Anthropic v DoW

Second Breakfast takes it on!

This post originally appeared in ChinaTalk.

Eight hours to the deadline. We break down the standoff, then get into the Cuba boat raid, Iran, and four years of war in Ukraine.

Jordan Schneider, Eric Robinson, Tony Stark, and Justin Mc

Today we cover…

• The Anthropic-Pentagon showdown: what Hegseth actually wants, the Maduro raid Claude controversy, and why Dario’s position is more nuanced than “no kill bots”

• Domestic surveillance: FISA, NSA, and Eric’s story about getting a call from the Department of Justice

• The Defense Production Act as a magic button — and why Congress is starting to push back

• Military-civil fusion, American style: are we becoming the thing we critique?

• Florida Man tries to invade Cuba with 10 guys on a 24-foot boat

• Iran: the naval strain, Witkoff and Kushner as our top negotiators, and the near-miss in Venezuela

• Ukraine at year four: European rearmament, the shadow fleet, and whether the 5% NATO target is designed to humiliate

• The Secretary of Defense problem: from Lloyd Austin going missing to Pete Hegseth’s Make-A-Wish Foundation

Listen now on iTunes or Spotify.

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Claude Goes to War

Jordan Schneider: So I had Claude Code build me the Claude of War, — a responsible approach to killing people. At least it has a sense of humor about it!

Happy Friday, February 27th. We are now eight hours and counting from the 5:01 deadline that Pete Hegseth set. Eric, take us away.

Eric Robinson: So why are we talking about Anthropic? It is one of maybe a half dozen industry leaders in generative AI and large language modeling. If you had asked about it maybe nine months or a year ago, I don’t think it would necessarily be spoken of in the same sentence as OpenAI or DeepSeek, but they have been on a breakout run — primarily because Claude has demonstrably shifted the way people interact with AI-enabled coding.

The tension at the moment is that Anthropic has, for reasons that remain unclear, caught the hostile attention of the Secretary of Defense. It does seem to be almost a personal mission that Pete Hegseth has taken on.

Jordan Schneider: We’ve got a few dynamics going on, and I think we should start with the inauguration, where you had Sam Altman and the rest of the tech CEO elite all there with big smiles. Greg Brockman donating $25 million to the Trump super PAC. And then Dario kind of on the sidelines — he’s missed some of these meetings. I think it’s clear that his politics don’t necessarily align with where this administration is. That was fine. David Sacks made fun of them for being “woke AI.”

But as Eric said, it’s all well and good until this is the market leader, which they have been for the past six months, in a sort of ironic twist of fate. The market leader is the one with the most federal ramping going on. Anthropic that was most integrated into the various things the Department of War gets up to.

Anthropic tried to kiss the ring. It was reported in The Wall Street Journal that they asked 1789 Capital — Donald Jr.’s VC fund — to get in on their last round. Donald Jr. said no. And now the knives are out.