[blep_]

I can think of a few ways to abuse it while still spinning it as "for research". The obvious one is to buy a $9999 gaming machine with several of whatever the fanciest GPU on the market is at the time, and say you're doing machine learning.

So my guess is it's an overly broad patch for that sort of thing.

[Fomite]

Not really - this is also true for things with no particular "civilian" use.

[blep_]

Yes, that's why I described it as "overly broad".

[Fomite]

But it's also not why the law was made.

There are other regulations to keep people from installing Steam on their ML workstations (which also cover machines below the threshold).

It's entirely about one grant-giving entity not wanting to pay for a piece of capital equipment that will have use beyond the project they're funding. It's a federal regulation, and it comes up far more commonly with lab equipment than it ever does with computers.