alt Hacker NewsAnthropic sues to block Pentagon blacklisting over AI use restrictions
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.