AI Policy

The Pentagon banned Anthropic’s products from the federal government barely a month ago. Now the White House is handing agencies the keys to Anthropic’s most dangerous model. Welcome to AI policy in 2026, where a six-week grudge can’t survive contact with a model that finds thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities before breakfast. From Persona Non Grata to Essential Asset Here’s the whiplash timeline. In early March, the Department of Defense slapped Anthropic with a supply chain risk designation — a label historically reserved for Chinese companies like Huawei. The move followed a bitter fight over military AI use that reportedly came to a head hours before U.S. strikes on Iran. Anthropic refused unrestricted military deployment. The Pentagon responded with the bureaucratic nuclear option. ...

If you still think the AI race is a three-way sprint between San Francisco, Seattle, and Shenzhen, this week should recalibrate your map. On Tuesday, Cohere’s chief AI officer Joelle Pineau went on X and declared — “unambiguously” — that the Toronto-based foundation model company will “always remain headquartered” in Canada. That sentence wouldn’t normally be news. Except it came twenty-four hours after she pointedly refused to make the same commitment in front of a House of Commons committee, and it landed in the middle of advanced merger talks with Germany’s Aleph Alpha that both Ottawa and Berlin appear to be actively blessing. ...

Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI just dropped the ninth edition of its AI Index Report — 400+ pages of data on where AI actually stands. Not where the hype says it is. Not where the doomers think it’s headed. Where it measurably is. The short version: AI is more capable, more adopted, and more expensive than ever. It’s also less transparent, more environmentally destructive, and outrunning every guardrail we’ve built. Here are the numbers that matter. ...

The company building the machines that might replace your job now has ideas about how to make that transition less painful. Whether you trust the fox to design the henhouse security system is another question entirely. OpenAI dropped a 13-page policy paper called “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age” proposing four-day work weeks with no pay cuts, a public wealth fund giving every American a stake in AI growth, and shifting the tax burden from labor to capital — including potential “robot taxes.” ...

Stop watching Congress if you want to understand where AI regulation is heading. Watch Sacramento. Governor Gavin Newsom just signed what his office calls a “first-of-its-kind” executive order that tells AI companies something they haven’t heard from American government in a while: prove your technology won’t hurt people, or lose access to the world’s fourth-largest economy. It’s a direct, unmistakable middle finger to the Trump administration’s deregulatory stance on AI. And it might be the most consequential AI policy move of 2026 so far. ...

The United States has its executive orders. The EU has its AI Act. But on March 5, 2026, China unveiled something far more sweeping: a 141-page national blueprint that essentially bets the country’s economic future on artificial intelligence. China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, released at the opening of the National People’s Congress in Beijing, mentions AI more than 50 times and includes what officials are calling an “AI+ action plan” — a comprehensive strategy to embed artificial intelligence into virtually every sector of the world’s second-largest economy. From manufacturing floors to hospital wards, from logistics networks to classrooms, Beijing is telling the world: AI isn’t a side project. It’s the project. ...

On Friday, the President of the United States declared war — not with missiles, but with procurement orders — against one of America’s leading AI companies. The crime? Anthropic told the Pentagon “no.” No to mass surveillance of Americans. No to fully autonomous weapons. And for that act of corporate conscience, Anthropic is now being treated like a foreign adversary. The Ultimatum The conflict had been building for months. Anthropic held government AI contracts since 2024 — it was the first advanced AI company deployed in federal agencies. But it had two red lines: no mass surveillance, no autonomous weapons. ...

An 84-year-old senator stood at Stanford last Friday and told a room full of future tech workers that America has “not a clue” what’s about to hit it. Then he proposed freezing the construction of AI data centers until Congress catches up. Bernie Sanders isn’t wrong about the problem. He might be dangerously wrong about the solution. The Stanford Bombshell Sanders shared the stage with Congressman Ro Khanna — the guy who literally represents Silicon Valley — at an event titled “Who Controls the Future of AI: The Oligarchs or the People.” Subtlety wasn’t on the agenda. ...

If you thought the AI wars were just about who has the best chatbot, think again. Axios dropped a bombshell this weekend: the U.S. Department of Defense is reportedly considering designating Anthropic — maker of Claude, poster child for responsible AI — as a “supply chain risk.” If that designation goes through, every defense contractor in America would have to cut ties with Anthropic entirely. The irony is almost too perfect. The AI company that built its entire brand around safety might get blacklisted by the Pentagon. ...

The company that built its brand on saying “no” to dangerous AI might be about to learn what that actually costs. Over the weekend, Axios reported that the U.S. Department of Defense is considering designating Anthropic — maker of Claude, darling of the AI safety crowd — as a supply chain risk. If that label sticks, every defense contractor in the ecosystem would be forced to sever ties with the company. ...