Then UMich - a notably Dem leaning govt program - wouldn't be included.
Personally, I remember taking Fairbanks Center associated classes and noticing how we have the children of Chinese VVIPs sitting next to active duty members.
It sparked interesting conversations, but seeing someone who was a test pilot at Hanford sitting next to a scion of a Red Family was interesting to say the least.
The program also absolutely did used to publicly give advice to the CCP at the time, and on the listservs I'm still on I do still see publicly pronounced UFWD members responding and posting events in the Boston area.
Ofc, if I noticed this then it was absolutely known to three-letter agencies and State, and this is part of a larger culture war, but there is a kernel of truth - too many children of various countries dignitaries attended the program.
Edit: can't reply
> I think isolationism amongst the war party is less helpful than some degree of interaction
UMich isn't an isolationist program though - it's a program which imo is the closest to how foreign policy was managed under the Obama admin.
Noting that we have always been at war with Eurasia, given we actually are not at war with Eurasia, would it not be both normal and sensible to at least know your Eurasian counterparts?
I think isolationism amongst the war party is less helpful than some degree of interaction.
I've TFed and CAed for SSC fellows eons ago and the fact that UMich (especially the International Institute [0]), VT (CETS [1] and CGIT [2]), ASU (GSI [3] and CAPS [4]), and UNC (ASC [5], ISA [6], CES [7], and TISS [8]) remain great programs (and tend to be fairly liberal).
Surprised TAMU wasn't included.
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> and lo and behold
Yep, but everyone who's an SSC will self-select for Mich, UNC, ASU, and VT. SSC fellows are smart and are gunning for top exit opps in the public and private sector. Hillsdale, Regent, and Liberty don't offer that and would limit career options as they are deeply ideological programs.
My first reaction was, "watch, they're going to replace actual rigorous educational institutions with religious colleges" and lo and behold, "Liberty University" is at the top of the list for replacement civilian institutions.
India used to use Venezuelan crude before the 2019 sanctions [0][1]
India only shifted to using Russian oil in 2022 [2] after Venezuelan [3] and Iranian [4] oil sanctions were enacted, which was when both began increasing engagement with China.
It's a similar story for South Korea [5] and Japan [6].
This helps reduce prices for ONG, as India is shifting back to Venezuelan crude which gives slack which South Korea and Japan can take advantage of, as India, Japan, and South Korea represent 3 of the 5 largest oil consumers globally.
25 years ago we didn't have Project Maven, and our leadership in the early 2000s were committed to boots-on-the-ground nation-building due to the afterglow of the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia.
GovCloud revenue is in the tens of billions of dollars. Bedrock less so. Almost every FedRAMP product uses the same codebase for Fed and non-Fed, and this would force most FedRAMP vendors to blackball Anthropic.
This restriction is viral. If AWS hosts Claude models, Lockheed can no longer use AWS for anything. Every defense contractor will pull out. What if Lockheed uses Asana or Jira or Slack? Guess what, they better not use Claude ANYWHERE in their organizations, or else all defense contractors will have to drop these products. Any any other company whose product they use in the design or manufacture of their products - if anyone, anywhere is using Claude products, they have to be dropped.
The JWCC, which is larger than GovCloud, was only $9b, split across three companies, over ten years. It’s peanuts compared to the investments that the hyperscalers have with Anthropic.
JWCC is not the only project. Vendors like Crowdstrike also rely on hyperscalers to serve their products to federal customers, and the codebase is shared.
This announcement has made Anthropic toxic in the entire dependency chain because it means years of efforts and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars rearchitecting entire platforms and renegotiating contracts.
The entire cybersecurity industry has a TAM of $208 BILLION [0]
> because it means years of efforts and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars rearchitecting entire platforms and renegotiating contracts.
This is exactly why this announcement has not made Anthropic toxic. The entire industry knows how ridiculous this move is from Hegseth, and it’s going to be rolled back next week once the adults get back from their weekend.
> Contractors can still use Claude internally in their business, so long as it is not used in government work directly.
I work in the enterprise SaaS and cybersecurity industry. There is no way to guarantee that amongst any FedRAMP vendor (which is almost every cybersecurity and enterprise SaaS or on their roadmap).
Almost all FedRAMP products I've built, launched, sold, or funded were the same build as the commerical offering, but with siloed data and network access.
This means the entire security and enterprise SaaS industry will have to shift away from Anthropic unless the DPA is invoked and management is changed.
More likely, I think the DoD/DoW and their vendors will force Anthropic to retrain a sovereign model specifically for the US Gov.
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> This is the core assertion that is not clear nor absolute.
If Walmart can forcibly add verbiage banning AWS from it's vendors and suppliers, the US government absolutely can. At least with Walmart they will accept a segmented environment using GCP+Azure+OCI. Retraining a foundational model to be Gov compliant is a project that would cost billions.
By declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk, it will now be contractually added by everyone becuase no GRC team will allow Anthropic anywhere in a company that even remotely touches FedRAMP and it will be forcibly added into contracts.
No one can guarantee that your codebase was not touched by Claude or a product using Claude in the background, so this will be added contractually.
FedRAMP contracts require all inputs being FedRAMP compliant and a vetted BOM. Anthropic is no longer FedRAMP high and because it is declared a supply chain risk now all our FedRAMP contracts are at risk and any company who has FedRAMP customers is at risk too.
> This means the entire security and enterprise SaaS industry will have to shift away from Anthropic unless the DPA is invoked and management is changed.
This is the core assertion that is not clear nor absolute.
> At what point are the models going to all be "good enough", with the differentiating factor being everything else, other than model ranking?
It's already come for vast swathes of industries.
Most organizations have already been able to operationalize what are essentially GPT4 and GPT5 wrappers for standard enterprise usecases such as network security (eg. Horizon3) and internal knowledge discovery and synthesis (eg. GleanAI back in 2024-25).
I agree, and most of my peers do as well. This is why most of us shifted to funding AI Applications startups back in 2023-24. Most of these players are still in stealth or aren't household names, but neither are ServiceNow, Salesforce, Palo Alto Networks, Wiz, or Snowflake.
Foundation Models have reached a relative plateau and much of the recent hype wasn't due to enhanced model performance but smart packaging on top of existing capabilities to solve business outcomes (eg. OpenClaw, Antheopic's business suite, etc).
Most foundation model rounds are essentially growth equity rounds (not venture capital) to finance infra/DC buildouts to scale out delivery or custom ASICs to enhance operating margins.
This isn't a bad thing - it means AI in the colloquial definition has matured to the point that it has become reality.
Personally, I remember taking Fairbanks Center associated classes and noticing how we have the children of Chinese VVIPs sitting next to active duty members.
It sparked interesting conversations, but seeing someone who was a test pilot at Hanford sitting next to a scion of a Red Family was interesting to say the least.
The program also absolutely did used to publicly give advice to the CCP at the time, and on the listservs I'm still on I do still see publicly pronounced UFWD members responding and posting events in the Boston area.
Ofc, if I noticed this then it was absolutely known to three-letter agencies and State, and this is part of a larger culture war, but there is a kernel of truth - too many children of various countries dignitaries attended the program.
Edit: can't reply
> I think isolationism amongst the war party is less helpful than some degree of interaction
UMich isn't an isolationist program though - it's a program which imo is the closest to how foreign policy was managed under the Obama admin.
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