Amrith Ramkumar

A lot of people look at this story and they think the Trump administration has Anthropic in a tough spot and is targeting them and they have a lot of leverage.

But we're told if the Trump administration decided to cut Anthropic off tomorrow and the military decided to stop using Claude altogether, there would be some real problems because Claude, again, is the only one that's been approved to be used in classified scenarios.

None of the other models have that approval yet.

And it has already been embedded.

So you can't really strip that out.

Cutting yourself off from some of the most advanced models would not be a great strategic choice.

It shows that AI adoption at the highest levels of government and at the highest levels of companies is happening very quickly.

And the government's going to be using it more and more.

So it sort of supports that case that the sort of AI arms race and the geopolitical implications of all of that are only accelerating.

Brian Armstrong is the 43 year old CEO of Coinbase, the giant crypto exchange, and he's the under the radar face of the U.S.

crypto industry in the United States.

He's survived a lot of booms and busts over the past decade and built Coinbase into what he calls sort of an everything exchange.

You can

buy Bitcoin, you can also trade stocks.

Now you can do stuff with prediction markets.

And he says his goal is to eventually be a bank replacement.

And he's gotten a lot of believers and among investors, the company has a market value of something like $55 billion.

And he's a staunch defender of the industry.

Now he's hated by some people in the banking community who have been offended by how he's lobbying in Washington to get policies that will be friendly for Coinbase in the crypto industry.

Yeah, it's like a love-hate frenemy dynamic with crypto and the banks right now.