I guess the rules are different if the customer is the government? If it's the government, then if the government doesn't get its wedding cake then the government can go so far as to prevent the baker from selling cakes entirely to any other customers.
The United States Department of Justice under the Trump administration, supported Phillips.[20][5] While the Department asserts that anti-discrimination laws are necessary to prevent businesses that provide goods and services from discriminating, these laws cannot be used to compel a business into expressing speech they do not agree with, nor used to provide goods and services with such expressions without the ability for the business to assert they do not agree with those expressions. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
I don’t think they are preventing them. You can still buy some Anthropic. Heck, maybe you’re now doubly motivated to buy some out of spite. What Uncle Sam is saying is he doesn’t want anything to do with it. But Anthropic can produce whatever and others can buy it.
In their view just like businesses cannot be compelled so are the customers, they can’t be compelled to buy.
If they're designated a "supply chain risk", then any company that does any business with the military cannot be a customer. That includes basically all the largest companies, many of which have already adopted Claude. So the Pentagon is threatening Anthropic with terminating most of their private enterprise revenue and basically ruining their business model.
That's a little different than just denying someone government contracts.
Wrong.
Companies with military contracts cannot rely on Anthropic-supplied products and services for those contracts. (Yes, the cabinet member who misrepresents his own title and name of his department also publicly misrepresented the legal consequences of the designation. It's almost like ignoring the law and just making things up is a pattern with him and his boss.)
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.
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.
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.
I wasn't recounting a hypothetical scenario.
That's not how it works, they'll just have to show how they mitigated the "risk". That doesn't mean not doing business with Anthropic that may mean not using Anthropic for any deliverables or any projects involving the specific contracts.
If Hegseth is the one who decides whether the risk has been mitigated (he is), you think he's gonna be overcome by a sudden spirit of good faith and make impartial judgements? Or just do the thing that maximizes his leverage, gratifies his ego, and pleases his boss.
It doesn't really work that way. Both parties want something from each other. If he is not "overcome by a sudden good faith" judgement all of the sudden no more Windows updates and it's RHEL Linux for everyone. Or if IBM says no, then what? Write your own OS? The system doesn't really work as a charity, it's corrupt but parties want something from each other. If he knows they need something and there is no other way to get the spirit of "good faith" will descend like lightning upon him. In this case he knew there is Google and OpenAI in play, and just like magic OpenAI made a deal pretty quickly.
> I guess the rules are different if the customer is the government?
Hmm, I don’t see the inconsistency? They are saying one baker is not to their liking and they are refusing to buy it and are returning the already bought cakes back. Also looks like they just found another baker not too long ago with a better “deal”.
"Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic,"
If this tweet is taken to the nth degree that'd effectively put Anthropic out of business since they have pretty significant Amazon[1] and Microsoft[2] cloud provider/funding relationships that would need to be nullified within 6 months.