I guess what's unusual is that the scope includes inbox access.
IMO it's probably a bad idea to have an LLM/agent managing your email inbox. Even if it's readonly and the LLM behaves perfectly, supply chain attacks have an especially large blast radius (even more so if it's your work email).
It's a bit of a pickle, given that managing your inbox (or at least reading it, classifying and summarizing contents, identifying action items etc.) is one of the most valuable applications of LLMs today, especially if you move beyond software developers having LLMs write code for them.
I do think it's a tempting use case, but there are precautions that up I would take if I was doing this sort of thing. Off the top of my head:
- Set up a separate inbox just for the agent, with a forwarding rule that passes on most things that land in my Gmail, but omits as many verification token/password reset emails as possible.
- Have the agent alert me when any sensitive emails do make it through, with suggestions on how to update the forwarding rule.
If it's a loyalty test then you'd think the DoD would be willing to let them "fail" and simply drop the contract, but instead they're threatening to label Anthropic a supply chain risk.
If we're going by Occam's razor: it's Friday so Pete probably started drinking ~10:30-11am.
This administration has repeatedly shown it will try to bully or take an outrageous negotiating position just to gain featly. Whether they get anything or whether the dispute is actually what the label says should always be treated with skepticism, especially these days with social media information wars. That’s the benefit of realpolitik when you’re a superpower, you often don’t actually need anything, you can just make an example of people to keep the flock in check.
It seems like they'd have a stronger negotiating position if they had an alternative contractor waiting in the wings before they accused Anthropic of being woke traitors, as opposed to a threat to migrate away over the next 6 months.
But again, the sophistication of their strategery might also have a negative correlation with Hegseth's BAC.
No one accused them of being competent negotiators. Remember, the secret behind the "Art of the Deal" is to be obstinate and abusive until everyone settles just to stop dealing with you.
They're not threatening to do that. They just did. Read the tweet linked in the article.
> In conjunction with the President's directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service. https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070?s=20
This has never happened before. It just goes to show how overextended the USG is these days. America is broke. Anthropic is about to IPO. Most stock market money comes from foreign countries like Japan these days. All those people are going to trust Anthropic more if they believe the company is neutral among nations and acting as a check and balance to power.
U.S. authorities labeled them a supply chain risk. The military went on Twitter and basically labeled Anthropic an enemy of the state. The most popular company on Earth. They did that. If USG was able to issue some kind of secret court order compelling them to act and keep it covert then they would have done it.
> If it's a loyalty test then you'd think the DoD would be willing to let them "fail" and simply drop the contract, but instead they're threatening to label Anthropic a supply chain risk.
It is not just a test, it is PR of sorts. They want to bully everyone into loyalty.
> If we're going by Occam's razor: it's Friday so Pete probably started drinking ~10:30-11am.
If we're going by Occam's razor, then we should cut away the drinks. USSR started its terror not because someone was drunk, it was a deliberate action to make everyone afraid to do anything. They targeted people at random and executed them accusing them of counterrevolution or espionage. The goal was to instill fear.
Now Putin regime does the same, they are instilling fear in people. It is a basic authoritarian reflex to make people afraid of being marked as disloyal. They prefer to do it in unpredictable ways to create an uncertainty of where the red lines are so people don't try even to toeing them.
Trump is not very skilled in the mechanics of terror. He is predictable which is unfortunate for a would-be dictator. It is an incompetence, and if a hypothesis resort to it, it is a bad sign for a hypothesis. But AFAIK no hypotheses explaining Trump can avoid introducing his incompetence into the picture. In this light the reliance of a hypothesis on incompetence loses its discriminatory power.
Everyone in the administration is completely drunk on power, they truly believe the government should be allowed to do whatever they please, despite being vehemently against previous governments telling their constituents what to do. Such nonsense, they hold no values, they only want complete power.
I don't know how the business leadership community could watch this whole affair and still be in support of them AT ALL. This is well past getting a crappy twitter rant from Trump on the weekend that maybe one could ignore until the next rant.
Yeah I'm guessing the TLD was the main signal, based on other comments linking to a thread about "Pinggy", who was also using a .online. The fact that Namecheap is giving them out for free means they probably are more scammy on average.
I've also never added domains to Google Search Console and haven't had blacklisting issue other than with a free .ml (another "cursed" TLD) site that was by default assumed to be spam by Facebook Messenger.
It's unfortunate that this category exists, but I don't share the OP's .com purism; I've used a mix of TLDs and even the cheap ones like .fyi and .cc haven't come under extra scrutiny as far as I can tell.
I think they could get pretty far with a PWA, but there are legitimate arguments to go native. For use cases like podcasts, where users can download them ahead of time, it seems like Safari limits storage to 1GB [0]. Plus playing background audio might not be as good an experience.
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