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Comment by manlymuppet | Hacker News Reader

As much as I dislike this administration's actions, why? Doesn't the Department of Defense get discretion to contract for whatever reasons it likes, as long as they think it serves public interests?

If Pete Hegseth, who is albeit highly incompetent, decides that Anthropic's values don't match with those of the DoD, isn't that entirely his call to make? Unless there's very specific circumstances at play, Hegseth is at least a public official, and gets to decide to do what he thinks is best for the public. Although he is wrong and Anthropic is right, no judge should force the government to use Anthropic products.

Does anybody have the legal analysis? I'm (clearly) not a lawyer, but I'm more interested for now in the question of whether this is allowed rather than whether it's morally right (it's obviously not).

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The core issue is that it went beyond just not picking a vendor. They labeled anthropic as a supply chain risk. This banned the use of their software for the whole government (and contractors IIRC).

I’m not a lawyer either but I think the introduction section of the ruling seems to address your questions in a somewhat accessible manner. Specifically the last two paragraphs of the intro section.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...

The short answer is that there's Federal law on how contracts are awarded and the criteria used to exclude vendors.

For other things that have gone to court see DoD JEDI and the NASA HLS.

Judges at this level often do things like this, and given it was brought in California likely the next level would also block the administration. That said, the Supreme Court has been pretty clear that the executive branch has broad and the only authority to designate supply chain risk. That said, they do need to justify it, not sure they did it well enough here, but this is far from an impartial judge.

Also, judges are political appointees -- This one has ruled against the Trump administration repeatedly and it's why this case was brought here. She was appointed by Joe Biden, was born/lives/works in the Bay Area and has a track record.

The trump administration has a long track record of doing illegal things that were struck down in countless courts across the country, so the more likely scenario is that this is yet another mark on that record. This isn't even the first one this week.

As for your legal arguments, it doesn't seem like they are currently correct, but I guess things can always change.

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