- I think the big problem is that this is more like a sanction, more than the government saying they don't want to do business with them. They government is saying that anyone they do business with can't do business with Anthropic.
So it's extremely important that they get an injunction that allows the cloud compute companies to continue to work them. I think they probably will, but it's really crazy that the government is actively trying to kill them off over this.
- The big problem is this is prior restraint on free speech.
- > They government is saying that anyone they do business with can't do business with Anthropic.
Is neither unusual nor extraordinary. The 2022 TikTok ban on government devices—enacted under the Biden administration—carried the same viral-as-in-GPL terms.
- The actual letter the govt sent Anthropic narrowed the supply chain risk to DoD usage. Far less than the Epstein administration poffered on social media
- It’s not just the supply chain risk designation from the Department of defense. Trump then added that he would order all government agencies to stop doing business with them. Basically, if you do not cave to their ideology, you will be coerced through such unethical means.
- Palantir famously sued the army and won, now accounting for the majority of their USG revenue. So, this is not necessarily a bad strategy.
Key differentiator though is Palantir’s suit was based primarily on Congressional acts and explicit clauses of the FAR. This absolutely does not seem to be the case for Anthropic, who could easily do the same, but chooses another ideological battle. I can’t imagine their legal counsel would recommend this route (actually asking Claude it doesn’t either!) which would imply this is Anthropic leadership’s move.
I’d gamble they’ve already given up on actual business with the government/military and that this is more of a PR move to further distance themselves and maintain a high road image.
- While it's difficult to eschew all government money, given the current political climate it would be interesting to turn the tables so to speak: updating their ToS to disallow any use by the federal government
This would hand the federal govt to OpenAI and Google but would certainly be head-turning. Hard to say if it would pay off positively for them though.
- AWS Bedrock offers Claude models in GovCloud so I don't think AWS would be very happy
- The government has near-absolute discretion over whom it contracts with, and no company has a constitutional right to be a federal vendor. Courts treat military technology decisions as core Commander-in-Chief functions subject to minimal judicial review, and the political question doctrine may bar second-guessing what the Secretary deems a security risk.
The supply chain risk statute grants broad, largely unreviewable national security discretion and doesn't require the threat to originate from a foreign adversary.
Finally, the First Amendment claim faces the problem that the government was responding not to abstract speech but to a concrete refusal to provide services on the military's terms, which courts are unlikely to treat as protected expression warranting judicial override of procurement choices.
- While this suit has a weak basis, what you’re saying is not at all how government contracting and procurement works.
> The government has near-absolute discretion over whom it contracts with,
Not at all the case, procurement is dictated by a maze of Congressional acts and the FAR.
> and no company has a constitutional right to be a federal vendor.
Not constitutional but federal law actually dictates they do. Many companies actually have _more_ of a right to contracts than primes.
> Courts treat military technology decisions as core Commander-in-Chief functions subject to minimal judicial review,
Not at all the case there have been many disputes and it’s not uncommon to see a protest filed against procurement decisions in even innocuous cases. Many companies (eg Palantir) have sued the government on procurement and won.
> and the political question doctrine may bar second-guessing what the Secretary deems a security risk.
Sure, lowercase security risk, but uppercase Supply Chain Risk designation is an actual action subject to administrative procedure. There are many laws (eg Administrative Procedure Act) that allow judges to overturn this. The current basis of their suit is largely ideological but if they instead argued the designation was arbitrary the APA could very possibly be used to overturn it.
- Even if a law provides few guardrails to restrict how it's applied, courts care that applications of the law are not capricious.
- Re: First Amendment claim
It goes much further than the "refusal to provide services" speech. By blacklisting them, they are blocked from doing any future business, which is prior restraint. Courts aren't very friendly to that.
- A pointless publicity stunt because of state secrets privilege that will lead to more extreme actions from the Trump admin against Anthropic like the DoJ pulling the trigger on a selectively prosecuted company ending copyright/hacking case for stealing all their training material.
- Defending against authoritarianism is never pointless.
- My trust in the judicial system in the USA is so eroded that I could easily be convinced that this is just a PR move and they don’t expect to win anything that goes against Trump‘s wishes.
- The judicial system aside, it was a deliberate legislative choice (in many countries, with the US being among the most enthusiastic) to allow the executive to unilaterally designate arbitrary entities to be bad. Every system of this nature eventually gets turned against people you yourself consider good. I don’t get the surprise, frankly.
- For what it's worth, it seems like the actual law that would be involved (so the deliberate legislative choice) does not allow Hegseth to do what he says he wants to do: https://www.justsecurity.org/132851/anthropic-supply-chain-r...
So it's not just that there's be a transfer of power to the executive (there is), there's also straight up executive overreach.
- tl;dr the Major Questions Doctrine is something SCOTUS has been using to decide of Congress has given wide latitude. For big questions, Congress needs to be explicit. They used this in the IEEPA and tariffs case to end the arbitrary levies. Tariffs were not mentioned and are a big issue. Similar story here with claiming broad interpretation on an important issue.
- Yeah, back during Trump's first term I was hoping Congress would rein in executive power a bunch as he is prone to do stuff like this, didn't turn out that way unfortunately...
Now the main constraint on executive power seems to be due process and habeas corpus.
46 points by spenvo 2 hours ago | 20 comments