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If anything deserves the designation "supply chain risk", it's an unfriendly autonomous AI (though I agree with Anthropic's claim that it is limited to use in association with government contracts)
Is that "unfriendly autonomous AI" in the room with us right now? I think that's begging the question.
Anthropic, or by extension, Claude, has shown no "unfriendliness" I can think of. That term brings to mind intentional collusion with hostile foreign actors, including intentional backdoors or deliberate sabotage. Political and moral disagreement that is entirely within legal limits does not count. The Democrats cannot blanket Republicans as enemies of the state, nor vice versa, despite working to undermine or reverse preferred policy.
Anthropic has not tried to stop the Pentagon from conducting fully autonomous drone strikes or mass domestic surveillance. They have politely declined to aid and abet them, after signing a contract that says so. I can only hope the DOW has lawyers too, it wasn't some hidden EULA activated by simply browsing their website. Supply chain risk? I see a vendor negotiation that didn't go the way one side wanted. There are other vendors out there, they didn't have to go with Anthropic.
I stress: the specific objection Anthropic raised was to mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous lethal systems. If opposing those makes an AI "unfriendly," I'd want to know what "friendly" looks like, because I don't think I'd like the answer.
Nor is Claude autonomous in any meaningful sense. Is it running independent cloud instances on exfiltrated weights? Not that I'm aware of. There are no plans to allow for this, and pre-existing safety measures to prevent it.
What exactly has Claude done that other competing models haven't? In what sense is it more unfriendly than Grok, or ChatGPT? Is it more autonomous? Only in the loose sense that I'd count on Opus 4.6 to get a lot more done than any Grok.
The more you squint at this, the stranger it gets. Anthropic wanted contractual guarantees against things that are supposedly already illegal. The Pentagon's response to "put that in writing" was to designate them a national security threat. If the restrictions are redundant because law already covers them, the resistance to codifying them is hard to explain charitably.
What do people even mean by this anymore? Do people think they stopped after the Snowden leaks? I'm old enough to remember liking candidate "constitutional law professor" Barack Obama criticizing the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program, then disliking his choice to promptly decide to continue and expand it once he was elected. Or tech companies opposing PRISM leaks before promptly jumping at the chance to (algorithmically, I'm sure) ban things that the Biden administration asked them to. Very stunning and brave moral record they've got going there.
I'm not sure I should trust Anthropic to be a better moral actor than the government here: they were willing to dance with the devil they already knew was doing this sort of thing, selling a product for which this is probably one of the clearest use cases. To be clear, I'm not the biggest fan of such programs continuing (although I can acknowledge they might be quietly stopping all kinds of bad actors), I'm just jaded from literal decades of "principled" stands against it mostly just sweeping things under the rug.
ETA:
If I had to guess, Anthropic wants to be the ultimate arbiter of what "the law" says here (or at least, what their "contractual guarantees" mean). So does the administration (and I'm sure the judiciary is willing to fight them on that on occasion).
Precisely. I am once again reminding people that the vast majority of folks can't even identify the names of the two main programs that were contentious, much less say anything about how they worked... and even further less about how they were different from each other.
...and yet somehow even further less about the subsequent history of those two programs. What follow-on statutory authorizations looked like or whether each of the programs continued.
No, people mostly don't have a clue. They absorbed a bunch of propaganda over a decade ago, never made coherent sense of it at the time, and are now just half-remembering faint glimmers of propaganda from days past.
You can continue to David Sternlight it all you want, the government was still Hoovering up all the metadata for every phone call in the United States from most carriers, and they were tapping the major email providers and Hoovering up all the metadata AND content. No, I don't remember what the different programs were called. Sure, they weren't supposed to look at that data unless it was within some number of hops of some targeted party, but they took it all anyway.
As for the statutory authorizations, they were black programs and their replacements are almost certainly black. There's no statutory line item for PRISM or XKEYSCORE any more than there was for the SR-71, and there won't be for the replacements either.
The propaganda here is by those pretending this isn't a big deal. Of course, such mass surveillance programs have been leaked before -- ECHELON and the program behind AT&T Room 641A (the one that Joseph Naccio went to jail for not playing ball with). In a few years everyone forgets and is shocked when the next such program leaks.
I'll just jump in here to say that this is the first outright false thing in this comment. The rest of your comment is just admitting to the truth of my comment. You don't actually know the differences; you don't actually know how they worked; you don't know the follow-on history, how the statutes changed, etc.
This was a close second to being outright false. Actually, I'll probably say that it's outright false. You could make modifications to it to be true, but as stated, it's outright false.
Look, I'm not pretending it isn't a big deal. Of course it's a big deal. That's why you should put in the effort to understand it instead of continuing to be false false false.
Are you sure? I would love to see the congressional budget that funded PRISM. I genuinely don't see how there could be one for a classified program like this. My understanding has just been that NSA gets $XXX billion in the budget with nothing else said.
PRISM is the name of one of the major components of FISA Section 702. This is public law. I don't believe the claim was that the budget is public. After all, the sentence immediately prior in the original comment was:
That speaks specifically about authorizations (which FISA Section 702 is), not appropriations.
I think you are technically incorrect. Which wouldn't be a problem except that you were so pedantically annoying to the other poster.
Here is the text of FISA. It does not contain the word PRISM anywhere. PRISM is a code name for one of the tools that Section 702 authorized. (I believe your comments are blurring the distinction between being something and authorizing something.) The fact that PRISM is a code name and was classified justifies calling it a "black program". Also, I interpreted the phrase line item from OP to be budgetary, since I have only ever heard that term used in a budgetary context before.
In general I'm sympathetic to the idea that most pro-Snowden/anti-NSA folks don't actually know what they are for/against. But I don't think you ranting at them in only semi-correct formalisms is helpful.
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