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Comment by mitthrowaway2 | Hacker News Reader

The previous power plant manager had, of course, already signed a contract agreeing to those terms; the power plant is subsequently under new management and upset about being bound by this contract, so they designate that none of their suppliers of parts and fuel are allowed to have any commercial dealings with the pen manufacturer or use these pens for any purpose, even writing.

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> The previous power plant manager had, of course, already signed a contract agreeing to those terms

It's even more perplexing in this case though, because the original DoD contract was signed in July 2025. It was the same "plant manager" just arbitrarily changing their mind in the middle of the contract they signed.

Greg Brockman donated $25 million to MAGA Inc. in September 2025. Interesting

And why would the manager ban the manufacturers pens even for writing, except out of spite to punish the manufacturer? And coming back to the real case, is the supply chain risk designation supposed to be a punishment or only there to actually protect the supply chain?

It turns out that a gun is usable for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons, and so it’s rational to both be concerned about the presence of a gun and work very hard to make sure only reasonable people are ever in a position to use it, and that’s not a contradictory position with the notion that one might actually need a gun under certain circumstances.

And if the military needs guns to both shoot at humans and animals and a gun factory says “these guns are for shooting small animals only, using them against humans would be inhumane” and refuse to sell them to the Navy Seals, they would be designated a supply chain risk?

Why not just stop buying their guns and let contractors still use those guns if they need guns to shoot animals?

That’s the same way to do it, and in earlier eras that’s what we would have done. Unfortunately, we elected a gangster who hears “I won’t let you do this” as a personal affront. This, again, is why we need to be very, very careful before we create guns and put them in places, because if the only thing we’re relying on is that only good people are going to pick up the tools we create, we’re going to be very, very disappointed.

"sane" way to do it.

If you have pens in the building, and staff need a pen, they will use the pen that is available, even if there’s a sign saying “not for purpose x”. If you want to stop that happening, you need to not have limited pens available to your staff at all.

Ah so a defense contractor won’t be allowed to use Claude to create their website because they might later want to do some target selection for military strikes using AI and then they wouldn’t be able to use Claude?

Close enough - if they’re using Claude for anything, the DOD can’t trust that staff didn’t also use it in product development, so they’d have to keep track of everything downstream of that component to ensure it was never used for target selection.

It could also be as simple as "anything tainted by the Claude non-targeting-conditions can't be used in target selection, and we don't want to leak classified information about which components we use in target selection by requiring specific items to be developed without Claude, so we can't allow it anywhere".

In fairness, that sounds legit.

Humans see a hammer and a nail and don't think about the rule saying "rubber tipped hammers only in this area, flammable vapour present".

That's not accurate. DOD suppliers weren't banned from having "any commercial dealings" with Anthropic. They were banned from using Anthropic for their work with the DOD.

That's true legally, but the government's public statements did initially very explicitly present this as a ban on any dealing.

"Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic."

Presumably, according to the defenders of the designation in this thread, this was an innocent mistake that doesn't indicate any political intent.

The way things work, the CIOs and CSOs of these companies just implement blanket bans, so it really is effectively a ban for any use. Source: I am at one such company.

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