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Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic was unlawful, US judge rules

Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic was unlawful, US judge rules

softwaredoug

Comments (104)

  • DannyBee
    The opinion is quite straightforward, and the evidence on the government's side was entirely nonsense, essentially.https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
  • paxys
    Sure, and what are you going to do about it? The current government is above laws.
  • giwook
    Like so many of this administration's actions, unfortunately...
  • londons_explore
    Presumably this is going to lead to anthropic getting a big payday from the US gov for all the time their flagship product was banned and all the users they lost due to it
  • WalterGR
    124 comments on this submission from 10 hours prior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49473522
  • jtrn
    I get irrational angry by logical and nonsensical statements. When I read this: “ Pentagon says private companies should not be able to constrain military action.” I am screaming: But they can fucking how what THEY want to sell to anybody! Setting terms for THEIR side is NOT constraining military action, unless military suddenly has totalitarian power over everybody !
  • ChrisArchitect
  • gigatexal
    Will it matter? Trump and his gang of criminal owns the Supreme Court and are happy to flout the law in a move fast a break things approach all the time. (See also the stupid gaudy ballroom) This win a pyrrhic one at best.
  • cubefox
    But I guess Anthropic will not be compensated?
  • josefritzishere
    Lots of that going around in this administration
  • micromacrofoot
    Add it to the "but no one's going to do anything about it" pile
  • techneek
    "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics."
  • whalesalad
    Unlawful means absolutely nothing these days.
  • digitaltrees
    When this administration is done we need to amend the constitution to hold politicians legally and financially responsible for intentionally lying and intentionally breaking the law. This was obviously illegal on its face and yet there is no consequence to pushing the norms.
  • small_model
    "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."
  • idiotsecant
    It did what it was supposed to - punish an entity that dared not do what the government told them to. It doesn't matter if anthropic gets a payday out of it, the administration doesn't get hurt by that and won't learn any lessons. We need to hold individual politicians and functionaries accountable
  • kypro
    I know most will see this as a good thing, and perhaps in this case it is, but I think it's generally concerning that people can vote for leaders who effectively can't do anything significant.I understand this community largely disagrees with Trump, but the only people who win overall from these scenarios are people who support the status-quo and don't like the idea of a leader having significant power to change things. Any leader who is elected on a mandate to govern differently will face similar legal challenges.I'm also not saying there's no place for legal challenges either, but there is a balance to be found there. The idea the Pentagon can't blacklist a US company for whatever reason it wants just seems absurd to me regardless of whether this specific ruling is good or bad.
  • nekusar
    And NOT a damned thing will be done to punish the administration for these obvious illegal actions.And they'll continue to do so, because it takes months to unwind this shit, and the damage was done immediately.
  • dzonga
    criminals in charge did unlawful shit. what a surprise.
  • SimonWAds
    [flagged]
  • lettergram
    This would likely be overturned if the federal government needs to push it. At the time Anthropic was saying publicly that they oppose certain actions and their model is restricted in certain ways. The executive branch viewed that as a risk and has the ultimate say over it's vendors, regardless of the judges ruling. The supreme court has been pretty clear on this.This is also a reminder that, contrary to popular understanding, judges are indeed political appointees. This one was appointed by Joe Biden, works in the Bay Area and definitely has a political bias in both the track record and in activism.https://grokipedia.com/page/Rita_F._Lin
  • kevinthedigger
    Another activist judge. They all need to go, it’s sad that one judge can derail goodness and what’s proper. Kind of like a dictatorship, or a king.
  • manlymuppet
    As much as I dislike this administration's actions, why? Doesn't the Department of Defense get discretion to contract for whatever reasons it likes, as long as they think it serves public interests?If Pete Hegseth, who is albeit highly incompetent, decides that Anthropic's values don't match with those of the DoD, isn't that entirely his call to make? Unless there's very specific circumstances at play, Hegseth is at least a public official, and gets to decide to do what he thinks is best for the public. Although he is wrong and Anthropic is right, no judge should force the government to use Anthropic products.Does anybody have the legal analysis? I'm (clearly) not a lawyer, but I'm more interested for now in the question of whether this is allowed rather than whether it's morally right (it's obviously not).
  • sailfast
    This is good, generally, for government overstepping especially in the case of targeted domestic restrictions (and what amounts to anti-competitive blackmail in my opinion)BUT! The judge’s opinion that “The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," is actually false. In the current administration it’s absolutely a blank check to punish and retaliate and I’m not sure under which authority a federal judge would stop them at this point.Current Supreme Court had made it clear they don’t have many controls here…Furthermore, Anthropic isn’t likely to recover any funds after this. So what if it happens to your small hardware startup? It’s a terrible precedent for Hegseth to set, and will lead to future harm. But he’s not the brightest bulb. Keep on talking up “Lethality” buddy… :/
  • thataccount
    https://san.com/cc/no-the-nsa-wasnt-hacked-by-ai-heres-what-...If this article is accurate, it sounds like Mythos via Anthropic had proven itself to be a security risk. This explains the dual speak around it being both essential and a supply chain risk, since if it were hacked by another country it would compromise security.Not being any riskier than any other "blackbox" AI is still sufficiently dangerous and I suppose the difference, without knowing more about what the government tested, was that they knew Mythos could do these things as they had evaluated it themselves.