I joined Anderson Cooper on CNN Friday evening to break down President Trump's ban on Anthropic across the federal government. I made the point that while Anthropic deserves credit for holding its ethical red lines on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, this isn't a story about a principled company blindsided by the Pentagon — Anthropic pursued this classified work through a partnership with Palantir last year, and the $200 million contract that followed put them squarely in an arena that plays by its own rules.
The bigger question now, as I told Anderson, is what happens next with OpenAI and Google, whose own employees have signed a letter demanding the same red lines — because if those companies fold, Anthropic's stand becomes a footnote, and if they hold, the Pentagon loses access to the three most capable AI systems in the world for its most sensitive work. And meanwhile, there is still no federal regulation of this technology whatsoever. We are watching private companies try to set ethical boundaries that democracy itself has failed to establish, while the government actively tries to tear those boundaries down.
