Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed artificial intelligence firm Anthropic a supply chain risk on Friday, following days of increasingly heated public conflict with the AI company.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed artificial intelligence firm Anthropic a supply chain risk on Friday, following days of increasingly heated public conflict with the AI company.
Buh-bye Anthropic…
The DoD just killed Anthropic, because they won’t be able to sell AI to any company that sells something to the DoD, or to companies that themselves sell something to the DoD. In other words, they won’t be able to sell AI to anybody at all, because no company wants to become a supply chain risk to potential customers who might have a DoD supplier somewhere down the supply chain.
Remember: the DoD initially approached Anthropic. Anthropic ultimately decided to reject their offer, so DoD killed them out of spite.
That’s what totalitatian regimes do.
This absolutely did not kill them. I’ve been dealing with federal procurement, including ATOs for DoD, for years, and 99% of companies never even remotely interact with it. Yes, there’s a large number that do, especially among Fortune 500s and up, but the actual percentage of companies who have military contracts is tiny. This was meant to intimidate them into compliance, but this doesn’t make them any less viable than AIaaS already is or isn’t.
The order is actually much narrow than that; it only applies to companies who directly have contracts with the military.
Anthropic software just can’t be used to process federal data, but if e.g. Lockheed uses ADP to process internal payroll, and ADP uses a third-party developer to build some software, and that developer uses Claude, that doesn’t snake it’s way back up the chain and invalidate Lockheed’s contracts.
Nah. Short term dip in value, that’s all, but I expect it to recover and improve.
When you realise the the US in not the only customer in the world, and other countries will be prioritising AI/LLMs that aren’t embedded and ultimately controlled by the unstable and fascist government there. Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Canada - all places that have good reasons not to want the US Government being fed their data.
There’s also Elon Musk’s strange relationship with that government, and he would likely get access to Anthropic’s codebase and IP through them too.
Also, non analytically, well done for standing up to bullies.