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Comment by astrashe2 | Hacker News Reader

I think the big problem is that this is more like a sanction, more than the government saying they don't want to do business with them. They government is saying that anyone they do business with can't do business with Anthropic.

So it's extremely important that they get an injunction that allows the cloud compute companies to continue to work them. I think they probably will, but it's really crazy that the government is actively trying to kill them off over this.

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The big problem is this is prior restraint on free speech.

I support the rights of Democrat & Republican administrations to designate certain companies as supply chain risks OR a national security risk.

I do not want a TikTok hoovering up our personal info sending it to China

I do not want a Anthropic becoming essential to warfare then questioning when the their AI is used to bring an enemy to justice

I do not want Nvidia sending their latest and greatest to China

I do not want a ASML moving their super advanced photolithography machines to China

I do not want a DJI selling their drones in the US and then exporting all the meta-data back to China

I do not want a Huawei hacking through American IT companies and then getting a free pass on selling their devices based on stolen IP in the US

You certainly seem to support the government designating a company a SCR at gunpoint when they refuse to renegotiate a signed, agreed to, and finalized contract.

...You realize the only valid uses of supply chain risk you mentioned were DJI and Huawei. TikTok isn't providing services to the U.S. Gov. Anthropic is an American company with no foreign ownership. A supplier does not have to sell it's product to a government it knows is liable to misuse it. Not as a SaaS provider. Nvidia and ASML are both now covered under ITAR. Your specification of Democrat &Republican admins just demonstrates both are two sides of the same coin. Both need a good and thorough cleaning out.

Anthropic has private ownership from a bunch of foreign investors GIC and MGX for one.

Not saying this action is correct or not but Anthropic has no reason to decline Chinese investment if they could get it. Neither does openAI.

It's insane people consider private companies should have free speech.

When they can't and aren't willing to do the same for private citizens. People being shot on streets didn't see any court cases?

I find hn to be quite brain dead in terms of what it chooses to care about.

> They government is saying that anyone they do business with can't do business with Anthropic.

Is neither unusual nor extraordinary. The 2022 TikTok ban on government devices—enacted under the Biden administration—carried the same viral-as-in-GPL terms.

The TikTok ban upheld by the courts was a law enacted by Congress, not an executive action, specifically targeting Tiktok. The legal challenges were all about the law's constitutionality.

This dispute challenges the executive's action, not the underlying law (10 USC 3252). Anthropic does make some constitutional claims regarding the 1st and 5th amendments, but they also advance procedural challenges under the Administrative Procedures Act and statutory arguments about whether the law authorized the action.

At least TikTok is owned by China, which is the US’s rival. Nothing Anthropic has done gives me the impression they’re working against anything America.

The story is they started fishing for classified info on how their tooling was used from their prime contractor, Palantir, who rightfully blew the whistle on them and told DOD what they were up to.

https://fortune.com/2026/03/07/pentagon-emil-michael-anthrop...

You mean their signed and finalized contract was being violated and they started discussions about how violating said contract is not okay?

It's more like the government blew the whistle themselves that they were trying to use Anthropic's services in a manner contrary to law.

This argument is going to be skewered in court.

Careful, you might hurt yourself stretching that far

The actual letter the govt sent Anthropic narrowed the supply chain risk to DoD usage. Far less than the Epstein administration poffered on social media

It’s not just the supply chain risk designation from the Department of defense. Trump then added that he would order all government agencies to stop doing business with them. Basically, if you do not cave to their ideology, you will be coerced through such unethical means.

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