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Chronicles

The story behind the story

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Anthropic's concerns are legitimate, but its position is intolerable and misaligned with a reality where US foes are developing autonomous fighting capabilities

Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery:Charlesarthur /The Overspill:Start Up No.2621: Anthropic's doomed military standoff, chatbots v PDFs, ChatGPT's bad health, 25 years after the iPod, and moreJudd Rosenblatt /Wall Street Journal:The Pointless War Between the Pentagon and Anthropic

Stratechery Ben Thompson

Discussion

  • @brianluidog Brian Lui on x
    I remember this tech influencer having terrible judgement about wework, so I never followed him. But a lot of techies think he's an oracle of some sort. You can see why I think finance bros are better at parsing information.
  • @ronbodkin Ron Bodkin on x
    The democratic way to govern powerful technology is to PASS LAWS. Not to use lawfare to destroy companies that refuse to bend the knee. We should be regulating AI as labs race to superintelligence not assuming that as long as they sign contracts to allow DoW to use them “for all
  • @arozenshtein Alan Rozenshtein on x
    I think this deeply understates the lawlessness of how the government is going about trying to destroy Anthropic. But what it does well is situate this in what is ultimately the bigger-picture question: to what extent will/should America nationalize its AI industry (which is what
  • @kellylsims Kelly Sims on x
    “What concerns me about Amodei and Anthropic in particular is the consistent pattern of being singularly focused on being the one winner with all of the power, with limited consideration of how everyone else may react to that situation.” This is a thoughtful piece on all this.
  • @smokepetrol J. Huffer on x
    Jingoist bullshit conclusions and democratic fantasies aside this is a basic analysis of great power politics from a realist (in the Mearsheimer sense) PoV that takes Amodei's eval of Claude on its own terms and usefully contextualizes DoW aggression
  • @alasdairpr Alasdair Phillips-Robins on x
    This post is confused on the Anthropic-DOD dispute and adopts a vision of society—"might makes right," so quit whining, Dario—that is at odds with American democracy. Anthropic's position is more limited than Thompson says, and we live in a country of laws, not brute force.
  • @meekaale Mikael Brockman on x
    even stratechery fails to address the difference between Anthropic and OpenAI god I'm so fucking tired of the idiotic discourse fuck all of you fucking pundits
  • @benspringwater Ben Springwater on x
    I love @benthompson .  He is my favorite tech commentator.  I listen to @stratechery every day.  But his justification for the US Govt seeking to destroy Anthropic is incredibly glib and misguided.  AI ::  nuclear weapons is sometimes a useful analogy but it's obviously an imperf…
  • @ericlevitz Eric Levitz on x
    It's really bizarre to see a bunch of ostensibly pro-market, right-leaning tech guys argue, “A private company asserting the right to decide what contracts it enters into is antithetical to democratic government” [image]
  • @themindscourge @themindscourge on x
    Who will be the Oppenheimer or Sakharov of AI? Anthropic vs DoD discourse reminds me of Cold War debates between nuclear scientists and the governments who employed them to build their nuclear arsenals. The governments thought that they were buying technical skills, but the
  • @kkmaway Krishna Memani on x
    there is nothing as rich as Tech bros...even if they are not billionaires...you can always aspire...is for them to become foreign policy, game theory, how-the-middle-empire-will-think- about-it expert. I have no clue. But for god's sake, you have no clue either. But you have a
  • @packym Packy McCormick on x
    Ben Thompson with the best take on DOD v. Anthropic, which is basically: if you don't want the government to treat your technology like nuclear weapons, stop comparing your technology to nuclear weapons. Hype Tax. [image]
  • @irl_danb Dan on x
    Ben Thompson, as always, lays out the reality more clearly than I could have, despite my attempts by Dario's own words, he's building something akin to nukes he's simultaneously challenging the US government's authority to decide how to wield said power as much as I like [image]
  • @benthompson Ben Thompson on x
    @EricLevitz I wasn't making a normative argument. Of course I think this is bad. I was pointing out what will inevitably happen with AI in reality
  • @arctotherium42 @arctotherium42 on x
    I've been defending DoD's position on their contract with Anthropic, but the correct remedy there is cancelling the contract, not trying to obliterate the company with a supply-chain risk designation.
  • @uswremichael @uswremichael on x
    Great article about the democratic process determining our nation's fate rather that a single tech founder overriding our leaders.
  • @billyez2 Billy Easley II on x
    Easily my least favorite piece I've read from stratechery. Dismissive of the law's power, Neo-Brandesian in its analysis of public and corporate power dynamics. This is not the way
  • @justjoshinyou13 Josh You on x
    @stratechery This conflates multiple senses of control/power. By vetoing some government uses of Claude, Anthropic is not arrogating to itself the ability or right to use Claude for autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance.
  • @tbpn @tbpn on x
    Stratechery's @benthompson: “I would like [Anthropic] to sell to the government, and I would like Congress to pass a law addressing these digital surveillance issues.” “A lot of people are like, 'That's unrealistic,' which I'm amenable to. But at the end of the day, if you [video…
  • @jeremiahdjohns Jeremiah Johnson on x
    @stratechery This is one of the worst things I've read from you, and seems like obvious nonsense. “AI is as dangerous as nuclear weapons, which is why if a company expresses concerns about using AI for autonomous weapons, we will destroy them permanently”. What the hell?
  • @rabois Keith Rabois on x
    Yes.
  • @quastora Trey Causey on x
    @stratechery I believe this post fundamentally misunderstands the options that are / were actually available to the government and to Anthropic in a way that is undemocratic. I highly recommend reading @deanwball's piece on this today for a more accurate picture. https://www.hype…
  • @ramez Ramez Naam on x
    Coming back to this. No AI company can stop DOD from misusing AI, because it's simply too easy to pick up or buy a different model. But by making the issue public, Dario has called the attention of voters, the press, and Congress to the potential misuse of AI. That's the win.
  • @ramez Ramez Naam on x
    The most important thing Dario did is get this issue in the news. At the end of the day, xAI will build a good enough model. Or Palantir can build a frontier model for a few hundred million. There are no technical moats here. The important thing is that the public and Congress
  • @reckless Nilay Patel on bluesky
    Ben Thompson making a full-throated case for fascism here stratechery.com/2026/anthrop...  [image]
  • @romitmehta.com Romit Mehta on bluesky
    This is the kind of unnecessary rationalization of tech by Ben that prompted me to not renew his newsletter last year.  This is nuts, and this is not the first time he has written such a thing.  [embedded post]
  • @rusty.todayintabs.com Rusty Foster on bluesky
    Earlier in the piece, he says that international law is “fake.”  It doesn't get much more cynical and amoral than this.  I haven't checked in on Ben in a while but this is straightforward Nazi thinking.  “Might makes right and only violent power is real.”  [embedded post]
  • @lopatto Elizabeth Lopatto on bluesky
    the contortions here are very funny if you're familiar with (a) ben's stance on other tech cos and (b) his objections to antitrust action.  do we think he's aware that he's describing and endorsing fascism?  stratechery.com/2026/anthrop...
  • r/WeTheFifth r on reddit
    “No president in the modern era has ordered more military strikes against as many different countries as Donald Trump …