It's quite obvious they just wanted to punish Anthropic, all this supply chain risk is a joke.

Yes, but it's important that we point out their contradictions :)

I don't think they even wanted to punish them. This is more "art of the deal" BS from the chief idiot in charge where you make people think you're going to go to an extreme as a bargaining chip.

Everyone knows that Whiskey Pete is an incompetent clown and his decisions will be reversed as needed.

> The government is the one that said it didn't want/couldn't use this

Technically, the Pentagon did. I don’t know if that’s legally binding on the NSA.

I work for a completely unrelated fed agency, who doesn’t use Anthropic products, and we all received the email stating we couldn’t use them period.

Huh, does supply-chain risk mean SecDef can bar a company from all federal contracting?

I have no idea but this went out to all fed agencies from what I could tell looking at the subreddit for fed employees. I was surprised by the notice because my agency does not have a contract with them and obviously we can’t just use any LLM provider.

TFA says the NSA is part of the DOD.

It is, but NSA reports to the director of national intelligence, not the defense secretary, so it’s unclear (to me at least) that SecDef’s opinion of Anthropic counts for anything here

I guess DOD is large enough they have multiple parallel cabinet level positions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

It’s not as clear as that. The NSA director is also, traditionally, dual-hatted as the Commander of CYBERCOM and thus a flag officer reporting ultimately to the SecDef. The DNI is responsible for coordinating/funding national intelligence activities but ultimately a lot of day to day operational decision making tends to flow through the pentagon. They would definitely need to abide by DoD policy

> They would definitely need to abide by DoD policy

The policy in question is a statement by SecDef being reviewed by courts. I think it’s fair to ask whether DNI is actually constrained by that, or if it’s a judgement call.

This is not surprising. Did anyone really think the government wouldn't lie?

The government has thousands of leaders with competing priorities. Different parts of the government doing different things isnt lying.

All of those parts are lying

Normal military procurement is going to go through process and use the APIs that Anthropic gives them. The NSA just has to has to achieve the goal of getting the weights out of the target computer.

... as it has been designated as a supply chain risk.

You have causality backwards

USG signed a contract → USG wanted to coerce Anthropic into changing the terms post facto → USG decide to use supply chain risk designation to achieve this

We know this for a fact because they simultaneously floated using DPA or FASCSA to achieve their desired coercion.