> Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.
I’m sure the lawyers just got paged, but does this mean the hyperscalers (AWS, GCP) can’t resell Claude anymore to US companies that aren’t doing business with the DoD? That’s rough.
Probably yes. Additionally the (probably more for AWS) won't be allowed to use it internally either. This will probably apply to all the top SaaS/software companies unilaterally.
Additionally, every major university will undoubtedly have to terminate the use of Claude. First on the list will be universities that run labs under DOD contracts (e.g. MIT, Princeton, JHU), DOE contracts (Stanford, University of California, UChicago, Texas A&M, etc...), NSF facilities (UIUC, Arizona, CMU/Pitt, Purdue), NASA (Caltech).
Following that it will be just those who accept DOD/DOE/NSF grants.
In the recent Supreme Court hearing over the firing of Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve, the administration is acting like Truth Social posts are official notices.
>Several justices have noted the unusual nature of the case before it, which began with a post by Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social, that said he would fire Cook.
>Jackson wondered why that would be considered sufficient notice: “How is it that we can assume that she’s on social media?”
Billable hours will win figuring it out but in theory, no because they can’t test it or use it.
Generally any machine that touches Supply chain Risk software cannot ship any software to DoD. AWS has separate clouds but software comes from same place.
AWS/GCP/Azure all do business with the DoD and at least AWS and Azure use Claude a decent amount internally. AWS’s Kiro tool (which is used internally instead of Claude Code) relies entirely on Claude models.
This is almost certainly going to be rolled back, because I guarantee the DoD isn’t going to stop doing business with the hyper scalers, and the hyper scalers aren’t going to stop doing business with Anthropic.
I don't think he got it backwards, at least if Hegseth's statement is accurate. AWS, GCP, etc. all do business with DoD. If they, as DoD contractors, are no longer allowed to do business with Anthropic, then presumably they have to stop re-selling or hosting Anthropic's models to anyone.
Does gcp have anything to do with Claude? AWS is the one that has to choose, if AWS picks Anthropic then GCP get all of the DOD. And then google also gets to provide Gemini to the DOD. Thats a nice chunk of change.
Oh you tender babes, trying to logic the meaning of what the lieutenant of the biggest crime syndicate in the world means with his words, as if this was a well thought-out strategy... it's a shakedown; it would make more sense to ask "at least if Hegseth is sober..."
Agree with other reply. I don’t think it’s backward. No they said any commercial activity. Does not feel like a stretch that commercial activity includes reselling api usage.
I don't see how you get that reading. Anthropic is clearly allowed to sell Claude to companies not doing business with the US Military. If anything that's more likely to be non-US companies.
IIRC, the supply chain risk designation is sticky which is why it tends to ultimately mean "nobody can work with this". Amazon using claude means a DoD company can't use Amazon. Every business that touches claude gets tainted.
It's a bit like how the US Cuba sanctions worked and why they effectively isolated Cuba from everything.
Because Anthropic sells Claude through other companies that in turn do business both with Anthropic and the government. These intermediaries, large cloud companies, can't offer Claude anymore if they want to keep the government as a customer.
The government is faaaaaaaaaaaar too invested in Azure and AWS for Microsoft or Amazon to give even half a shit. The DOD has no where else to go and the companies know it. They'll sit on their hands until the legal maneuvers play out, which will take longer than this administration will be in office.
You expect hyperscalers to play chicken with the DoD?
The courts have historically been pretty consistent about giving the DoD whatever the fuck they want, going back to WW2 and even longer for the predecessors of the DoD. I agree that the next administration might reverse it, but the thing is, the government will stay irrational longer than Anthropic will remain solvent.
The US government told every American company to stop doing business with Huawei and they all did it overnight, even when it cost them billions. TSMC stopped fabricating for them, Google pulled Android licensing… The machinery of sanctions compliance is extremely well-oiled and companies fold instantly because the outcome of noncompliance is literally getting thrown in prison.
So is it actually sanctions? I believe Huawei was on the entities list. Such a list comes from the fact that the government can require export licensing. Since Anthropic is in the U.S., I do not believe it’s the same thing as Huawei.
Huawei did eventually end up on the entities list, but there was a gap between when it was initially announced and when it became law, and the divestment from contractors started immediately overnight.
This is also true, unless the government can force them to drop Anthropic on the basis that the alternative- the government dropping them- is unworkable.
Or Pete Hegseth will threaten to do the same to them unless they comply, and they will demonstrate the same inexcusable cowardice the American business class has consistently demonstrated this past year. Hope I'm wrong and this has finally woken them up!
The stock market will be spooked if the US govt can willy nilly high trajectory darling of the AI world like this though.
Who's next? OpenAI? Google? What if they refuse to allow the DoD to use AI with zero safeguards and Trump's goons decide they are also a "supply chain risk"?
No. The stock market has understood for generations that it's the guys with the guns that protect their gold. The stock market will have a sigh of relief.
It’s not unusual for legal departments to take offense to these sorts of things, because now everyone using Claude within the DoD has to do some kind of audit to figure out if they’re building something that could be construed as surveillance or autonomous weapons (or, what controls are in place to prevent your gun from firing when Claude says, etc). A lot of paperwork.
My guess is they just don’t want to bother. I wonder why they specifically need Claude when their other vendors are willing to sign their terms, unless it specifically needs to run in AWS or something for their “classified networks” requirement.
Git commits have a email address as a required field[0], although some people put something bogus in there. And then it's in the data provided when you clone the repo onto your machine even if you aren't using the GitHub APIs.
To his point, you can set that to the no-reply email address GitHub gives you if you don't want mail but do want the commit to be linked to your GitHub account.
I know he doesn't make live coding videos anymore, but it'd be cool if Andreas showed off how this worked a little more. I'm curious how much he had to fix by hand (vs reprompting or spinning a different model or whatever).
What happened? It’s been awhile since I checked in but it seems he doesn’t work on serenity and doesn’t live stream anymore (and is now into lifting weights)
He got his serenity and at the same time ladybird browser started getting somewhere, so he separated it out and went full on with it. From what I know, he was working on browsers before at Apple, so it was like he got ready to return
> One related thought I had was that given OpenAI is the only one _not_ doing this of the big3, it probably indicates they have a lot more spare compute.
Or, pessimistically, it could indicate they’re burning cash hoping the subsidized access will eventually result in someone giving them a product idea they can build and resell at a profit.
If they let *claw (or third party coding agents, or whatever) run for six more months and in those months figure out how to sell a safe substitute and then cut off access, maybe it will have been worth it.
I've been to SF three times, and each time the oddest thing was going down 101 from the airport and seeing cURL commands and "you sped past that just like we sped past Snowflake" and such on billboards. It's like being on another planet where everyone is at work.
(on the other hand, in DC there's ads on the metro for new engine upgrades for fighter jets, and i've gotten used to that.)
I visited L.A. in 2023 and the thing that shocked me was how many billboards were for products that I only ever heard advertised on podcasts. MeUndies, for example.
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I’ll never see a tree at all.
Song of the Open Road - Ogden Nash
On the other hand, when they say something is in us-west-2 they mean it, so if another region has an outage your workloads aren't impacted unless your code is reaching out to that region.
A lot of cloud services sorta work the same way. AWS and Azure are pay per request for all sorts of things, I figured that was the model the inference providers were following.
Is the problem that the app was written with AI assistance or that it's low-effort/bad? I don't care if you used Claude to fix a bug or something if you have a cool app, but i do care if you vibe coded something I could've vibe coded in an hour. That's boring.
Feels like effort needs to be the barrier (which unfortunately needs human review), not "AI or not". In lieu of that, 100 karma or account minimum age to post something as Show HN might be a dumb way to do it (to give you enough time to have read other people's so you understand the vibe).
I’m sure the lawyers just got paged, but does this mean the hyperscalers (AWS, GCP) can’t resell Claude anymore to US companies that aren’t doing business with the DoD? That’s rough.
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