I think you're right, this isn't about a specific request but about defense contractors not getting to draw moral red lines. Palmer Luckey's statement on X/Twitter reflects the same idea: https://x.com/PalmerLuckey/status/2027500334999081294

The thinking seems to be that you can't have every defense contractor coming in with their own, separate set of red lines that they can adjudicate themselves and enforce unilaterally. Imagine if every missile, ship, plane, gun, and defense software builder had their own set of moral red lines and their own remote kill switch for different parts of your defense infrastructure. Palmer would prefer that the President wield these powers through his Constitutional role as commander-in-chief.

There's a hell of a difference between "we don't like your terms so we're going to use a different supplier" and "we don't like your terms, so we're going to use the power of the federal government to compel you to change them". The president is the commander-in-chief of the military, but Anthropic is not part of the military! Outside serving the public interest in a crisis, the president has no right to compel Anthropic to do anything. We are clearly not in a crisis, much less a crisis that demands kill bots and domestic surveillance. This is clear overreach, and claiming a constitutional justification is mockery.

Of course a contractor could not decide to unilaterally shut off their missile system, because that would be a contract violation.

A contractor may try to negotiate that unilateral shut off ability with the government, and the government should refuse those terms based on democratic principles, as Luckey said.

But suppose the contractor doesn’t want to give up that power. Is it okay for the government to not only reject the contract, but go a step further and label the contractor as a “supply chain risk?” It’s not clear that this part is still about upholding democratic principles. The term “supply chain risk” seems to have a very specific legal meaning. The government may not have the legal authority to make a supply chain risk designation in this case.

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