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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.