Derek Thompson

In the big picture, I want this podcast to be about everything in the world.

I want to talk to experts in psychology and media and medicine and economics.

But there are times when it feels to me like there are two stories whose significance towers over just about everything else.

Story one is Donald Trump and this administration.

And story two is artificial intelligence.

And today's show is about what happens when these two massive objects smash into each other and what we can see in the wreckage of that collision.

Recently, contract negotiations broke down between Anthropic, a leading AI company, and the Department of War, otherwise previously known as the Department of Defense.

The gist is that after weeks of negotiations, the Pentagon couldn't get Anthropic to agree to the use of its technology on autonomous weapons and other military applications.

Anthropic claimed that the White House was negotiating in bad faith, forcing a private company to accept contract language that went against its values.

The White House, for its part, felt that Anthropic was trying to play God, dictating to the military how its technology should be used in an emergency, rather than allowing democratically elected leaders to decide for itself.

I have my biases here.

I lean toward Anthropic.

But at one level, you could say this was a typical, boring contract dispute.

At a higher level, however, I think it was a fight over a question with huge implications for national security, a question that could haunt the next few years or decade of our politics.

That question is, who should control AI?

It's what happened next, however, that was most shocking and infamous.

Soon after negotiations broke down, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth took the extraordinary step of labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk, implying that the company could not do business with any firm that holds Pentagon contracts, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.

Without access to cloud services provided by these companies, or without the ability to sell services to those companies, Anthropic will struggle mightily.

This designation was broadly seen as the equivalent of the Pentagon trying to murder a successful American business for the sin of saying no.

It's not just liberals like me that found this announcement jarring.