Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed artificial intelligence firm Anthropic a supply chain risk on Friday, following days of increasingly heated public conflict with the AI company.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed artificial intelligence firm Anthropic a supply chain risk on Friday, following days of increasingly heated public conflict with the AI company.
This absolutely did not kill them. I’ve been dealing with federal procurement, including ATOs for DoD, for years, and 99% of companies never even remotely interact with it. Yes, there’s a large number that do, especially among Fortune 500s and up, but the actual percentage of companies who have military contracts is tiny. This was meant to intimidate them into compliance, but this doesn’t make them any less viable than AIaaS already is or isn’t.
The order is actually much narrow than that; it only applies to companies who directly have contracts with the military.
Anthropic software just can’t be used to process federal data, but if e.g. Lockheed uses ADP to process internal payroll, and ADP uses a third-party developer to build some software, and that developer uses Claude, that doesn’t snake it’s way back up the chain and invalidate Lockheed’s contracts.
I think the order actually is even more narrow than that in that it only deals with the part of the business that they do that has to deal that has to do with actual sensitive stuff that is, if the anthropic CEO is to be believed.