And why would they have an objection to that? They sold a product to a customer. They should have no business in how that customer uses their software.
It’s a bit more complex than that, but to be fair I don’t know what they were expecting after they integrated a purpose-built model with Palantir to be deployed in high-security networks to carry out classified tasks.
> And why would they have an objection to that? They sold a product to a customer. They should have no business in how that customer uses their software.
They sold a service to a customer, contractually subject to terms they both agreed upon. How do people keep missing this? The government changed their mind after agreeing to the restrictions and tried to alter the deal with Anthropic ex-post-facto.
I'd hate to break it to you, but companies do have a right to determine how their products are used. You were subject to that when you wrote that comment. Did you not notice that?
No, I do not think they do. If a buy a car a run somebody over on purpose, the manufacturer has no right to come take my car away. Even if it were to be written in a contract.
That is with the Pentagon directly only. Now they will lose much more because no defense contractor, subcontractor and so on can use them for anything defense related (even if they use the model to invent a new type of screw, if that screw is going to be used in anything military).
So yeah, they bet a whole lot on “look at us, we have morals”.
There's no legal basis for blocking defense contractors from using them. Trump's claiming he can do so, but the law doesn't back him up. He'll lose in any fair court, or any corrupt court that values billionaire interests over virtue signaling to the orange one (like the Supreme Court).
Also, they got a huge PR win, and jumped to #1 on the Apple App Store. Consumer market share is going to decide which of the AI companies is the market leader, not fickle government contracts.
If you look at what generates cash, it's corp to corp. That's across most industries. While there are markets that are consumer mostly, LLMs have immense and enormous business facing revenue potential. The consumer market is a gnat in comparison.
There are always Executive Orders that can enforce that. It is not like in the movies where they will sort stuff out in 2 weeks in a single trial. It is going to take years, and we'll see if Anthropic survives that.
Low orbit space relays. You can hit them from high above with what you want to transmit, buffer it there and they can upload it (or download it?) to Earth pretty fast. Having a few hundred terabytes or a petabyte or two in space for storage I think it is pretty doable nowadays.
If they are low orbit then they are moving fast, which means wider radio beams. And if those beams would also hit earth, hogging spectrum needed for final download.
Unfortunately, every country has a law somewhere saying it can take private property at will if it is in the national interest.
It's not only the US being special in this case.
The problem is pretty simple: there is money to be made and someone will do what the Pentagon wants. Will it be worse in capabilities than Anthropic? Probably, but as long as it can be used to wage autonomous war wherever the US military decides, it will be good enough.
Anthropic can stick to their beliefs as much as they want, but it will not change the outcome, maybe just postpone it a bit.
On an unrelated note, I think the Pentagon erred when it labeled them a supply chain vulnerability, they should have used the DPA to make them do what they need. Less drama and much cheaper compared to replacing them with a whole different company.
It's the US being special in how there's zero good reasoning behind any of this. A private company made a choice and it's retaliating like a spurned date.
There is plenty of good reasoning executed badly from a PR perspective.
It is (now) called the Department of War for a reason: It needs to be able to kill people very fast and cheap. Autonomous weapons platforms do that: you give them a geofenced area and let them kill everything that moves in said area. No loss of human pilots, no fatigue.
If Anthropic they had any ethics concerns they would not have signed up the Pentagon as client in the first place.
My guess is that they wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
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