There's a reason it's unpopular.

If your company makes an herbicide that happens to be very good at killing off anyone who drinks it at a high concentration in their water supply, you're saying that there should be no way for your company to resist being used for mass murder (including unavoidable collateral damage)?

Also, the core mission of the military is not "killing its adversaries through any means necessary". It is to defend state interests. Some people have a belief that mass killing is the best mechanism for accomplishing that. I do not agree with, nor do I want to associate with, those people. They are morally and objectively wrong. Yes, sometimes killing people is the most effective -- or more likely, the quickest -- way. In practice, it doesn't work very well. The threat of violence is much more powerful than actually committing violence. If you have to resort to the latter, you've usually screwed up and lost the chance to achieve the optimal outcome. It is true that having no restrictions whatsoever on your ability to commit violence is going to be more intimidating, but it also means that you have to maintain that threat constantly for everyone, because nobody has any other reason to give you what you want.

The actual military is not evil. Your conception of it is.

If I start a small business that sells Apples and the US government comes to me and says "we want to buy your apples and fire them at high speed to" these are now your words "kill adversaries through any means necessary."

If I say, no, then am I stopping the military?

I feel like it is reasonable that I can say "no, I don't want to sell you my apples."

I cannot for the life of me figure out why that means I am stopping the military from killing people. The US Military will definitely still be able to kill people for centuries. I'm just saying I don't want to participate in it.

That's not their mission, in any country, ever.

The problem here is that this department claims its adversaries are Americans. Do you think antropic should aid in the killing of Americans?

Any company is free to choose its business partners and set terms to them. "Don't like our terms, don't partner with us"

If government can force any private company to work specially for government then US is no better than PRC

Yes, Musk is guilty of treason for exactly that reason. He directly sabotaged a major US military operation in Ukraine.

However, the military is bound by US and international law. It's clear they're not going to obey either of those with respect to this contract.

On top of that, Anthropic has correctly pointed out that the use cases Trump was pushing for are well beyond the current capabilities of any of Anthropic models. Misusing their stuff in the way Trump has been (in violation of the contract) is a war crime, because it has already made major mistakes, targeted civilians, etc.