#anthropic

On Tuesday February 24th, the founder and CEO of Anthropic was summoned to the Pentagon to meet with Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defense, for a "tense meeting."

Anthropic, for context, is under contract with the Pentagon for use of its AI assistant Claude in US military operations. (It was recently revealed that Claude was used in the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.)

Anthropic was given an ultimatum: allow unrestricted military use of Claude—including surveillance and autonomous weapons—or risk being blacklisted as a “supply chain risk.” Anthropic says they refused. Now we wait and see what the Pentagon responds.

But it's important to take a step back and look at what this crisis reveals about AI today.

The AI debate is often framed as being about “regulation”—as if the right rules will make it “safe.” But this framing obscures what we, and many others believe, is the ultimate function of AI—that it's a tool built for control. To control media, to control culture, to control the conversation.

AI is infrastructure for power.

The companies racing to build it now are under immense pressure to win—to be the one AI company to rule them all. And that means agreeing to the terms of the highest bidder.

We know that Google, OpenAI, Musk's xAI, et al are all more than happy to do that. (They've all donated lavishly to Trump as it is.) And as long as one of these companies is willing to take the low-road—to forgo ethics, to break laws—an AI-safe world is impossible.

In other words, whether or not Anthropic complies doesn't really make a difference, because another AI company—with the same or equal capabilities—will. It doesn't matter who wins the race because, in the end, it's a rigged game.

Which is why when it comes to creating an AI-safe world, the solution isn't to choose the "good, ethical" AI company over the “bad” ones.

The only truly AI-safe world is a world with AI-free spaces and institutions.

Apparently the deadline is tomorrow. (See the Bluesky posting over here for useful URLs.)

...Just doublechecked my entries in their database. They scraped essentially everything I've ever written. And confused Diane Wynne Jones with me, ffs. ...FUCKERS.

If you are US-based, get yourself on that list. Here's its URL:

Anthropic, a major artificial intelligence company, agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by a group of authors who alleged the platform had illegally used pirated copies of their books to train large-language models, according to court documents.

“If approved, this landmark settlement will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, larger than any other copyright class action settlement or any individual copyright case litigated to final judgment,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in California last year, centered on roughly 500,000 published works. The proposed settlement amounts to a gross recovery of $3,000 per work, Nelson said in a memorandum to the judge in the case.

Pete Hegseth has threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to come around.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 2.25.2026 1:00 PM

The U.S. Department of Defense is in a standoff with artificial intelligence developer Anthropic over the company's refusal to let the government use its products for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of U.S. citizens.

The feud presents a frightening picture of the government's agenda when it comes to AI technology—and the lengths to which it's willing to go, or at least threaten to go, in order to access AI tools without any safeguards. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said yesterday that the Trump administration might even invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to let the military use its products how the Pentagon sees fit.

Come On Now

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-used-anthropics-claude-in-maduro-venezuela-raid-583aff17

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/xCG2o