I agree with what you're saying, but given the egos involved in the current admin there's a practical interpretation:

1. Department of War broadly uses Anthropic for general purposes

2. Minority interests in the Department of War would like to apply it to mass surveillance and/or autonomous weapons

3. Anthropic disagrees and it escalates

4. Anthropic goes public criticizing the whole Department of War

5. Trump sees a political reason to make an example of Anthropic and bans them

6. The entirety of the Department of War now has no AI for anything

7. Department of War makes agreement with another organization

If there was only a minority interest at the department of war to develop mass surveillance / autonomous weapons or it was seen as an unproven use case / unknown value compared to the more proven value from the rest of their organizational use of it, it would make sense that they'd be 1) in practice willing to agree to compromise on this, 2) now unable to do so with Anthropic in specific because of the political kerfuffle.

I imagine they'd rather not compromise, but if none of the AI companies are going to offer them it then there's only so much you can do as a short term strategy.

Well at least we know now that the department of war is less capable than before. All because the big man shit his pants while Anthropic was in view.

>5. Trump sees a political reason

Like, they haven't paid me a bribe? That seems to be the only "politics" at play in Trumps head.