A statement from our CEO on national security uses of AI
Catholic moral theologians say Church teaching supports Anthropic’s refusal to allow its AI systems to be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons.
Billionaire Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah will join Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican, where Leo will present the first encyclical letter of his papacy on artificial intelligence.
This is designation as political theater: a show of force that will not stick.
Artificial intelligence is supercharging surveillance, and the law has not caught up with it.
Dario Amodei penned a public letter explaining the danger of the Defense Department's request to remove certain constraints from Claude, and refusing them outright.
The law doesn’t say what Sam Altman claims it does.
Anthropic is in a standoff with the Department of War; while the company’s concerns are legitimate, it position is intolerable and misaligned with reality.
On the business, strategy, and impact of technology.
On Anthropic’s standoff with the U.S. government and the exhausting nature of modern news commentary.
I want to take a minute, amidst the Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3-Codex hysteria, to capture some of the currently-open questions about AI progress and its impact on software engineering. There’s uncertainty at lots of different levels about what the future will look like, and good arguments for very different outcomes. This is partly for my reference (as these questions keep coming up it’s nice to have the obvious arguments in one place) and partly to document my predictions. I’m going to start at the high level and work my way down.
The Trump administration barred Anthropic from federal contracts after it refused to remove limits on AI use for domestic surveillance.
The DoD threatened to blacklist Anthropic for refusing to remove AI safety restrictions. Gamers have seen this playbook before.
A blog about futurism, science, technology, and military affairs.
Do our dull lives become worth watching?
OpenAI's CEO claims its new defense contract includes protections addressing the same issues that became a flashpoint for Anthropic.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed artificial intelligence firm Anthropic a supply chain risk on Friday, following days of increasingly heated public conflict with the AI company.
OpenAI and the U.S. Department of War will deploy AI models, emphasizing safety amid Anthropic's loss of military contracts.
On the business, strategy, and impact of technology.
On the business, strategy, and impact of technology.
On September 26, 1983, a Soviet officer broke protocol and prevented nuclear war. Forty-three years later, the Pentagon is demanding the right to remove the safeguard that saved us: a human in the loop.
the alignment problem is Pete Hegseth
This topic has gotten too much attention to ignore. I’ve got a lot of blog post ideas, but not enough time to turn them into posts (guess I should be using AI). While those ideas percolate, here’s the rundown on the Anthropic vs. Department of War situation since so many of you have asked me
The DOD and Anthropic clash over AI use in military operations. Who should decide?
OpenAI is in and Anthropic is out as a supplier of AI technology for the US defense department. This news caps a week of bluster by the highest officials in the US government towards some of the wealthiest titans of the big tech industry, and the overhanging specter of the existential risks posed by a new technology powerful enough that the Pentagon claims it is essential to national security. At issue is Anthropic’s insistence that the US Department of Defense (DoD) could not use its models to facilitate “mass surveillance” or “fully autonomous weapons,” provisions the defense secretary Pete Hegseth ...
Techtonic with Mark Hurst is a weekly radio show from WFMU about technology, how it's affecting us, and what we can do about it.
The U.S. and Israel have assembled a massive air and naval strike force in the Middle East and have attacked Iran. The fighting is ongoing as of this writing. Here’s incredible footage of an …
The Anthropic-Pentagon standoff isn't an ethics story. It's a replay of the 1993 Last Supper that consolidated 51 defense primes into 5, at Silicon Valley speed.
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I spent some days on Codex after hitting Claude's limits. Then the Pentagon deal happened – and Anthropic said no while OpenAI said yes. Here's why I switched back.
HOBOKEN, MARCH 3, 2026. I love philosophers, but sometimes they annoy me--for example, when they focus on what you might call sci-fi versus real-world problems. Example: On January 26 a philosopher I admire, Eric Schwitzgebel , gave an online talk on whether artificial intelligences mig
Anthropic's token negotiation deeply offends the misanthropes
What a weekend. Two new wars in Asia don’t qualify as top news. My first reaction to Hegseth’s conflict with Anthropic was along the lines of: I expected an attempt at quasi-nationaliza…
The company will "likely file suit against everybody,” one legal expert said.
In light of recent events, it is time for consumers to start wielding their power to influence the AI giants. Replace ChatGPT with Claude, and do not use the Microsoft Copilot chatbot.
The Department of Defense struck a deal with other Big Tech firms for use of their AI tools. How they will be used is unclear.
Interesting & joyful things from the previous week
Secretary of Defense Hegseth's "attempted corporate murder" of Anthropic over an ideological dispute should not be taken lightly.
On the business, strategy, and impact of technology.
The AI Bubble in 2026 (2/4)
New details on precisely where the lines were drawn
A conversation with Kat Duffy from the Council on Foreign Relations and Amos Toh from the Brennan Center for Justice.
I led the Geopolitics Team at OpenAI for approximately three years and then joined two other teams before deciding to leave in June 2025.
Anthropic gave up its contract with the Pentagon over AI safety disagreements -- then, OpenAI swooped in.
The most important AI story of the year (so far), explained.
Hi all. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? It has been a week dominated by AI. Which is fitting because AI dominated the weeks before it and will dominate the weeks ahead. That’s part of the reason I haven’t written for a while, as I think
We explain why