🌻 AI vs. the pentagon

the alignment problem is Pete Hegseth

This post originally appeared in Jasmine’s Substack.

“It is terrifying that the US government may try to destroy your whole business if you set any requirements for how your products are used, and that federal contracts no longer mean things and can be ripped apart whenever”.

Who would win in a fight: an alcoholic Fox host with a fetish for extrajudicial airstrikes, or a neurotic Italian-American physicist running an AI company worth $380 billion dollars?

Over the last few days, I’ve not been able to stop thinking about the insane Anthropic vs. Pentagon saga. This is arguably the most consequential AI news of the year so far: more than Claude Code, more than data center populism. I am supposed to be working on two non-Substack AI reporting projects¹, but decided last night fuck it, emergency blog, let’s share some half-baked takes on the news.

I’ll start with a TL;DR of everything that’s happened. The whole thing plays out like a TV thriller, and I don’t blame anyone not keeping up. (Fellow situation monitorers, feel free to skip ahead to the analysis if you like.)

In July last year, Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the Pentagon to provide access to Claude. Until recently, Anthropic was the only leading AI lab whose services could be used on classified networks. The company was eager to cooperate with the US military, even partnering with Palantir. But when Claude was used for the January capture of Nicolas Maduro, that allegedly miffed an employee inside Anthropic, though new reporting suggests that the dealbreaker was really the Pentagon’s plan to analyze commercial bulk data on Americans.² A pissed-off Pete Hegseth wanted to make super sure that Anthropic was down for anything he wanted, citing “all lawful uses”—which under US military law, means basically whatever. And that was where things got messy.