[bloppe]

If you were a customer, what would you do? Keep paying for Claude but be extra careful about preventing all the people working on anything that might potentially be construed as related to the DoD work from using it, for fear of a retributive Hegseth? Or just use codex company-wide and not worry?

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/26/incoherent-hegseths...

> The designation, typically reserved for foreign firms with ties to U.S. adversaries, could ban companies that work with the government from partnering with Anthropic.

> “You’re telling everyone else who supplies to the DOD you cannot use Anthropic’s models, while also saying that the DOD must use Anthropic’s models.”

I wouldn't put anything past this administration in terms of twisting rules and acting in bad faith to excerpt as much leverage as possible. They do it all the time. It's basically a government of patent trolls threatening everyone with meritless lawsuits that are nonetheless extremely effective.

[dragonwriter]

> If you were a customer, what would you do?

If I was “one of the largest companies”, as was raised upthread as being impacted in all of their business, then I would be used to having many large public and private customers with different and conflicting contracting requirements and segregating support for those contracts, and for US defense contracts specifically, probably have a dedicated business unit for those that probably a subsidiary legal entity and which, in any case, is almost completely walled off in practice dedicate to defense contracts, provides all the shared services consumed by individual defense contracts independently of the parent corporation, and which adheres strictly to defense contracting rules and charges the compliance costs back to those defense contracts at a healthy profit, while having basically no impact on how the rest of the company does business.

[bloppe]

You can imagine all sorts of hypothetical scenarios where Anthropic doesn't suffer too much. You can also imagine them losing a lot of big business. The point is that the DoD is sending a very clear signal: "if you don't do what we say, we will punish you until you do". If they didn't want to punish anthropic, they would simply go to a competitor like OAI. The fact that they're threatening several different potential revenge plots proves otherwise.

The govt has so many levers it could pull that it's technically not allowed to but that this administration has made very clear it loves doing. Things like spurious lawsuits prosecuted by a perpetually unconfirmed AG, or capriciously interfering in mergers or permitting processes. There's not a single norm too far for these guys. You're Dario Amodei. You would not be comforted by the idea that they're "not allowed" to punish you.