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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

>Why can't they expedite for special cases?

They can, the preliminary injunction is a thing that can be invoked very quickly to stop actions before the law decides.

Anthropic didn't suffer any irreparable harm and they're free to seek damages if they wish, but they won't because it doesn't really matter to them. This whole mess has just been advertising that has kept them in the headlines and very likely has been more beneficial than harmful.

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  Anthropic didn't suffer any irreparable harm

This is a fast paced business environment where one company being explicitly disallowed by the government could create long-lasting damage. How many institutions might have gone with the safer OpenAI and will not revisit the decision?

I'm pretty convinced Anthropic was intentionally antagonizing the government in order to get high level attention, media coverage, and government contacts to hep "fix" the problem. Far from irreparable harm it was a marketing stunt.

A lot of folks here are misreading “irreparable harm,” which means “something that cannot be fixed with money later.” Even if this somehow screwed Anthropic so badly that they lost the AI race and Dario was relegated to the permanent underclass, that is an injury which could in theory be compensated with money - a jaw-dropping quantity of money, but money nonetheless. Irreparable harm can never be fixed even with infinite money. For example, if you think you’re the rightful owner of a piece of real estate, and someone else tries to sell it to a third party, you are faced with the prospect of irreparable harm: all the money in the world can’t FORCE the buyer to sell it back to you if the transaction goes through, and a piece of real estate is completely unique and non-fungible (at least in the eyes of the law), so no amount of money could get you the same thing.

Edit to add: Anthropic did show a risk of irreparable harm because their opponent is the government, and the government typically can’t be forced to pay damages (subject to limited statutory exceptions).

> Anthropic didn't suffer any irreparable harm

Factually wrong. Many people on defense contracted projects (you can find at least a few of those in every big company you have heard of) are banned from using Anthropic models. They need to use GPT, Gemini or something else. That is a LOT of business lost.

The injunction happened before the DOD ban even came into effect.

What you are saying is false.

In many companies, Anthropic models are still banned despite the injunction. Companies are waiting for this to be settled.

You don't have the full picture.

I don’t know how you can say that. Anthropic’s reputation was destroyed by this, and A LOT of business deals happened before this injustice was corrected.

> Anthropic’s reputation was destroyed by this,

Anthropic’s reputation was enhanced by this

Fixed that for you.

However it is true that there were some defence contractors who probably took Codex deals instead of Claude deals when this happened.

You sure they didn't lose governmental contracts because of it?

Also, the current administration doesn't care much about the law but what Trump and his people like and dislike. They made it very clear that they don't like Anthropic, so they won't get any contracts now, this ruling doesn't really matter until Trump is out of office.

None of this provable, of course.

They even fired people for investigating the storm on the Capitol. The message was pretty clear: we don't care about the law or what your job is, if you do something we dislike we retaliate, so you better become corrupt and stop caring as well or quit now on your own terms.

>You sure they didn't lose governmental contracts because of it?

I'm sure they got MORE government contracts because of it by turning themselves into headline news for weeks.

It was outright illegal to contract them after they were officially declared a risk. Afterwards it was clear that the highest level administration doesn't want them being contracted, an administration that's known to fire people that are only doing their job.

So being in the news for such things surely didn't help.

but they literally obtained a preliminary injunction back in March.

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