Commentary: What TikTok and Huawei can teach Anthropic

Anthropic has been labelled a supply chain risk by Washington but that's not exactly a death knell, says Catherine Thorbecke for Bloomberg Opinion.

TOKYO: The Pentagon formally notified Anthropic last week that its products have been deemed a supply chain risk, marking the first time Washington has publicly placed that label on an American company.

But if it sounds like a death knell, it isn’t. Such attacks are usually reserved for Chinese tech, meaning there’s now a pattern for how these things play out: Usually with a lot of noise and remarkably little lasting damage.

Let’s start with TikTok. Washington spent more than half a decade targeting the platform under the banner of national-security risks. The short-form video app initially faced the threat of a ban during President Donald Trump’s first term due to its Chinese origins.

Pundits spent years declaring the end. But Trump then reversed course, and campaigned to save it when he was re-elected to the White House. The app’s scale and cultural reach made the crusade to ban it politically untenable, and Trump even sidelined Congress multiple times to buy breathing room to strike a deal. After all that, TikTok’s US operations emerged unscathed - as did the ambitions of its parent company ByteDance.

Anthropic, meanwhile, sued the Defense Department on Monday over the designation, and has said the vast majority of its customers are unaffected by it anyway. While such a warning can chill federal contracts and spook risk-averse partners, the company has said the official letter ultimately has a “narrow scope”.