> OTOH, I think almost guaranteed it will be watered-down by the government. Because read expansively, it could force Microsoft and AWS to choose between stopping reselling Claude vs dropping the Pentagon as a customer.
A tweet does not have the force of law. Being designated a supply chain risk does not mean that companies who do business with the government cannot do business with Anthropic. Hegseth just has the law wrong. The government does not have the power to prevent companies from doing business with Anthropic.
The issue is, even if the Trump admin is misrepresenting what the law actually says, federal contractors may decide it is safer to comply with the administration’s reading. The risk is the administration may use their reading to reject a bid. And even if they could potentially challenge that in court and win, they may decide the cheaper and less risky option is to choose OpenAI (or whoever) instead
They would have a very good case against the government if that were to happen. I suspect that the supply chain risk designation will not last long (if it goes into effect).
Some vendors will decide to sue the government. Others may decide that switching to another LLM supplier is cheaper and lower risk.
And I'm not sure your confidence in how the courts will rule is justified. Learning Resources Inc v Trump (the IEEPA tariffs case) proves the SCOTUS conservatives – or at least a large enough subset of them to join with the liberals to produce a majority – are willing sometimes to push back on Trump. Yet there are plenty of other cases in which they've let him have his way. Are you sure you know how they'll judge this case?
> Are you sure you know how they'll judge this case?
I'm not even sure it will get that far. There's a million different ways that this could go that mean it won't ever come before the supreme court. The designation isn't even in effect yet.
I do think if it goes into effect it will be eventually overturned (Supreme Court or otherwise) There just isn't a serious argument to make that they qualify as a supply chain risk and there is no precedent for it.
A tweet does not have the force of law. Being designated a supply chain risk does not mean that companies who do business with the government cannot do business with Anthropic. Hegseth just has the law wrong. The government does not have the power to prevent companies from doing business with Anthropic.