OK, explicitly designed to be used against adversaries. So the government is explicitly designating Anthropic as an adversary of the United States of America (a domestic adevarsary, not foreign, sure, GP was wrong on that part).
And the reason Anthropic is an adversary of the USA? They have a clause in their license agreement that their products must not be used in surveillance or military targeting decisions.
Sounds like a fair characterization then? Trying to dictate or restrict the (domestic) military uses of a product is literally an adversarial position to the national military interest.
Where did you get "trying to dictate" from? The text is "the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert [...]"
A mutually agreed upon "you may not use our product for X or Y purpose" in a contract clearly doesn't pose any such risk.
Trying to argue for and enforce a 'you may not use our product for an express objective of the US military' provision is pretty clearly "trying to dictate". Actively cancelling, moving capabilities behind a 'safety' wall, or even threatening to would be a clear sabotage of the US military's operational capabilities. It'd be one thing is Anthropic merely expressed an opinion, but my understanding is that it was/is an outright 'we will not allow' as opposed to a 'we'd prefer you didn't'.
Imagine if Microsoft tried the same with excel or power point. "um actually in the fine print of the EULA it says you may not use our product for military purposes so we will revoke your access unless you stop using power point for mission briefings that might result in the deaths of civilians". Would fly about as well as a lead brick.
Again, the statute says nothing about "dictating terms." It covers an adversary who might sabotage or subvert a system. And no, Anthropic did not cancel anything, did not pull any capabilities, and has no backdoor into deployed models. There was no "um actually." It wrote two prominent usage restrictions into a contract, the military read and signed it, and then later demanded the terms be removed.
As a sanity check, I’d highly recommend trying out your own line of reasoning in cases which you think you might feel differently about. For example, imagine it's instead a certain authoritarian state saying "obey the Party or get blacklisted as a national security threat."
It might feel good in the moment, like "yeah, Anthropic, don't tell the military what to do," because you agree with this particular call. But the government doesn't give that power back, and you might not be so happy about the next way it gets used.
No, it's not. If Anthropic is a supply chain risk, that means that if you are working on a project that will be used for the DoD, you can't use Claude or any other Anthropic product for any purpose whatsoever in that project. Asked Claude to change the color of a PPTX for a sprint demo you're doing? Oops, you've know introduced a supply chain risk and your company is liable for damages or at least losing its entire contract with the DoD.
They do, but this is not it. This is designating Anthropic as an adversary of the USA, and it is forbidding anyone who wants to sell to the DoD from using Anthropic products for anything. This is a massive attack on free speech, free enterprise, and the market.
That's not normal in a free country - even less so in one that claims to have a free market.
Anthropic said "don't use our products for targetting decisions in military ops". The DoD could have easily said "actually then, we won't use your products at all". Instead, the DoD said "either you let us use your products in targeting decisions, or we won't let you sell to anyone who sells to us for any purpose, using a law that only applies to adversaries of the USA".
> using a law that only applies to adversaries of the USA
Everyone keeps parroting this despite it not being true. And you're missing the point. The DoD specifically doesn't want it in their supply chain at all because it's an intelligent system that will work against the DoDs goals, by design, in certain scenarios.
Your argument boils down to, "The DoD isn't allowed to not want Claude in their supply chain", which is crazy.
Of course they can. Any supplier is free to set terms for how their products are to be used. The DoD is free to not agree to those terms - but it's not free to then claim the company that offered those terms is a security risk, and bar any DoD supplier from using them for any purpose - which is what the extreme measure they took represents.
> but it's not free to then claim the company that offered those terms is a security risk
Yes they are free to do that. You have to blame Congress for giving them that authority under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act and specifically 41 U.S.C. § 4713.
But Claude’s ToS didn’t prohibit use of Claude for sensitive military operation but it was coded to do so. It was part of the government’s evidence
No, they can only do that if a company is a true supply chain risk. Not everyone some idiot in the government doesn't like is a such a huge risk to the country that they can be banned from doing business with anyone doing business with the DoD.
Ultimately this is for the courts to decide, and the current decision is not final. And while the two Trump-nominated judges agreed with you, the other judge agrees with me - so at least we can say that neither my nor your position is legally absurd.
> Just because you disagree with a power of the government does not mean the government does not have that power.
Sure, but we live in a democracy, not a dictatorship. The government doesn't just get to do whatever it wants. People and corporations have certain freedoms. One of those freedoms is not being compelled to work with the government. The government can't force a company to work for them except under extreme circumstances. Which currently no extreme circumstances have been claimed and no one is talking about nationalizing (the act of forcing the company to work for the government) anthropic
The law being used was passed by Congress who is elected democratically and then reinforced by the judiciary who is either also voted in democratically or appointed by the democratically elected Congress. Lots of people want the US to be a dictatorship but it's a far cry from an actual one.
Sure, but also just because Congress gave the government a power to take an extraordinary measure in an extraordinary circumstance doesn't mean that the government can simply claim the circumstance happens all the time and use the measure whenever it strikes the fancy of some executive.
Ultimately whether Anthropic is a true supply chain risk for the United States military is a question of fact, and the courts will have to decide. That the President or Secretary of Defense doesn't like a company doesn't make them a supply chain risk.
Sure, which is why the judicial branch reviews such decisions, and has reviewed this one and has come to the conclusion that it was justified. Just because you don't like their ruling doesn't make it not binding.
Their ruling is not final yet, per the article. I'm also free to disagree with the correctness and propriety of a judicial ruling and believe it was biased (of course, I do have to still abide by it, to the extent that it applies to me in any way). That it's binding doesn't mean it's right and that it is in accord with the law and/or the constitution.
A judicial ruling is by definition in accord with the law or constitution (because it literally becomes the law) whether you or I like it or not, if and until such a time as it is overturned.
A judicial ruling is separate from a law, and it's actually quite common for judicial rulings to be found non-constitutional (or even struck down by a normal higher court, if we're talking in general and not this particular case). In particular, only judges are bound by precedent, and even then, only precedent from their own circuit, not the entire USA. Whereas laws made by contract are binding on everyone, and they apply federally.
Rulings are a type of law, as in the general term of something written down and set together (literally, leges) that binds one of the populace with their society. As I said, until they are modified by the legislature or struck down by another court, they are the law of the land.
No, I don't think that's correct. Humans are fallible, and just because a court says that something is in accord with law/constitution, doesn't mean it actually is.
That distinction is academic, of course, because when the courts decide a certain way, then of course that's how things will play out.
Well, except when the Trump admin ignores court orders.
Seems like you're conflating legal and moral. The law is exactly what the legislature and courts say it is, because it is what's written down. That doesn't mean it's always morally right.
This isn't about morals, it's about legal correctness.
If a ruling will get overturned in the future, then it's wrong today. It's enforceable until it's overturned, but it's not correct. Two judges making opposite decisions about the same question are not both right.
(I'm assuming the overturning is valid for the sake of simplicity. If it isn't then the argument is the same but mirrored.)
No, it's correct today with the best of our society's knowledge. You can't retroactively say it was wrong looking from today into the future. Only once we get to the future and something is overturned can we say the past decision wasn't correct.
Oh, pfff, please, this is some kindergarten nonsense.
These are not equal market participants coming together to exchange goods and services. This is government and a private entity. This is nuclear weapons with public trust and god knows what.
Well, that's what this court case is about. The government believes they have that power, and Anthropic and others believe they don't. You clearly believe they do, and I clearly believe they don't. It's fine to disagree. Ultimately SCOTUS may decide on this, and that'll be the final word. Not that SCOTUS is always correct in its rulings, but at the end of the day, their decision is final.
I've got no issue siding against Anthropic when they're wrong! Anthropic had a similar dispute with Bessent over the Fable launch, and there I take the government's side without reservation. If the government thinks they've found a national security problem with your highly capable new model, obviously you should agree to voluntarily withdraw it until they're satisfied, even if your best and correct guess is that it's just a minor jailbreak.
Anthropic has no such history. The backlash to the Fable release saw a number of social media influencers promoting a similar lie, which I frankly suspect was part of a coordinated Trumpist media effort. Releasing a model with known, documented limitations that constrain its performance on certain kinds of tasks is completely different than releasing a model which is "trying to sabotage people they don't trust".
If I sell a torque wrench with a maximum setting of 1000 foot-pounds, and the government says they'd really like 1500, I'm not sabotaging them by explaining that my wrenches aren't safe when used that way and refusing to remove the limitation.
> The backlash to the Fable release saw a number of social media influencers promoting a similar lie, which I frankly suspect was part of a coordinated Trumpist media effort.
Alright, not worth talking to conspiracy theorists (even if Anthropic literally said so in their release blog posts). I'm sure Wired is part of a "Trumpist media effort."
Any system that is missing a task bar/dock/whatever you call it is a non-starter for serious work. That's a major regression that completely kills default Gnome, and shows just how incompetent their UX designers are. Even the Windows 8 designers knew better than that, and that's saying something.
It is one of the "interesting things to look at" if one is switching between apps and files regularly. It's not just an app launcher with icons (though in some environments it is and that's their UX failure). It shows important variable info, like file or directory names per program, sometimes status of the action inside app (connected/disconnected or action completion percentage etc.). Clock is useful too, as are notification badges. Taskbar is for work, not just to take space.
I used to think task bars were pretty neat, back in the 1990s. But once I started keeping more than a dozen windows open, it became a waste of space. And now that I typically have 200+ windows open, the concept of a taskbar is ... like trying to get a fish to ride a bicycle, or like having a rock in my shoe. It gets in my way and provides no benefit to me.
But that's okay. I don't have to use one. Different people have different needs and preferences, and their choice to use a taskbar-free workflow doesn't interfere with their ability to get serious work done.
A dog enters a bar. He doesn't see anything, so he says "shall I open this door?"
(the combination of an article about a mysterious aspect of such a well known ancient god and your joke made me think of this mysterious Babylonian joke, recorded from 1700 BCE but whose meaning we can only theorize about)
> For example, do not hook your goddamn water or traffic or electricity infrastructure up to the goddamn Internet, and then, do fire the guy who suggested it.
Ask the Iranians how impenetrable even physical isolation actually is - their centrifuges were still destroyed even though they were air gapped (the infamous Stuxnet). Ultimately all computerized systems are vulnerable to sufficiently determined cyber-adversaries.
You also need to make various cost-benefit analysis decisions for all of these things. Does the extra security you gain by keeping your system disconnected from the Internet actually increase all-around availability and resilience?
In particular, integrating highly variable power sources like solar and wind into the grid requires much more complex synchronization between producers, storage, and consumers in order to function properly. Trying to build a renewable grid without Internet access is doomed to extremely inefficient, if possible at all. Building an alternate network would be extremely expensive and ultimately useless (since every house in the country needs to connect to it, it would be just as vulnerable as the actual Internet anyway). So, ultimately you must connect your power grid to the Internet to actually provide service, despite the security risks.
Perhaps the situation with the water supply or traffic is different, so maybe this is not as applicable.
a lot of this infrastructure is managed at municipal level. There are ministry mandates. But a lot of this is run by a small town with a small budget. Compromises exist like the ability to remote desktop because there is no budget for 24/7 operators.
Again, the point of a data-only attack is that you replace, say, a string with another valid string, and take control of program logic that way. For example, imagine a program that uses `system(LS_CMD_STR)`, where that LS_CMD_STR is some kind of constant holding the value "ls -lah". If an attacker can corrupt program memory in such a way that it overwrites that value with "rm / -f", no amount of assertions will trigger on this, but the program will do something much worse than expected.
In microcontroller programming, redundant data, checksumming and token-passing are sometimes used to mitigate CPU malfunctions due to electromagnetic interference (microcontrollers are often used as "programmable logic", so there's no hard layering between hardware and software, layering violation is made on purpose). If anything looks wrong, you trigger an assertion failure and reset the chip via the watchdog timer. For example, when you pass LS_CMD_STR, you would also pass the name of the caller and the CRC32 checksum of the string as arguments, and the function on the receiving side should validate them.
So I think adding assertion is definitely a way to discover data-only attacks in fuzzing, or even as a partial mitigation of these attacks. It's just stack canary for variables and strings (but as the paper authors said, complete mitigation can be impractical).
And the reason Anthropic is an adversary of the USA? They have a clause in their license agreement that their products must not be used in surveillance or military targeting decisions.
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