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Anthropic refused to let the Department of War use their models to spy on Americans en masse or autonomously kill people, and for the past week the DoW has been trying to pressure them to change that.
Today the Department of War said "If Anthropic doesn't let them use their models for any legal purpose the Pentagon wants ("all lawful use") the Pentagon will either cut ties and declare Anthropic a 'supply chain risk,' or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military's needs."[1] The DoW gave Dario until Friday to make a decision.
The former would prevent any company that does business with the DoW from using Anthropic products,[2] something normally reserved for foreign adversaries, and has been threatened for a week. The latter is new, and IMO it's a big deal.
It would mean no matter what Anthropic does, they can't control how the DoW uses their models. It's somewhat ambiguous whether this would be a legal use of the DPA; it's normally reserved for hardware not software. It's also not clear to me what it would meant to have Anthropic "tailor its model" to DPA usage.
People at AI companies often assume if they trust the leadership of their company, then they don't have to worry about egregious misuse. But if they develop the technology, they can't stop the government form getting their hands on it. And this incident is evidence the government is very willing to take extreme measures to get their hands on it and that they intent to use it for things like spying on Americans en masse.
I expected at some point when AI was very powerful governments would try to nationalize it, but I didn't expect this kind of action when the technology was this early along in development, when it was very far from posing a decisive strategic advantage.
It's important to bear in mind they are probably trying to sound extra scary to pressure Anthropic and other AI developers in this negotiation. Though they also framed this as an ultimatum and didn't give themselves much room to back down.
Perhaps from using them at all for anything, perhaps from using them to fulfill that specific contract. The details are murky. Per The Verge:
"This could be implemented in a very narrow sense — or an extremely broad one. 'I suspect the more logical explanation would be the narrower definition, that Anthropic can’t be used as part of a specific statement of work for the Pentagon,' said Gertz. 'But based on some of the reporting and effort to make this seem like a punitive move against Anthropic, it’s worth thinking through both of those scenarios.' "
When using the DPA a key question is how likely it is for a company to sue against it and whether the Supreme Court would rule in favor of the company. While the current Supreme Court is generally pro-Trump it's generally pro-corporate rights.
If you stand in front of the Supreme Court and say, it doesn't go against my red lines that my software being used to hack a powerplant and shut it down and let people starve as a result but I'm not okay with it being used to make direct decisions to kill people please allow me the right to make my software not make ... (read more)