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Comment by tgma | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I am entirely capable of doing that. Your point?

I'm providing information for other readers to evaluate your good faith, or lack thereof.

That's a nice straw man you got there. I don't mind you characterizing the negotiation however you want. That's not the debate. Call it "shakedown" or "mafia" as someone else mentioned, or whatnot (although it is appears the company that was trying to grandstand the elected US Government by dictating their own terms was Anthropic, not the other way around, but I digress). The question is was it a breach of contract or just a tough negotiation?

Companies have gone out of business due to a big customer pulling the contract. Imagination Technologies comes to mind. This is not a rare thing in business.

I have to admit, “accept this unilateral change to the contract or we will use the full power of the US government to destroy your company” is certainly a tough negotiation stance. You got that part right.

How did you get the "destroy your company" part? If HN sentiment is any evidence, they are even more popular than before. GPU is a constrained resource and I am sure they are going to have enough business to saturate what they got. I'm certain they would have just removed (and still will remove) two paragraphs from the terms had it really "destroyed their company."

> full power of the US government

Haha, I can assure you that is not even close to the full power of US government. Ask the crypto people during Biden admin for just a little more power (still not even close to "full.")

"Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic."

For a company of Anthropic's size, this may very well be a death sentence, even if their work has nothing to do with the military supply chain. They could have just canceled the contract, but they wanted to go full Darth Vader on them to prove a point in case anyone else thought about "negotiating" "voluntarily" with the federal government.

You don't think Anthropic is going out of business any minute now, do you? This is just rhetoric. Affirmative evidence is they would just remove two paragraphs if they were.

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