The DoD is blaming AI for this (you are of course right though)

You're overlooking the critical difference between the government-as-government and the government-as-purchaser. You have to play on Walmart's terms--which are draconian and exacting--to sell to Walmart. Why should the DOD be any different when it comes to stuff the DOD is buying or indirectly paying its contractors to buy?

Yeah, the DOD is such a huge purchaser that it can "ruin you" by blacklisting you if you don't play by its terms. The same is true about Walmart if you're a grocery supplier, Apple if you make electronics components, etc. Private companies absolutely exercise their power like that.

In this context, that designation just means that the DOD won’t use your product and it’s suppliers can’t use your product for DOD-facing activity. That’s not “thuggery” it’s something any buyer can do. Walmart or whatever could do it too.

> Private property and being able to run your firm on your own terms applies to everyone.

In theory, maybe. In reality, this is a privilege for a very small number of rich people.

> Anything that erodes the rights of companies erodes your rights.

How absurd. Food safety regulations don't erode my rights one bit, but they do erode the rights of companies to negligently poison me. I guess I'm losing the right to start a food company that poisons people, but I'm happy to forfeit that right in exchange for not being poisoned. We could extend this list of reasonable tradeoffs in which we all exchange the right to treat people poorly for the right not be treated poorly, and we all would benefit.

Except the people who want to sell poisoned food, those people will be worse off. I am okay with that.

No, companies have routinely killed millions of Americans for profit. I do not trust companies at all. Attacking companies to provide for Americans has always benefited society as a whole and has always had vast majority of support from voters.

Also what private property? Most Americans can't afford to buy homes and are being priced out of owning property entirely.

Corporations have eroded the livelihood of Americans more than the government ever has.

There is only one class that fights against raising the minimum wage, or establishing a 32 hour workweek, or enacting medicare for all, or providing a society free of pollution and it's always been the corporate class.

There has been no dominating force that has killed more American civilians than the American corporation.

Corporations can't even regulate themselves and you're trying to argue that the true enemy is a democratic government? Come on man. These types of retorts does not convince voters (so please continue saying them). Actually go out there and do some deep canvassing.

People rightfully hate corporations because they are the last vestige of monarchs, oligarchies, and authoritarians that are allowed to ruin + destroy our lives with little repercussions.

One just has to look at the situation of our deteriorating food safety inspections (that were hallowed out by Musk + DOGE goons FYI) to know that corporations absolutely do not care about public safety over profits. Or health insurance companies that are incentivized to deny Americans life saving care for shareholder profits.

We have a sick society and it's mostly due to the unabashed influence of corporations over our lives.

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Also in other comments you seem to be under the impression that corporations should be legally allowed to do what they want with zero government interference? Why do you believe such things over concepts of democracy or regulation?

Society is allowed to tell someone no, not everyone consents to your beleifs.

I think I mostly agree here -- any cloud provider or frankly SaaS system carries a similar risk. The question is whether they want to explicitly make that part of their terms of service, and in addition have made public statements about their willingness to apply those terms of service.

AWS GovCloud I believe promises the opposite. They could still do it, in terms of the capability itself, but then they'd be subject to both civil, criminal, and possibly even military consequences. Whereas Anthropic would be shielded from those consequences by the terms of their agreement (presumably; I'm not up to speed on the specifics of their contractual demands. This is just based on the context from this article and the previous appeals case that ruled against the government).

If AWS employees use Claude to build govcloud, it is a violation of supply-chain. Either Amazon, Microsoft, and Google require their employees to stop using claude or the DoD has to migrate off of these cloud providers.

Or these companies have to completely split the govcloud work from its commercial offerings (which defeats the whole point).

Again, it's unreasonable to play this game. The regime must be held to account for the actual things that they say, not whatever sanewashed policies we can backfill underneath them. If Hegseth's statements exceed his legal authority, that doesn't mean he's lying, it means that the government is knowingly pursuing an illegal policy.

If you don't like that, and would prefer to discuss a lawful supply chain risk designation, you should convince him to retract the statements or impeach him.

Exercising its power as a purchaser is "not buying it" or "choosing a competitor." Instead, this is arbitrarily and capriciously using an administrative mechanism in a novel way to punish a company.

'why not'? It's retaliatory beyond all proportionality, for one.

They are not "just a purchaser" though. It's the world's most powerful organization that is funded by the people and is supposed to be for the people. I'm all for businesses making FAFO decisions, but expect a lot more here.

> The DoD and US military does not allow contractors to use iPhones

What are you talking about? That's nowhere close to a true statement.

But the idea is that you don't elect people who would behave that way in the first place. Plus the US courts are demonstrably not in fact mindless rubber stamps for the president. And it's not like anyone is actually canceling elections at this time, so they can be voted out later.

To me a fascist government would prevent people from being able to take their power away at all, and simply do whatever they want with impunity, but I don't quite see that happening in the US right now. Courts are still ruling against the government, they're largely complying in most ways, and there will still be more elections.

Are they trying to do some things that smell "fashy"? Maybe. But I still think it's a stretch to say the US government is full blown fascist in the same way we've seen that in the past in some other countries.

Is that why he's so mad at their rulings all the time?

Anyone who doesn't agree with me must be MAGA, right? You think people who don't like Anthropic are automatically Trump supporters? I have personally experienced how evil Claude is compared with the other options.

Irrelevant. Then the government should just refrain from taking the contract, not use violent force to restrict Anthropic doing business.

I think you're complaining that they have a bad product. A supply chain risk means something else entirely.