Technology

As you’ve probably heard, on Friday that political caprice came home to roost for many in Silicon Valley when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced he was declaring Anthropic a “supply chain risk” and that no one with US military contracts could have a commercial relationship with the company any more (a gross exaggeration of what being declared a supply chain risk actually means, but that’s besides the point).

We’ve criticized these “supply chain risk” designations going back years, but mainly for how they tend to be used to prop up American companies against foreign (usually Chinese) competitors with little evidence regarding the actual risk. Of course, you can easily understand the stated intent of an “SCR” designation: if there’s a foreign company with ties to a government that is averse to the US, there is always a risk that the company could agree to sneak backdoors or spyware into the network and do something bad. Hell, it’s what the US does.

But here, it makes no sense at all. The only “risk” was Anthropic saying its technology shouldn’t be used for domestic mass surveillance or to power autonomous killing machines. There is no underlying risk.