hardware startups from manufacturing with TSMC. This is part of why there’s funding from the EU to develop Sovereign AI capabilities, currently focused on designing our own hardware. We’re nothing like as far behind as you might expect in terms of tech, just in terms of scale. Also, while US export restrictions might make things awkward for a short while, it wouldn’t stop European innovation. The chips still flow, our own hardware companies would scale faster due to demand increase, and there’s the adage about adversity being the parent of all innovation (or however it goes). | | |
| ▲ | piskov 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > And the US can’t realistically stop our well-funded homegrown AI Hardware startups from manufacturing with TSMC See what happened to Russian Baikal production on TSMC | | |
| ▲ | EdNutting 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | You mean because of the international sanctions that needed Taiwanese, British and Dutch support to be effective? Or because of the revoked processor design licenses from the British company Arm (which is still UK headquartered… despite being NASDAQ listed and largely owned by Japanese firm SoftBank)? Or perhaps you think the US could stop us using the 12nm fabs being built by TSMC on European soil? Or could stop us manufacturing RISC-V-based chips (Swiss-headquartered technology)? The US is weak in digital-logic silicon fabrication and it knows it. That’s why it’s been so panicked about Intel and been trying to get TSMC to build fabs on US soil. They’re pouring tens of billions of dollars into trying to claw back ownership and control of it, but it’s not like Europe or China or others are standing still on it either. | | |
| ▲ | piskov 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Or perhaps you think the US could stop us using the 12nm fabs being built by TSMC on European soil? Being built as in not operating yet? 12 nm gpu is what? Nvidia 1080/2060 level? Those top researchers mentioned would love to train on that. Also how many gpus would be made annually? Also what about CPU? You gonna use risc-v? With what toolchain? Chinese could pull it off in a few years, yeah. EU? Nah. Started thinking about sovereignty too late compared to China |
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| ▲ | sho_hn 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The EUV and other factory equipment everyone's using is predominantly European. High-end testing tools used in R&D are largely European. The fabs aren't, and that is no small thing. The tech stack is there though. It's pretty tiresome that the HN audience keeps assuming Europe doesn't have "tech" because it doesn't have Facebook. Where do you think all the wealth comes from? Europe is all over everyone's R&D and supply chain. | | |
| ▲ | EdNutting 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I sometimes wonder whether people realise which country ASML is based in, and which country their major suppliers are in (e.g. optics: Germany) |
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| ▲ | axus 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The GPUs and AIUs aren't being manufactured in the US. |
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| ▲ | SauntSolaire 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | To make 1/10th the salary they're making now? | | |
| ▲ | EdNutting 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You seem to have a very ill-informed view of UK/EU salaries in this particular sector; And also: yeah, people take salary hits to go do things they believe in (this is like, the entire premise of the underpaid American startup founder model) - it should come as no surprise that people are willing to forgo pay for reasons other than just building their own business / making themselves personally wealthy. | | |
| ▲ | SauntSolaire 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | We're talking about the "brightest scientist and engineers" in the AI sector, you may be underestimating US salaries for the people that's referring to. And no, working remotely for US companies doesn't count. |
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| ▲ | readthenotes1 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That much? | | |
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| ▲ | thimabi 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I agree. And even if those workers stay in the U.S., there’s absolutely no guarantee that they’ll do their best to favor the government’s interests — quite the opposite, if anything. At the end of the day it’s a matter of incentives, and good knowledge work can’t simply be forced out of people that are unwilling to cooperate. |
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| ▲ | zymhan 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Well that's quite a leap to make. Plenty of room in between those options. | |
| ▲ | csomar 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > ... UAE? :-) At least you are not paying taxes for the things you don't agree on. It's indeed a strange time we are living in. |
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