> it cannot allow private companies to control the use of military equipment.

The big difference here is that Claude is not military equipment. It's a public, general purpose model. The terms of use/service were part of the contract with the DoD. The DoD is trying to forcibly alter the deal, and Anthropic is 100% in the clear to say "no, a contract is a contract, suck it up buttercup."

We aren't talking about Lockheed here making an F-35 and then telling the DoD "oh, but you can't use our very obvious weapon to kill people."

> Surely autonomous murderous robots is something U.S. government has interest in preventing

After this fiasco, obviously not. It's quite clear the DoD most definitely wants autonomous murder robots, and also wants mass domestic surveillance.