HackiNews

• InvisibleUp
  Isn't Claude still considered a supply chain risk by the DoD? I guess that doesn't apply to non-military government agencies.

  • mushufasa
    we're in the limbo zone where the rest of the government is basically ignoring the DoD's designation

    • zombocomvibes
      Hegseth probably doesn't want to push the issue any further lest he invite more legal scrutiny.
  • pixelstack
    whole current american government is supply chain risk. What this gonna do to make it worse? lol
  • gigatexal
    My question exactly. Interested in seeing how far they take this.
• happytoexplain
  You'll have to start with changing the mission statement at the bottom of your page to remove the term "AI".

  • seemaze
    s/a/s/g

    • EdwardDiego
      Claude approves of your sed.

      • amlib
        Funny thing is that it will just mess his whole message except for the "AI" lol
      • Lukas_Skywalker
        Clsude spproves!
• snvzz
  Who voted Claude in?
• chopete3
  40% discount across the board is pretty steep and while doing the extra work of providing FedRAMP compliance.

  Genuine public service.

  10-15% discount was sufficient to get listed.

  • aenis
    Anthropic is giving nice discounts to volume customers these days. One can get more than 40% with a short one year commitment.
• nxobject
  Huh – I always thought GSA was still full of Elon's minions.

  • cwal37
    Who's leasing his compute?
• munch-o-man
  honestly, no thanks. Just hire people to do the work they have always done in government. I don't really want these techno-fascist oligarchs that are basically trying to replace democracy with themselves letting their little chatbots run wild in our government. I use claude every day writing code at work (I never auto-accept, everything is reviewed by me in small incremental chunks) and it does the most boneheaded dumbass shit or roundabout way to do something simple or just bolts on more shit and endless conditionals instead of refactoring logic when it is obvious that the original design no longer works.

  What is our rush to give up our own thinking?

  Also, fuck them, just because they are on the books for an amount of money equal to the GDP of New Zealand doesn't mean I want to pay it off for them with my taxes.

• iAMkenough
  The company that claims it "may never be profitable" just signed a deal to take even more of your tax dollars, is what I'm reading.

  GSA should be working to host its own inference and models for federal agencies, not selling out to unprofitable private infrastructure.

  Read their SEC filing, then decide if the "discount" is sustainable as a multi-agency dependency for decades to come. Or just blindly accept this as a positive and downvote away.

  • bradreaves2
    This isn't the government subsidizing a private venture, it's a private venture offering a discount to the government. What does profitability have to do with whether or not the government should purchase their services?

    • computably
      If the service provider goes under, the govt wasted their money.

      • ameliaquining
        ...no? Whatever value they got from inference they already did is still there? Of course the government still needs to worry about vendor lock-in, but they'd have to do that no matter what, and also general-purpose LLMs are relatively replaceable for most use cases.

        • bagacrap
          If the company has a sustainable business model it will be profitable and hang around without jacking up prices. If not, you wasted time and money setting up the anthropic tool chain.
        • iAMkenough
          Given the statements in their SEC filing, it's not outlandish to consider the possibility of a long-term plan to make Anthropic models a nationalized, public utility before they go bankrupt.

          If GSA is already considering vendor lock-in as they establish new public services across multiple agencies, the natural move is to build them to eventually transition to a federally-owned and operated provider. Especially with how involved the U.S. government is in limiting capabilities Anthropic provides to consumers today.

        • roosterIllusi0n
          Except that work would be cheaper to set up and the cost would drop over time if they were using local llms. Every dollar paid to a 3rd party rental service is a dollar that is burned in the fireplace. We are paying more for the right to be stuck paying more forever, it's ridiculous.

          • ameliaquining
            Why would the government use local LLMs? Compute is a central example of the kind of thing that makes sense to outsource.
    • roosterIllusi0n
      Not a discount at all. Every dollar for a rented service is being flushed down the toilet. Industry is moving to local llms, the government should have been ahead of them.
  • sailfast
    Claude gov is AWS Bedrock hosted on GovCloud which is managed via GSA schedule and FEDRAMP. So… that’s how GSA does exactly that these days.

    • iAMkenough
      I'm of the mindset that "GovCloud" and related products that make government dependent on private companies for vast government services is a bad idea.

      If it's critical infrastructure, it should be publicly owned, funded, and protected by the federal government directly. Not rented from someone else under contracts that can be violated.

      • sailfast
        It’s a good sentiment, but that’s not how it currently works outside of agencies like the NSA that have some special needs and maybe the technical capacity. (Granted it’s been a minute for me so maybe this has changed) Either way it’s all contractors for the most part. In-house roles are not as flexible and don’t pay market.

        I don’t actually think you want the federal government doing their own cloud work tbh. It’s a hugely expensive endeavor and the incentives are not there to do it right across government.

        These agreements are pretty iron clad and the data centers are often separate and have their own setups.

        Once a cross-cutting services agency like DISA or GSA own the stuff they quickly become a bottleneck for government agencies because they can, and then each agency goes out and fights for their own budgets to avoid the bottleneck, and then we’re back to renting.

        It’s often better for service to have separate agreements with agreed upon commercial providers for this reason.

        • iAMkenough
          The interstate highway system is also a hugely expensive endeavor, but boy am I grateful for it. Maybe we should privatize that too?
      • gnabgib
        GovCloud is not, Google (https://cloud.google.com/gov) and Azure (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/solutions/government) also provide said services

        • iAMkenough
          Notably, all three of those providers have an incentive to increase costs for taxpayers in order to serve their investors. And all of those providers have federal politicians invested in their stock price.

          • sailfast
            Turns out anyone with a 401K is also invested.

            But we’re also taxpayers. So maybe there’s an equilibrium.

            Also ideally some competition between those providers that will keep prices in line. (Spoiler: it absolutely does)

            GSA also requires that the government is the lowest cost customer so nobody on earth is allowed any better deal. This also applies pressure. You have to rely on incentives in the end.

            If you assume nobody has any integrity and incentives are all fake and nobody will hold to their agreements then there isn’t really a “public” good anymore anyway so what’s the point in trying to make a public cloud? It would just lead to grift at larger scale that wouldn’t even benefit our stock portfolios.

• euroderf
  Can Claude propose legislative fixes to eliminate giveaways to special interests ? If not, why not ?

  • demritocracy
    Claude2032.com
  • judge2020
    "Can" and "will be used by the people in power to" are two different things. and "Can in a way that would work" is a whole nother thing.
  • criley2
    There is a whole side of sci-fi that has explored the idea that AI government could finally cure us so much more than just one class of corruption. There are, however, new downsides.