alt Hacker News> Because it's not a military asset? It's a privately-owned asset.
Are you under the impression that the military is submitting Anthropic API calls?
Whatever model the military is using is as much of an asset as the F35 they purchased.
Depending on their agreements, you could argue it's a rented asset. Doesn't change any calculus.
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> Depending on their agreements, you could argue it's a rented asset. Doesn't change any calculus.
I think your mistakenly thinking of it as an asset. It's not as asset like a house, it's a service. They have a service contract. They have uptime and SLA commitments. That contract has parameters, and changing those parameters means a new contract.
A similar service would be signing up a private company to do intelligence gathering and analysis for the DoD in Asia. They find a company that specializes in Asia and sign a contract. They give them work and the contractors fulfill it. Coming back and saying "we want you now to give us analysis for important decisions in South America." The company would reasonably reply "we don't have the skills to do that in South America. Our team knows nothing about South Am, we're no better than someone off the street at that. There is no credibility behind anything we'd say about South America. And on top our contract was foe Asia". If we want to discuss a plan for hiring people for South Am let's discuss it, but that's a new contract." And then the DoD saying they're a supply chain risk makes no sense.
Or if you want an even more and hyperbolic example they cant take those data analysis to and say we're sending them ti the front lines of Iran. The company say no, and the DoD replying "you're a supply chain risk". They are not renting people, they are signing for a service of data analysis. Similarly they are not renting hardware they are signing for an LLM/intelligence service.
> Are you under the impression that the military is submitting Anthropic API calls?
Yes? I assume that it's not in a government owned and operated datacenter, but likely in AWS (govcloud or whatever) and maintained/serviced by Anthropic SREs like I suppose regular Claude is.
status.claude.com shows the uptime for the government cloud service. It's running in-part on an AWS server.
And the F35 comes with tons of contract terms in favor of the manufacturer. Like I've heard about how planes have been grounded because although an air base has the parts and mechanics rated to perform the repair on site, the servicing contract only allows it to be performed by the service contractors who needed to be flown in.