Anthropic says it will challenge Pentagon supply chain risk designation in court

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/anthropic-says-it-will-challenge-pentagons-supply-chain-risk-designation-court-2026-02-28/

by Jimmc414 • 5 months ago

133 37 5 months ago

reuters.com

locusofself• 5 months ago

Pete Hegseth (and Trump) are such cartoon-villain buffoons.

Anthropic is a "Supply Chain Risk" much the same as Rene Good was a "Professional Agitator" or "Domestic Terrorist".

I pray that Trump gets crushed in the midterms

nubg2• 5 months ago

I hope something really comical happens, that cannot be explained away by a bully, like Texas turning blue.

pogue• 5 months ago

I just voted blue in Texas today, so we'll see. But, probably keep your expectations low(ish).

Early vote turnout in Texas outpacing past elections, fueled by Democratic primary voters - Texas Tribune https://www.texastribune.org/2026/02/25/texas-early-voting-t...

yoyohello13• 5 months ago

It’s so embarrassing being an American and having these people as my representatives. Trump’s screaming about LIBERAL LEFT LUNATICS is just so insane. I feel like I’m losing my mind. How can any person think this is the guy they want representing them? The last year has really shaken my faith in humanity.

skeledrew• 5 months ago

LIBERAL LEFT LUNATICS

At least he has the alliteration down.

siliconc0w• 5 months ago

I think the lower courts will easily find this is far beyond what the statue allows (and a free speech violation) but this Supreme Court will be eager to get back on Trump's good side and will stay the lower courts injuction.

That means at least a year to get it resolved, in the mean time practically all enterprise users will need to migrate off.

mountainriver2• 5 months ago

I would be shocked if any of the liberal enterprises move off them due to this. Maybe if they have explicit contracts around it but I have no idea why else they would.

bloppe7• 5 months ago

Any company that does business with the military will be prohibited from being a customer. That's basically all the biggest companies, who will all choose to keep their multi-billion dollar military contracts and simply use codex instead of Claude. So Anthropic would be prevented from selling to all the biggest companies, many of whom have already adopted Claude.

That would be pretty tough.

nawgz• 5 months ago

I don’t think it’s actually going to be a big deal. Anthropic’s response to Pete Kegsbreath basically said the only limitation they expect is DoD contractors can’t use it on DoD missions, not a general ban. Now that’s not nothing but there’s a whole business world hungry to generate insane amounts of code for no reason, they’re ready to collect the token tax

wanderingstan• 5 months ago

What motivation would the Supreme Court have to get “back on Trumps good side?” If anything, after his recent name calling of them I’d think they’d be less inclined to appease him. The can’t be fired.

ChrisArchitect2• 5 months ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188697

skue2• 5 months ago

No, just related. That was about Hegseth carrying through with his threat. This is about Anthropic making it clear they will fight this in court.

ChrisArchitect2• 5 months ago

The line about the court fight is in the official Anthropic post. The discussion is over there.

somethoughts3• 5 months ago

While not exactly parallel, it seems slightly hypocritical that this is coming from the party of "a baker should not be forced to bake a wedding cake for a customer that they ideologically/morally disagree with."

I guess the rules are different if the customer is the government? If it's the government, then if the government doesn't get its wedding cake then the government can go so far as to prevent the baker from selling cakes entirely to any other customers.

apothegm• 5 months ago

To this political faction, it’s different when the customer is the in-group.

skue2• 5 months ago

This isn’t parallel at all, and I didn’t realize that Anthropic was the member of any particular party.

somethoughts3• 5 months ago

Sorry I was a bit unclear - this was referencing the Administration not Anthropic.

The United States Department of Justice under the Trump administration, supported Phillips.[20][5] While the Department asserts that anti-discrimination laws are necessary to prevent businesses that provide goods and services from discriminating, these laws cannot be used to compel a business into expressing speech they do not agree with, nor used to provide goods and services with such expressions without the ability for the business to assert they do not agree with those expressions. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

donkeybeer• 5 months ago

If its not hypocritical lying, its not maga. Its a very simple rule of thumb.

rdtsc5• 5 months ago

of "a baker should not be forced to bake a wedding cake for a customer that they ideologically/morally disagree with."
I guess the rules are different if the customer is the government?

Hmm, I don’t see the inconsistency? They are saying one baker is not to their liking and they are refusing to buy it and are returning the already bought cakes back. Also looks like they just found another baker not too long ago with a better “deal”.

somethoughts3• 5 months ago

It was mostly in response to the secwar tweet:

"Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic,"

If this tweet is taken to the nth degree that'd effectively put Anthropic out of business since they have pretty significant Amazon[1] and Microsoft[2] cloud provider/funding relationships that would need to be nullified within 6 months.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/federal/defense

[2] https://military.microsoft.com

tzs• 5 months ago

The military uses a lot of open source software.

It would be interesting if the maintainers of several projects the Pentagon depends on were to start using Claude on those projects.

How would Hegseth explain that it is both such a big risk that he wants to ban from government work any company that uses Anthropic even if they are not using it for their government work, yet they keep using those open source projects whose maintainers are using it for the work the government is using?

Note: even projects that do not allow AI contributions could almost certainly find something helpful to use it for.

Anthropic says it will challenge Pentagon supply chain risk designation in court

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