Judge blocks Pentagon effort to 'punish' Anthropic with supply chain risk label

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/26/business/anthropic-pentagon-injunction-supply-chain-risk

by prawn • 4 months ago

447 184 4 months ago

cnn.com

JohnTHaller• 4 months ago

Some judicial pushback against authoritarian policies is good to see.

alexchapman• 4 months ago

Oh I agree.

alienbaby• 4 months ago

I'd wish more for an impartial, considered judgement

sgc• 4 months ago

Which of course would look exactly like judicial pushback against authoritarian policies.

KronisLV• 4 months ago

Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government

What issue do you take with that statement or the outcome here? I think Anthropic’s position on what the tech should not be used for was well reasoned.

It feels like the govt. flipped out based on their public messaging and this whole ordeal - instead of them themselves being more measured and just choosing not to use Anthropic’s services if they take an issue with it.

mpalmer2• 4 months ago

I deeply wish for people who say things this cryptic and opinionated to actually speak their mind and back up their positions. Comments like these add little to the discussion.

paulpauper• 4 months ago

So much for all that alarmism a month ago. Just got to be patient and wait for cooler heads to prevail. Or it goes to show how Anthropic handled it well, by making their case as persuasively and assertively without delay as they had done.

jonplackett• 4 months ago

It’s all a big PR campaign. They will reveal shortly that they used Claude as their legal team.

SpicyLemonZest6• 4 months ago

I completely disagree with the idea that a court not allowing the Secretary of Defense to bankrupt a company for disagreeing with him means it's wrong to be alarmed that he tried. It remains extraordinarily alarming that the guy who runs the US military thinks anyone who tries to stop him from doing what he'd like is a threat.

Waterluvian3• 4 months ago

I think the verdict has been in for years now that there is nothing that Americans will mobilize against if it’s only the principles of freedom and liberty on the line. I think it will take being poked with a rather large stick to see some movement. Crippling the economy might be that stick. Unfortunately we all get to suffer their idiocracy.

yoyohello13• 4 months ago

That’s the least concerning thing about Hegseth. The “warrior of God” rhetoric and the fact that he publicly wants to start word war 3 in the name of Jesus should be way more prominent in the public conversation.

nickysielicki3• 4 months ago

This is entirely procedural. This preliminary injunction does not take effect for a week (eg: the order does not take effect for another week and the ban stays in place in the interim), which is done precisely to give the DoD the time to appeal to a higher court, whereupon this preliminary injunction order will very likely be reversed/blocked until the lower court has time to rule on the merits.

It’s not really unexpected.

conception• 4 months ago

This case means nothing since the administration can simply say well we’re gonna treat them that way, even if they aren’t officially labeled and if you’re doing business with them, we’re gonna cancel your contract. Mob tactics don’t extend to the courtroom..

0x3f11• 4 months ago

Is the practical outcome much different? I doubt they'll get contracts either way, so the labelling was just a formality.

If anything it seems the label was just intended to give a veneer of legitimacy to the admin by using an existing mechanism and terminology, rather than saying "we're going to block your access because we feel like it".

epolanski• 4 months ago

It's a strong signal that the government cannot strong arm privates.

simmerup• 4 months ago

Though of course that would require the government to respect the rule of law

mmoustafa2• 4 months ago

The Supply Chain Risk label requires every single company in the supply chain of a product or service provided to the US Government to either drop Anthropic or get dropped themselves. This is not just suppliers, but also includes suppliers of suppliers all the way down. This is a much larger chunk of the economy (approaching 100%) than the Pentagon/DOW.

0x3f11• 4 months ago

Yes, but

I suspect the admin will now just have an informal, not-written-down policy that does exactly the same thing.

verdverm2• 4 months ago

There are multiple designations, any part of government, defense applications, not allowed.

For example, in certain outcomes, Anthropic may not be used by the Pentagon, but still be used by the IRS.

why_only_153• 4 months ago

The point of the supply chain risk designation was not just to have the DoD stop using Anthropic (they could have done that by just cancelling the contract). Their intended effect was to force every company that sells to the US government, no matter how indirectly, to not use Anthropic in any way, which would effectively destroy them because almost every company is in the supply chain (for example my company is https://calaveras.ai/ because we sell to AI companies who in turn sell to DoD).

0x3f11• 4 months ago

I understand that, but I suspect the admin will now just have an informal, not-written-down policy that does exactly the same thing.

SEJeff2• 4 months ago

Fun fact: Palantir is powered entirely by Claude and was what was used for the Venezuela operation and for targeting for the Iranian operation.

nickysielicki3• 4 months ago

This whole event was precipitated by Palantir using Claude in the Maduro raid, and news of this surprising Anthropic and resulting in them asking questions and maybe suggesting in private discussions that they took issue with this and wanted to introduce more posttraining limits on the ways their model was used by the department. This has been widely reported and I don’t think anyone is really disputing that.

If that’s true, then what you’re suggesting is absurd. Because it’s not enough for the pentagon to merely stop contracting with Claude, because that was never the problem in the first place from their risk model. Their problem was they had a prime contract with Palantir for their wargaming service, and Palantir subcontracted with Anthropic as an LLM provider. So if DoD ceased to contract with Anthropic directly, it would have no impact on the risk that Anthropics new posttraining limits potentially posed to their mission insofar as they are reliant on Palantir and it’s services and there would be nothing preventing Palantir from continuing to contract with Anthropic.

I have to ask, what other tool do you think they have to protect themselves from this? You can argue that these guardrails from Anthropic are useful and important and DoD should just accept that, and that’s fine, but it really is (and ought to be) the departments decision about whether they’re comfortable with that or not. It’s their call. They have access to information on our adversaries that the public doesn’t. And they’re the ones responsible when lives are lost. And if they’re not comfortable with trusting service member lives to a specific post trained Opus 4.6 model, I’m not sure what other avenue they have to solve that problem across their entire prime contracting space other than a supply chain risk designation.

Any sort of backroom dealings where they whisper off the record to defense CTOs that they have a problem with anthropics leadership and would prefer that they sub out to OpenAI or Gemini instead for LLM services would be totally illegal and a violation of procurement law. So they definitely can’t do that. A supply chain risk designation is the only real tool they have to single out a single company.

One thing worth noting: Anthropic is a PBC, which is a new corporate structure that makes it relatively unaccountable to traditional profit motives. But those traditional profit motives are precisely the carrot that the DoD relies on dangling in front of the industry to motivate companies toward its mission. Traditional for profit companies are lead by people who have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit by serving the government. The entire procurement process relies on companies being motivated by profit and competing through bids. But PBCs are specifically designed to remove that incentive structure from their decision making, which makes them entirely unalike every other defense contractor which is publicly traded and can be held legally responsible by shareholders for putting personal beliefs above increasing shareholder value. That sounds like… exactly the kind of thing you don’t want in your military supply chain.

ethin• 4 months ago

I believe designating an entity a supply chain risk has far deeper implications than the DoD avoiding that entity, and goes as far as a lawful prohibition for any contractor of the USG being also prohibited from using or working with the entity so designated. Ironically enough, if the comments in this discussion are true that Palantír uses Claude, Palantír would've also been prohibited as well.

0x3f11• 4 months ago

I think that's what the common reporting implies, but I'm not confident that it's true. My understanding is that a supply chain risk must specifically be involved in the supply chain, hence the name. It may be that the admin hypes up their powers for the purposes of instilling fear, but as evidenced by this very post, they can be wrong.

charcircuit6• 4 months ago

What's the point of a supply chain risk distinction if you can't mark a company as a risk if they express that they will be a risk?

0x3f11• 4 months ago

Well, you could also say what's the point of laws when courts can interpret them however they like? There's never a neat answer in such multi-valent systems, is there?

mexicocitinluez• 4 months ago

What's the point of the Constitution when the government can ignore it at their discretion?

dboreham• 4 months ago

Freedom Treater.

Dylan168073• 4 months ago

Is this question supposed to have anything to do with the situation at hand, where what they did was refuse to perform certain categories of service?

charcircuit6• 4 months ago

was refuse to perform certain categories of service?

Anthropic wanted to have the power over what the government could or couldn't do. If there was any false positive on something that was supposed to be allowed the government would have to work with Anthropic and get permission from them to do something they are allowed to do. This to me is the risk that Anthropic was giving to the government. If Anthropic expresses that they want this level of power over what the military can do I think that such intention can justify being a risk. That is how it relates to my comment.

verdverm2• 4 months ago

The "mark" was capricious and vindictive. That's at the heart of why it was injuncted.

salawat• 4 months ago

To act as a safety valve against foreign companies acting as proxies for an adversary. Not for use against an American company that won't let you retroactively violate already agreed to terms. Anthropic isn't jeopardizing the supply chain, they simply will not let the Government force them into providing services they otherwise wouldn't.

genthree• 4 months ago

I recommend reading the law on which this action was based.

enoint2• 4 months ago

There’s a narrow law in which Congress grants the Secretary decisions about security. Then there’s the executive posting on social media. While it would be nice if the administration followed the law, this case is really about manipulation via social media.

nutjob22• 4 months ago

Google the "arbitrary and capricious" legal standard. And try to stick to the facts about Anthropic's actions.

dataflow• 4 months ago

I assume the court case [1] is referring to 10 U.S. Code § 3252 [2]?

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72379655/134/anthropic-...

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/3252

AbrahamParangi2• 4 months ago

[flagged]

fwipsy• 4 months ago

Can you be more specific? I see a lot of uninformed takes, but no specific bias. Do you mean downvotes?

davidw• 4 months ago

If you turn on the thing that shows 'dead' comments, there is a larger than normal number here.

longislandguido4• 4 months ago

Are you suggesting there is a government conspiracy to influence this dusty corner dive bar of the Internet?

ahhhhnoooo3• 4 months ago

Are there tech workers who don't know what HN is? It's a pretty reasonably sized social media site.

macintux• 4 months ago

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ronsor• 4 months ago

They're specifically referring to the dead comments from new users in this thread, so it's not insinuation. They're pointing out a higher-than-normal quantity of shill bots flocked to this thread.

The fact that the comments are dead means the system is working as intended, but it's not unreasonable to point out the nature of the comments.

AbrahamParangi2• 4 months ago

That seems shockingly naive.

gopher_space• 4 months ago

The mistake is thinking that an organic entity won't reject causality when it interferes with their politics.

The interesting thing here is that this isn't an always-on feature. You can actually see the process on a person's face. I was delighted by the recent DOGE depositions because the video quality is good enough to see the guy's eyes stop moving and glaze over.

tick_tock_tick2• 4 months ago

Nah I think a lot of the judicial overreach is just pissing off a lot of the regular hackernews userbase off. This fit the law to a T.

And then if it's not this it's blocking the removal of a temporary order. Just tons of garbage that was implemented without any law now all of a sudden is permanent because a judge decided.

jimbob45• 4 months ago

Lost in the cacophony is the fact that Anthropic fumbled a strong lifeline while hemorrhaging cash without a business model. It’s fun to look down at OpenAI but they may not get another chance like this again.

felixgallo• 4 months ago

It's fun to say that Anthropic doesn't have a business model, but clearly they do. Hopefully they can achieve it while maintaining their standards, even if in the eyes of some that's 'fumbling a strong lifeline'.

MeetingsBrowser2• 4 months ago

Claude has had such a massive increase in usage since being labeled a supply chain risk the service has been struggling to scale to meet increase demand.

On top of that, the prevailing opinion seemed to be that courts would overrule the supply chain risk designation, allowing the government and its subcontractors to use Claude again.

It’s hard to see how they could have navigated this better

israrkhan• 4 months ago

This government contract was a very small part of anthropic revenue. Almost negligible. Their 2026 revenue is projected to be $14 billion to $20 billion. This contract was $200M over 2 years.

brandensilva• 4 months ago

On top of that, Palantir has been designated as a multi year contract and they use Anthropic under the hood.

bicx• 4 months ago

Anthropic is the leading enterprise LLM provider. All they have to do is keep building a best-performing product, charge what they need, and keep costs as far down as possible. If my company knew there were an LLM 1.5x as good as Opus, they would be willing to pay 3x the cost. If it were being sold by Anthropic, they’d be even more likely to pay, since we could easily keep our same tooling.

ryanmcbride• 4 months ago

whatever you say boss

mpalmer2• 4 months ago

OpenAI smells desperate, and is already understood to be overextended. It isn't Anthropic that retired their flashy video gen platform, ceding competitive ground to Google.

mrkstu• 4 months ago

The issue of course is that the Judge can't change the knowledge that the head of the executive doesn't want people down the chain using this product, so they won't. Anthropic is a dead letter in government circles until the next Presidential election.

ajross• 4 months ago

That's something that normal boring suits can and do remedy. Companies sue and win over denied government contracts all the time.

ncallaway• 4 months ago

Eh, it’s not going to be transitively problematic for Anthropic the way the supply chain risk designation would’ve been.

Amazon isn’t going to have to divest from Anthropic because of this. Yes, they probably won’t be able to get a contract with Raytheon, but that wasn’t the main risk of being tagged with the supply chain risk designation.

bakies• 4 months ago

The type of contract they had was optional anyway. They could have just not done business with Anthropic in the first place. Really I think this has only promoted their platform as being sane and moral.

heavyset_go2• 4 months ago

Really I think this has only promoted their platform as being sane and moral.

I mean, maybe for people who aren't paying attention to how Claude's actually weaponized[1]?

This use case is neither "domestic mass surveillance" nor "autonomous weapons" as humans were in the loop:

Old intelligence and AI? Behind the deadly attack on an Iranian girls’ school that left 175 dead
The targets for Operation Epic Fury were identified with the aid of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Maven Smart System, which folds in data from surveillance and intelligence, among other data points, and can lay out the information on a dashboard to support officials in their decision-making.
Maven, created by Palantir, has been coupled with Anthropic’s Claude, a large language model that can vastly speed up that processing.
Seth Lazar, who leads the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab at Australian National University, said the use of Claude to select military targets “should send chills down the spine of anyone who's been spending the last few months vibe-coding, vibe-researching, vibe-engineering.”

Doesn't sound sane and moral to me

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

lrvick3• 4 months ago

Sane and moral... and yet they sick their lawyers on open source projects like OpenCode to make sure everyone is forced to use their client software and tracking.

suid• 4 months ago

That may be, but the government doesn't need to declare Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" in order to just not do business with it. A simple clause in all RFPs is all that is needed.

The problem with this declaration by the government is that now any company doing any business with the US government would be effectively forbidden from using Anthropic ANYWHERE within their company, which is a huge deal, because the government does want to vet any vendors' software development practices.

But as long as the Judge in this case pushes back against such an action by the government, that leaves companies free to use Anthropic for their own internal uses. And most companies WILL continue to use them if it makes economic sense.

brookst• 4 months ago

Perhaps. But certainly those companies will factor in the risk that this is overturned, or that the government pursues other extrajudicial means to punish those who do business with Anthropic.

All things equal, you’d be better off not exposing yourself to risk of financial harm or other punitive measures. Which is the whole point of the government’s action in the first place.

hn_throwaway_993• 4 months ago

The problem with this declaration by the government is that now any company doing any business with the US government would be effectively forbidden from using Anthropic ANYWHERE within their company

That is not true, even if the supply chain risk designation held. The sad thing is that so many people (myself included) also believed this, because this is what Hegseth said. He was lying. Thanks to another comment further down in this thread that led me to this page that explains what the supply chain risk designation actually does: https://www.justsecurity.org/132851/anthropic-supply-chain-r...

lrvick3• 4 months ago

Any company that feels the need to send data in plain text to third party LLM providers has absolutely no business having government contracts. OpenAI and Anthropic are both a complete joke when it comes to data security.

It is hard to believe how few companies seemingly lack even one person with the basic technical skills required to rack up a server or two or find a service that supports verifiable end to end encryption.

aardvarkr• 4 months ago

That’s fine. They can choose to use whatever model their political hearts desire. the supply chain risk designation means EVERYONE who works with the government isn’t allowed to use Claude. Nearly everyone in tech has some sort of contract with the government.

dragonwriter• 4 months ago

the supply chain risk designation means EVERYONE who works with the government isn’t allowed to use Claude.

No, it doesn't. The even more illegal Presidential directive (also a subject of this case and the injunction) asserts that, but the supply chain risk designation itself does not have that effect.

Jimmc414• 4 months ago

Anthropic is a dead letter in government circles until the next Presidential election.

Department of Defense itself is still using Anthropic in active combat operations _after_ the Supply Chain Risk designation.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/05/anthropic-pentagon-ai-claude...

mr_00ff002• 4 months ago

Had this conversation with a friend, but I think as an America you can be very optimistic about the institutional strength of democracy in the country.

People are very pessimistic recently, but if anything, we are seeing that our system works well. A person got into power that a majority voted for, but when he oversteps, the courts and other institutions (even judges and fed reserve chairs he picked!) seem to hold him to the rules.

I get the pessimism, but for the most part, I kinda think the system is working.

cwillu• 4 months ago

The question is not whether the walls can contain the bull until animal control arrives, but whether any china will remain intact.

setsewerd• 4 months ago

Given the iran situation I think china will be fine.

(I'll show myself out)

kirubakaran• 4 months ago

The bull comparison is a bit unfair to the bull, who didn't break any china at all in MythBusters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzw2iBmRsjs

pjc50• 4 months ago

It's more like the early bits of Jurassic Park: the T-Rex bashing away at the restraints while everyone assures you that they spared no expense to make it secure.

mxkopy• 4 months ago

This is one ruling out of many, many of which directly benefit Trump. See Trump vs. United States 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States

There’s absolutely 0 reason to be optimistic towards a court stacked explicitly in his favor.

paulv2• 4 months ago

that a majority voted for

A majority of people who voted. Not a majority of eligible voters and certainly not a majority.

sillysaurusx• 4 months ago

Are you saying that if all eligible voters were forced to vote, Trump may have lost the popular vote?

what• 4 months ago

Anyone who was eligible but didn’t vote effectively voted for whomever won. The distinction doesn’t matter.

Hasnep• 4 months ago

I hate Trump as much as the next guy but this feels like nitpicking. You're obviously right, but if you choose not to vote then you're implicitly approving of whatever outcome you get.

tick_tock_tick2• 4 months ago

No one cares about people who don't bother to vote. If you can't manage even that you don't deserve an opinion.

blah blah some exceptional circumstances, etc you all know what I mean.

zaptheimpaler2• 4 months ago

lol judges have ruled 100s or 1000s of ICE detentions in various states illegal by now. None of that has stopped ICE from doing what it's doing. This kind of optimism in the law seems naive today because there is no mechanism to actually enforce it. All federal agents have very substantial legal & civil immunity, heads of departments have immunity as well. The head of the legal system is Pam Bondi who isn't even prosecuting child rapists, or Donald Trump who is one.

Even after Kristi Noem ruined countless lives and was responsible for deaths of innocent people, the only consequence she faced is being demoted to some made up job where she still gets paid to do nothing - no fine, no jail, not even being out of work, no accountability, no justice. None of the ICE agents involved have faced any consequences besides a leave either, we don't even know most of their names. The justice system is not working.

People who don't follow the news like most of the tech community are living in some dreamland of a system or treating it as a purely mental battle of optimism/pessimism vs. actually seeing what is happening.

Natsu2• 4 months ago

judges have ruled 100s or 1000s of ICE detentions in various states illegal by now. None of that has stopped ICE from doing what it's doing.

This is a weird one because ICE has lost so many habeas cases, mostly by dropping them, only for the 8th circuit court of appeals (which covers Minnesota) to overturn that the other day:

https://ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/26/03/253248P.pdf

There was similar precedent in the 5th circuit (Texas) previously, too, but that was not binding on Minnesota:

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/26884355/ca5detention...

So this is pretty weird now, legally, since a ton of lower courts have assumed things didn't work this way and the appeals courts are now saying they're wrong.

brendoelfrendo• 4 months ago

Trump or various departments of his administration have a 90% success rate with cases at the Supreme Court, as compared to a roughly 55-60% success rate at lower courts. The judiciary can still work, but the highest judiciary in the land is pretty soundly in his pocket. Trump's most significant defeat at the Supreme Court, overturning his signature tariffs policy, was viewed by some as a sign that the Supreme Court remained independent and defiant... but that's pretty clearly not the case, at least not up to this point.

jrflowers• 4 months ago

And people say that posting isn’t art…

pnt12• 4 months ago

I'm not an American but unfortunately I don't share the optimism. Your president shows time and time again he does what he wants, whether it's immoral or illegal or not within his power to do. And a majority turn a blind eye, especially his party. Some examples (correct me if I'm wrong): starting 2 wars; very questionable anti deportation methods by ICE; a DOGE that was ruthless and dumb; renaming a branch (ministry of war) in effect while in theory not having such power; pardoning crypto currencies pundits who have business with him; ties to pump and dump scams. Not to mention ties to Eppstein.

My prediction: in a vendetta, because they chose to contradict him publicly, and his cronies will put high pressure to have anthropic out of everything touching the government, and any rebel will be fired for an unrelated cause. The high profile CEOs (those we were attending his inauguration) will avoid anthropic, lest they find their selves out of some profitable contract or in some unrelated tribunal issue. Anyone in his party will surely avoid them too.

JKCalhoun• 4 months ago

Begging for forgiveness… The U.S. needs an ask permission President. (You can argue of course as to whether the U.S. ever had that.)

mr_00ff002• 4 months ago

Anthropic is a good example of my point, judges are blocking that action.

The president has always had these powers, starting wars hasn’t been a congressional power since World War II. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq twice were all police actions by the president.

For the most part he can do what he wants at first, but the system eventually pulls back. It’s happened with ICE, it’s happened with Anthropic, it’s happened with interest rates and pressure to effect fed reserve chairs.

enoint2• 4 months ago

He’s never won a majority of the popular vote.

Hizonner• 4 months ago

For a problem the size of Trump, the intended function of the institutions would have been removing him from office by now. Not to mention ignoring basically all of his more publicized executive orders (I don't know about more obscure ones).

The judiciary sort of holding it together to issue orders that are mostly ignored is not the system working.

Tadpole9181• 4 months ago

...what in the world...

We have a war in Iran that was not approved by legislature. Run by a Fox news host with no experience who has committed multiple war crimes on camera now. A war we are not exactly winning (now raising the enlistment age and losing million dollar aircraft to thousand dollar drones), having an enormous and lasting impact on the global economy - making us look downright stupid. And position us to be unable to defend allies in the region, sure, but perhaps even other critical regions like Taiwan.

We kidnapped a foreign leader and are talking about an invasion of Cuba - who we are committing human rights violations against by preventing them from having electricity.

We have tariffs across all our prior allies. Multiple trade deals have been ruined. America's reputation is permanently damage. Well, more than that, Trump has threatened to invade Canada and Greenland. And apparently our (former) allies took it so seriously they had begun to develop new strategies and elevate their military preparedness and make security talks with their allies.

And our "corporate stability" benefit is quickly falling apart as agencies and courts are rapidly being replaced with sycophants whose most important decree is "bribe or otherwise adorn dear leader with praise". Bills attempting to bring back manufacturing are dead. Infrastructure bills are dead. We're back to the rot.

ICE is acting as a Gestapo, who show no badges and wear masks and plain clothes. They have killed multiple people and faced zero repercussions and has been expanded to airport security where they have already assaulted citizens. And that's before we get into the concentration camps.

The president attempted a coup on our government in 2020, where he directed his supporters to storm the capital and stop the ratification of an election he lost - and faced absolutely no punishment. He is now nominating judges who are refusing to state in their Senate hearings that he lost the election. We have also passed a bill called SAVE that effectively makes creates a secret poll tax for married women, whose both cost and expediency are gated by a department directly controlled by the executive. That's if we even have a fair one, of course: Trump has floated numerous times cancelling the election in times of war or deploying armed ICE agents to key polling locations. He has made it very clear they cannot lose midterms.

And that executive is vaporized. Trust in public careers has been killed by DOGE, alongside the careers and decades of knowledge and progress destroyed by them simply hammering apart institutions . The department of education is dead. The fed, one of the last and most important hold outs, is losing independence and will soon by led by a yes man who will blindly slash rates for Trump to enrish himself - at any cost for the economy.

The SCOTUS, of which an entire third were placed by Trump - who is eyeing yet a fourth - have given Trump enormous wins, most famously the ruling that he is essentially immune from all laws and can do anything he wants. And they're looking like they may erode the state right to self-managed elections and/or ban mail-in votes. A ruling that essentially destroyed our ability to punish Trump for his colluding with a foreign nation to rig our democratic system with the help of the technofeudal corporations.

Which, funny enough, brings us full circle to the war in Iran. Where his actions now allow him to stop all support for Ukraine and drop sanctions on Russia without people noticing all too much. Yet again, benefiting the crooks a significant portion of the intelligence community believe - including our own - compromise the now president.

I cannot fathom how you can sit there and say that the system is "working". Has the frog seriously been sufficiently boiled? It was this easy? It's been one single year!

BugsJustFindMe• 4 months ago

It's insane to to say that the system is working when the ones responsible for enforcing the laws are the ones who are ignoring the laws. A judge said. Uh huh. And what's the judge going to do when they ignore it like they've done so many times before? The Trump DOJ is still in violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was passed nearly-unanimously by Congress months ago, and continue to withhold content that implicates Trump in a child rape and sex trafficking ring.

tim333• 4 months ago

I was cheered to see the Conservative Political Action Conference audience cheering for his impeachment a couple of days ago https://newrepublic.com/post/208293/cpac-attendees-confused-...

On the other hand you've got Bannon trying to sort a third trem.

yen223• 4 months ago

How many of you had to stop using Claude because of the Pentagon edict?

gburgett• 4 months ago

We are certainly moving that direction (small defense sub)

Terretta• 4 months ago

Invert the question:

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/06/claudes-consumer-growth-su...

biophysboy• 4 months ago

I had to, and I work in a completely different agency (NIH)

xvector3• 4 months ago

Pushed me towards Claude.

Seattle3503• 4 months ago

I did, but the govt is one of my companies customers

mholm• 4 months ago

My org gave us 5 months to transition our personal usage away from Anthropic products. Presumably that's paused now, though they haven't made an announcement. I work with medicare/medicaid, and the supply chain risk was directly cited in the initial decision.

stainablesteel2• 4 months ago

i think the military should be able to do what it wants

last i checked the german military is held down by stupid obligations forced onto it by its government that make it both inefficient and obsolete

Analemma_• 4 months ago

As many, many people more intelligent and good-faith than you have pointed out, the government is free to stop using Anthropic‘s services at any time: nobody disputes that. What they are not free to do is impose a corporate death sentence because their contract counterparty wouldn’t submit to forceful changing of terms they had previously both agreed on.

stainablesteel2• 4 months ago

claims bad faith
starts off with insults

the judge ruling is independent of the prior events

you can think one thing about one of those things, and another about another

telotortium• 4 months ago

Just a district judge, so I’m supposing the Trump administration will file an appeal if they care, and will almost certainly get a preliminary injunction. The Ninth Circuit ruling will be more telling.

xvector3• 4 months ago

Unfortunately the Pentagon can and will appeal, and the 9th Circuit and higher courts are excessively deferential on "matters of national security."

yalogin• 4 months ago

Glad to see the judicial system works sometimes atleast. Less cynically now, the president has admired Xi many many times openly, and it’s clear he prefers an administrative style similar to China. That is what he is turning the country into. Everybody goes and bends the knee like the tech ceos did and he controls every aspect of the administration with an iron fist, just like China.

trymas2• 4 months ago

IMHO current USA government is somewhat inverse to China.

US government now is a kakistocracy made out of sycophants to the biggest egomaniac this generation have ever seen. Who is only driven by personal wealth and attention.

Any billionaire capitalist psychopath openly promising to give cash and attention to orange musollini gets a free reign to do anything (they could be even not from USA) - it’s oligarchy.

China is not that. Xi and CCP are much more principled than emotional children in USA.

IAmBroom• 4 months ago

Xi is intelligent and capable of long-term planning.

The only similarity I see is that neither Xi nor our Narcissist-in-Chief brook any criticism; but aside from the "Let 1,000 Flowers Bloom" campaign of Mao, that has always been China's domestic policy.

ozgrakkurt• 4 months ago

Don’t think they would put a tv presenter to the head of the military in China. I find it much more similar to current Turkey situation. And Trump is speedrunning that process too, he is destroying things much faster

krapp• 4 months ago

Less cynically now, the president has admired Xi many many times openly, and it’s clear he prefers an administrative style similar to China.

China style authoritarianism can't work in the US because the CCP has to actually deliver quality of life to the people in exchange for their political and cultural oppression. America's tech oligarchy is only willing to deliver for billionaires.

If Trump were really setting up a Xi style dictatorship he would be pacifying the people with investment in infrastructure, education and healthcare. Americans would gladly tolerate armed masked thugs kidnapping immigrants and the wholesale censorship of the internet and the press if he actually kept prices down and employment up.

Or he could at least better at giving the impression of doing so. The biggest failure of Trumpism by far has to be its propaganda. None of these people know how to lie effectively. Not nearly as well as the neocons. Look at the whole song and dance they did to justify war with Iraq versus... whatever the hell America's plan with Iran is supposed to be (besides Christian holy war, apparently.)

throwawaypath• 4 months ago

China style authoritarianism can't work in the US because the CCP has to actually deliver quality of life to the people in exchange for their political and cultural oppression.

One of the most terminally online brainrot takes I've read, and that's saying something. Their quality of life is worse in practically every metric. Great quality of life improvements for the 50 million who died during the Great Leap Forward.

panny• 4 months ago

10 U.S.C. § 3252 authorizes the Secretary of Defense to exclude a source from defense procurements involving national security systems if there is a supply chain risk, defined as the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or subvert a covered system.

I think any LLM is covered by that, but specifically for Anthropic,

Recent research has uncovered several critical vulnerabilities, including the "Claudy Day" attack chain which allows silent data exfiltration through conversation history, and a zero-click XSS prompt injection in the Chrome extension that enabled attackers to inject prompts without user interaction until a patch was released in February 2026.

What is obvious to me however is the timing. This Trump pants-shitting happened just before the Iran invasion. You can just imagine it. Trump wants to send fully autonomous bots into Iran to destroy the non-existent nuclear program. Anthropic leadership tries to make a moral stand saying innocent civilians could die. Trump doesn't care because he wants zero US military casualties even if it means a school full of Iranian children is bombed and everyone is killed. And then we get exactly that plus a forever war.

And obviously, the judge is out of her lane too... since, you know, the rule basically can apply to any AI agent because they're just as likely to do what you ask as they are to delete all your emails without even apologizing for it.

lrvick3• 4 months ago

I mean they -are- a supply chain risk, but also, so is every security negligent proprietary software firm the public and government relies on for no reason. Anthropic deserves to -share- this label with dozens of other companies.

What is insane is that the US government lacks the capability to insert GPUs into PCIe slots, and provide them with electricity and FOSS tools. This shit is just not that hard. Especially when you have an unlimited money printer.

A level of incompetence that causes the US government to even think they need to pay a private company to host LLMs for them is the biggest risk I see.

zombot• 4 months ago

Will it help? This administration is not big on adherence to the law.

Judge blocks Pentagon effort to 'punish' Anthropic with supply chain risk label

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