Viva local-first software!
And I’m not singling out Anthropic. None of these companies or governments (i.e. people) can be trusted at face value.
>For instance, an agency could pay for a subscription or negotiate a pay-per-use contract with an AI provider, only to find out that it is prohibited from using the AI model in certain ways, limiting its value.
This is of course quite false. They of course know the restriction when they sign the contract.
This reads to me like:
* Some employee somewhere wanted to click the shiny Claude button in the AWS FedRamp marketplace
* Whatever USG legal team were involved said "that domestic surveillance clause doesn't work for us" and tried to redline it.
* Anthropic rejected the redline.
* Someone got mad and went to Semafor.
It's unclear that this has even really escalated prior to the article, or that Anthropic are really "taking a stand" in a major way (after all, their model is already on the Fed marketplace) - it just reads like a typical fed contract negotiation with a squeaky wheel in it somewhere.
The article is also full of other weird nonsense like:
> Traditional software isn’t like that. Once a government agency has access to Microsoft Office, it doesn’t have to worry about whether it is using Excel to keep track of weapons or pencils.
While it might not be possible to enforce them as easily, many, many shrink-wrap EULAs restrict the way in which software can be used. Almost always there is an EULA carve-out with different tier for lifesaving or safety uses (due to liability / compliance concerns) and for military uses (sometimes for ethics reasons but usually due to a desire to extract more money from those customers).
If it gives you high priority support, I dont care, if its the same tier of support, then that's just obnoxiously greedy.
It’s worrying to me that Anthropic, a foreign corporation (EDIT: they’re a US corp), would even have the visibility necessary to enforce usage restrictions on US government customers. Or are they baking the restrictions into the model weights?
"Foreign" to who? I interpretted your comment as foreign to the US government (please correct me if I'm wrong) and I was confused because Anthropic is a US company.
The concern remains even if it’s a US corporation though (not government owned servers).
> The concern remains even if it’s a US corporation though (not government owned servers).
Very much so, I completely agree.
2) Are government agencies sending prompts to model inference APIs on remote servers?
Of course, look up FedRAMP. Depending on the assurance level necessary, cloud services run on either cloud carve-outs in US datacenters (with various "US Person Only" rules enforced to varying degrees) or for the highest levels, in specific assured environments (AWS Secret Region for example).
3) It’s worrying to me that Anthropic, a foreign corporation, would even have the visibility necessary to enforce usage restrictions on US government customers.
There's no evidence they do, it's just lawyers vs lawyers here as far as I can tell.
"...cannot use...For ongoing surveillance or real-time or near real-time identification or persistent tracking of the individual using any of their personal data, including biometric data, without the individual’s valid consent."
SilverbeardUnix•56m ago