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Comment by afthonos | Hacker News Reader

No, that’s not accurate at all, and in case you are genuinely confused:

1. Anthropic should be free to sell its services under whatever legal terms and conditions it wants.

2. The Pentagon should be free to buy those services, negotiate for different terms, refuse to buy those services, and terminate contracts subject to any termination clauses.

You may or may not agree with what the Pentagon wants to do, but if things had stayed there, there would be no real issue.

The problem is that the Pentagon is trying to bury Anthropic as a company, calling it a danger to the United States because it exerted its non-controversial right in (1).

Any “explanation” that doesn’t address that is confused itself or trying to confuse the issue.

I leave it to you as to which category the linked source falls under.

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1. Agree

2. Agree

> The problem is that the Pentagon is trying to bury Anthropic as a company, calling it a danger to the United States because it exerted its non-controversial right in (1).

My take is that the DoD very much wanted to continue using Claude. However, Amodei refused to budge on relinquishing final say over Claude usage. The DoD took this as a personal offense (how dare this guy, does he know who we are, etc) and lashed out in retaliation. The whole sequence of events makes sense when viewed under this lense.

> Amodei refused to budge on relinquishing final say over Claude usage.

So did Altman. The terms of each company’s agreement with the DoW are roughly the same when they come out of the wash.

“Mr. Altman negotiated with the Department of Defense in a different way from Anthropic, agreeing to the use of OpenAI’s technology for all lawful purposes. Along the way, he also negotiated the right to put safeguards into OpenAI’s technologies that would prevent its systems from being used in ways that it did not want them to be.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/technology/openai-agreeme...

“Roughly the same” != “the same”. Changing one or two words words in a contract can make a huge difference.

> However, Amodei refused to budge on relinquishing final say over Claude usage.

And that's 100% acceptable and legal. They have the right to do that. And DoW can then turn around and say "no deal". And that's 100% acceptable and legal.

So Hegseth going above and beyond and lashing out on the People's behalf like a butthurt child is unwarranted at best, and should definitely be illegal if it's not already.

I agree, my point is simply that Hegseth lashing out over Amodei's refusal is more plausible than a grand conspiracy to move to OpenAI (while simultaneously locking themselves out from Claude).

I do agree with this.

That is way too reactive for these people

It is more likely the plan purposely gave Anthropic terms it knew it would not accept to give a certain public perception. OpenAI was always going to be the recipient, but for reasons unknown, they could not make the deal directly, and had to create the perception that they had no choice.

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