If the government just banned all government agencies from working with Anthropic, that would be reasonable. But they didn't. They're banning any company that works with the military from working with Anthropic in any way, using a law that has never been invoked against an American company.

The governments supply chain is like 80% of the US

The US government is applying severe sanctions against a US company that does not "influence their supply chain". Donald Trump believes the economy is great and at the same time declares economic emergencies to justify doing certain things. It could be true that Anthropic's products are useless for the DoD because of the products' safeguards, but that doesn't mean they're a risk to the US government.

As to this being 100% legal, I'm not so sure (not a lawyer). It might not be a criminal offese, but there's a whole category of abuse of power that this may fall under if Anthropic is put under a certain status without real justification. Many powers given to the executive branch are not absolute and can't be applied arbitrarily, but require justification. Anthropic might be able to sue the government for declaring them a "supply-chain risk" without sufficient justification. E.g. they could claim that not being sufficiently patriotic in the eyes of the administration does not constitute a risk, and that since their not the sole supplier of the tech, they were not trying to strong arm the government to do anything.

It appears that when it comes to Jesse Jackson you're entirely capable of understanding how a shakedown works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47046514

> I am not aware

People have noticed.

> It's called negotiation in business.

The bad faith in this statement alone is almost equal to the sum of it in the rest of your comments.

I'm just curious, do you understand that the DoD isn't saying it won't do business with Anthropic. Its saying it will also ban any company that does business with the DoD (so 90% of large enterprises?) from doing business from Anthropic. Are you aware of this?

Hegseth managed to get through art of the deal? Maybe he made a drinking game out of it, a shot per page.

You seem really unaware of the timeline of this issue and what has actually happened, I think you should update your info before posting so confidently wrongly.

The contract, including Anthropic's redlines, was signed more than a year ago and has been humming along with no objections from anybody. Hegseth abruptly got a bug up his ass about it last week, and demanded Anthropic sign a revised version under threat of punishment. Anthropic is simply saying "no, we will not be forced into signing a new version, you can either keep going with the original terms we all agreed to, or stop using us". The Pentagon can simply stop using Anthropic if they don't like the terms anymore (which, again, are the terms Pentagon agreed to in the first place). But what the DoW wants is to strong-arm Anthropic, using the DPA, into new terms because they abruptly changed their mind. That's not "negotiation" in any sense, that's Mafia behavior.