Doesn't NSA have a backdoor to all these companies by default? I could have sworn I read somewhere years ago that the government demands a backdoor to all US companies if they can't get in on their own.

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nerdsniper 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

3 parts to this:

1) The US gov generally does have close partnerships with most large-scale, mature tech companies. Sometimes this is just a division dedicated to handling their requests, often it’s a special portal or API they can use to “lawfully” grab information from for their investigations. Often times these function somewhat like backdoors. Anthropic is large, but not mature. Additional changes must still take place for “backdoor” style partnerships to be effected.

2) The NSA can pretty much use any computer system they set their eyes on - famously including computers that were never connected to the internet secured in the middle of a mountain (Stuxnet). If they wanted to secretly utilize the Claude API without Claude finding out, that is within their capabilities. Google had to encrypt all their internal datacenter traffic to try to prevent the NSA from logging all their server-to-server traffic, after mistakenly thinking their internal networks were secure enough not to need that.

3) This isn’t about being “able” to do whatever the administration wants. This is the administration demonstrating the consequences of perceived insubordination to make other companies think twice about ever trying to limit use of corporate technology.

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chirau 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Interesting.

On point 3, are you saying this will dissuade other companies from taking Anthropic's stance? Somehow I actually thought this would set precedent for how to actually stand up to gov. Quite interesting how we see the same situation and come up with totally different conclusions.

	▲	toraway 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They're describing the intent of the administration not predicting the future impact on other companies. Essentially making the point that your original question about NSA being able to get whatever they want clandestinely isn't actually relevant because Hegseth/Trump don't actually care this much about Claude doing X or Y -- they were trying to make an example of punishing Anthropic with the expectation they would immediately crumble like the rest of Big Tech, as a warning for anyone else to stay in line and keeps their mouth shut.

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readitalready 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

NSA legally isn't allowed to spy on US citizens directly, due to the NSA being a US military organization and the Posse Comitatus act prohibits the US military from being used as a US policing force.

It's one of the hidden and forgotten revelations about the Snowden leaks, where he showed that the NSA had a bunch of filters in their top-secret classified systems to filter out communications from US citizens. Those filters exist because of Posse Comitatus.

	▲	chirau 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		How does the filter work? Identity first? As in, do they access the data/activity first and stop when they realize the person is a citizen? Otherwise how do they approach it?

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helloplanets 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A backdoor is a completely different thing when it comes to an AI company, as compared to a social media company. Not really even sure what it would mean when it comes to doing inference on an LLM. Having access to the weights, training data and inference engine?

The model of Claude the DoD is asking for more than likely doesn't even exist in a production ready form. The post-training would have to be completely different for the model the DoD is asking for.

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quietsegfault 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I have worked at a number of software companies that would be "interesting" to get access to, with enough intimate information to know if there was a super-sekret backdoor. If "all US companies" had to comply .. well .. I guess I was really lucky to work for those that somehow fell through the cracks.