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Last month, Anthropic, the AI company behind the model you may be using right now, had a very public falling out with the Pentagon. The story we were sold: a principled tech company refusing to let its technology be used for autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance of Americans.
Amodei, who is Anthropic’s CEO, drew a moral line in the sand. To many, that made him something rare in Silicon Valley: a man with a conscience.
And look, maybe that’s true but here’s what I’d ask regardless.
Anthropic signed a $200 million US Department of Defence contract. They put their technology into classified military networks. They partnered with Palantir, a company whose entire business is built on surveillance infrastructure. Then, after all that, the terms of how their AI would be used in active warfare became a surprise?
You don’t sign deals with the Pentagon to hand out marshmallows to your enemies.
This isn’t necessarily a character attack. It’s a pattern recognition exercise. Look at Halliburton and Dick Cheney. Look at Blackwater, which earned $320m in Pentagon contracts while its senior staff rotated freely between private boardrooms and government offices.
The history of private companies and military power is not a history of clean hands and clear intentions. Commercial interests and state violence have always made for complicated bedfellows, and the arrangement has rarely been what it looked like from the outside.
The more interesting question isn’t whether Anthropic was naive or calculating. It’s whether it even matters. Because OpenAI walked straight through the door Anthropic had left open and the gap was filled within hours.
That’s the thing about barons. When one steps aside,
another steps forward. The serf doesn’t notice the difference.
So where does that leave the rest of us? Stuck, as we have always been, between competing powers we didn’t elect and can’t control, hoping the flames of their wars don’t reach us. The difference now is the scale.
Henry Ford had a transformative idea and it reshaped transport, labour and manufacturing. The consequences were enormous but they were bounded. You could regulate a factory. You could unionise a workforce. You could, eventually, legislate against the worst outcomes.
Can you do any of that with an AI system making targeting decisions for an armed drone at machine speed?
Former US President and army general Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 that only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry could keep the military-industrial complex in check. He was talking about tanks and bombers.
Oh, Dwight, if only you could see what we have now.
The new military-industrial complex doesn’t just make weapons. It makes the cognitive layer that everything else runs on. Governments, courts, hospitals, financial systems. And increasingly, battlefields.
TECHNO FEUDALISM
The old feudalism broke down when peasants could leave the land, earn their own income, and no longer needed the lord’s protection. The system collapsed when the thing the lord controlled stopped being the only option.
The question worth sitting with is this: what’s the digital equivalent of that moment? What does it look like when ordinary people find a way off the manor?
There is no clean answer. There probably isn’t one answer at all but the first step is calling the system by its name and refusing to mistake a turf war between barons as a fight between good and evil.
The serfs are still in the middle either way.
OTHER TECH NEWS: Growing pain in the neck
