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Comment by techblueberry | Hacker News Reader

So they are such a risk to national security that no contractor that works with the federal government may use them, but they're going to keep using them for six more months? So I guess our national security is significantly at risk for the next six months?

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It's a waste of your effort to apply rational argument to the actions of a group that are in it for a shakedown.

Simple rational argument:

SCOTUS says POTUS is above the law, so POTUS has collected $4B in bribe / protection money since taking office 13 months ago. Anthropic has lots of money at the moment. Why should they be allow to keep it?

Since they didn't pay off the president (enough?), his goons are going to screw with their revenue and run a PR smear campaign.

Once you realize it only has to do with Trump's personal finances, and nothing to do with national security or the rule of law, then all the administration's actions make perfect rational sense.

Open question: How much should a congress-critter charge Trump for a favorable vote? (The check should come with a presidential pardon in the envelope, of course...)

It’s the mob. This is nothing more than, “Nice AI ya got here. Be a shame if sometin’ wuz to happen to it.”

Except that it’s sovereign.

What's sovereign - the mob? The AI company? Being enigmatic for cool points isn't conducive to productive discussion.

My take is the commenter was implying something like "Yes, like the mob, but worse, because it is done under the auspices of a national government."

I got the meaning right away, but I can appreciate if others didn't. I didn't read it as intentionally enigmatic, fwiw. Sometimes short punchy comments really land, sometimes not -- it is a risk. As you can probably tell, I err in the other direction. (:

Sovereign like King George III?

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

[...]

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

[...]

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

[...]

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

— The Declaration of Independence https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip...

People threw tea in Boston Harbor over less than the tariffs.

So are we. You want garbage picked up in your town, you gotta talk to us.

Let us sit upon the ground, and tell sad stories of the death of kings.

Sovereign like Putin.

Keep in mind that Anthropic “is the only A.I. company currently operating on the Pentagon’s classified systems” [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/technology/defense-depart...

Because Palentir is using Anthropic.

From what i understand, Palentir using Claude during the capturing of Maduro is the reason all this started, as Anthropic did not agree their systems were used that way. [1]

Obviously Palentir and others need time to migrate off Anthropic’s products. The way i read it is that Anthropic made a serious miscalculation by joining the DoD contracts last year, you can’t have these kind of moral standards and at the same time have Palentir as a customer. The lack of foresight is interesting.

1 https://www.axios.com/2026/02/15/claude-pentagon-anthropic-c...

They are the same amount of ‘risk’ to national security that the various ‘emergencies’ the executive branch has used as legal excuses to do otherwise illegal things are emergencies.

Congress is negligent in not reigning this kind of thing in. We’re rapidly falling down so many slippery semantic slopes.

I'm def adding "slippery semantic slopes" to my vocab.

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect

For this administration the law isn't something that binds them, but something they can use against others.

Don't make the mistake of thinking their words have meaning. They see a way to punish the company, they take it. Same thing with declaring a national emergency to impose tariffs. There's no supply chain risk, no national emergency, but that doesn't stop them.

the administration which declares ad-hoc emergencies is behaving as predicted

Dont forget Nvidia technology was condsidered too sensitive to be exported to China....until the Trump administration decided they could export it if they paid a 10% export tax.

The part of this you're missing is that China doesn't want it [1].

Why? Because China will make their own. This has been obvious to me for at least 1-2 years. The US doesn't allow EUV lithography machines from ASML to be exported to China either. I believe the previous export ban on the most advanced chip was a strategic error because it created a captive market of Chinese customers for Chinese chips.

China will replicate EUV far quicker than Western governments expect. All it takes is to throw money at a few key ASML engineers and researchers and the commitment of the state to follow through with this project, which they will.

I'm absolutely reminded of the atomic bomb. This created quite the debate in military and foreign policy circles about what to do. The prevailing presumption was that the USSR would take 20 years to develop their own bomb if it ever happened.

It took 4 years.

And then in 1952 the US detonated the first thermonuclear bomb. The USSR followed suit in 1953.

[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

this is inacccurate, tesla was the first mover in china's EV market and held by far the largest market share for over a decade. obviously that was in large part to elon hiring chinese systems engineers to build out the first super factories and using chinese robotics tech. but ever since losing those key early leaders, tesla has completely fallen behind.

We've moved beyond telling people not to forget and have entered "expect nothing less" territory

Aren't export taxes against the US constitution?

Yes but only if you call them export taxes.

If it’s payments to continuously verify National Security protections, it’s all good.

Yes ... but what's your point? /s

Isn't this our governments classic negotiation strategy? Go to the extreme, and meet somewhere well on their side of the middle.

The Trump administration tends to use this playbook.

Putting aside my take, I’m trying to objectively make sure I’m grounded on what is likely to happen next, without confusing “what is” with “what is ok”.

Can't just unplug the thing and use something else.

Obviously the DoD would not want limited use. Strange they don't make their own given their specific needs.

I think this is maybe the most revealing thing about this saga, that seemingly the U.S. government has not been training their own frontier models.

Perhaps getting donations from Altman and "investing" directly in OpenAI is more convenient.

Or, Hegseth revved up an internal govt model and found it just as woke as Anthropic.

> Obviously the DoD would not want limited use.

I agree in this sense: Hegseth's Dept. of War doesn't want any restrictions. I'll try to make the case this is self-defeating, assuming one has genuine, long-term national interests at the front of mind (which I think is lacking or at least confused in Hegseth).

Historically, other (wiser) SecDefs would decide more carefully. They are aware when their actions would position DoD outside of reasonable ethical norms, as defined both by their key personnel as well as broader culture. I think they would recognize Hegseth's course of action as having two broadly negative effects:

1. Technology, Employees, Contractors. Jeopardizes DoD's access to the best technology. Undermines efforts in hiring the best people. Demotivates existing employees and contractors. Bullying leads to fearful contractors who perform worse. Fewer good contractors show up. Trumpist corruption further degrades an already lagging, sluggish, inefficient system.*

2. Goodwill & Effectiveness. Damages international goodwill that takes a long time to restore. Goodwill is a good investment; it pays dividends for U.S. military strength. The fallout will distract Hegseth from legitimately important duties and further undermine his credibility. Leading probably to a political mess for Hegseth, undermining his political capital.

* Improving DoD procurement is already hard given existing constraints. Adding Trumpist-level corruption makes it unnecessarily worse. There is already an unsavory, poorly tracked, bloated gravy train around the military industrial complex.**

** BUT... Despite all this, the system has more or less worked reasonably well for more than what, 80 years! It has enjoyed bipartisan continuity, kept scientists and mathematicians well funded, and spurred lots of useful industries. It is, in a weird gnarly way, a sort of flux capacitor for U.S. technical dominance.

I agree with the damage. Not simply an unwise spokesman though. It's the trend in the entire administration, or one should identify as the United States slide into less sugar coating, if any.

We will kidnap statesmen, we will conduct illegal arrests, illegal tariffs, threaten to take over lands from our traditional allies, bomb our enemies during negociation, without congress approval. All for the good of the American Empire.

It would be a far stretched script for fiction, but that's exactly the terms and actions taken just in the last year.

I doubt these were the recipe for what worked well for the last 80 years. Momentum is the result of a smoother and more balanced doctrine.

> So I guess our national security is significantly at risk for the next six months?

That does seem to be what Hegseth is arguing, yes; and that is presumably his justification for doing something drastic here. Although I assume he is lying or wrong.

And as a cynic, let me just add that the image of someone going to the political overseers of the US military with arguments about being "effective" or "altruistic" is just hilarious given their history over the last ~40 years.

There has been a terrifying decline in quality and an increase in corruption in Trump’s second administration.

Re: the hilarity part, I’m conflicted: in general, a good sense of humor is useful, but in present circumstances a stoic seriousness seems warranted.

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