Dave Lawler

I spoke to somebody who's in this space who said, actually, that's probably a tough case for Andropic to win if this did happen and they tried to fight it in court, because on issues of national security, the courts often give the president pretty broad authority to say, we need this for national security.

We need this model.

We know we're using it for stuff, but we need full access, unfettered access.

The problem, and this is a quote from a defense official, I'm paraphrasing, but they told me the problem for Anthropic is these guys are really good.

You know, we're putting so much pressure on them because their software is just that useful for us that, you know, we feel it's necessary to have these conversations.

So go.

Yeah, always eager to come on.

So this story that we published this morning that caused quite a stir, basically, my colleague Barak Ravid was putting together all the various pieces of what we know.

There's been so much incremental reporting, Don, over the last weeks and months about are we moving toward a deal?

Are we moving toward war?

And he just sort of made some calls and stepped back and said, here's everything we know that indicates we're pointing toward war.

And here's everything we know that indicates we're moving towards a deal.

And there's a whole lot more on the war side of the ledger.

And folks he was talking to said, you know, the scenarios that are being presented to Trump that are under consideration, these are not good.

the kinds of things we were talking about in January.

When these protests were happening in January, Trump was looking at potentially striking a security forces headquarters in Tehran or something like that, a symbolic strike to say the United States doesn't approve of this.

That, at least according to our sources, is not what's being discussed now.

It's a much more significant military operation that would unfold probably over the course

of weeks you listed, the military assets that are in the region, they certainly have the capacity there and the firepower there to do quite significant long-term operations.

I agree with Miles when he said Trump does not want a land war in the Middle East.