Pentagon

The job listing reads like a Tom Clancy novel: “Policy Manager, Chemical Weapons and High-Yield Explosives.” Five years minimum experience in chemical weapons defense. Knowledge of radiological dispersal devices — dirty bombs, for the uninitiated. The employer? Not the Pentagon. Not the CIA. Anthropic, the company that makes Claude. Welcome to 2026, where the hottest job in Silicon Valley requires you to know how to build a bomb so you can teach an AI not to tell anyone else how. ...

The future of AI warfare isn’t a hypothetical anymore. It’s running live ops in Iran. Admiral Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, confirmed this week that the military is actively using “a variety of advanced AI tools” in Operation Epic Fury — the massive air campaign against Iran that’s struck over 5,500 targets since February 28. AI helped hit 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours alone. At the center of it all: Palantir’s Maven Smart System, with Anthropic’s Claude baked in. The same AI that summarizes your emails is now helping analysts prioritize strike targets in an active war zone. ...

The biggest AI company your parents have never heard of just picked a fight with the United States Department of Defense. And the outcome could determine what AI looks like for the rest of the decade. On Monday, Anthropic — the company behind Claude, one of the world’s most capable AI systems — filed two federal lawsuits against the Pentagon, the Trump administration, and 16 government agencies. The trigger: the Defense Department slapped Anthropic with a “supply chain risk” designation, a label typically reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei or Kaspersky. ...

When Caitlin Kalinowski posted “I resigned from OpenAI” on X and LinkedIn this past Saturday, she didn’t just leave a job. She drew a line in the sand that the entire AI industry is now being forced to acknowledge. Kalinowski — a veteran hardware executive who previously led Meta’s Orion AR glasses project and spent nearly six years designing MacBooks at Apple — walked away from her role leading OpenAI’s robotics team over one issue: the company’s rushed agreement to deploy AI models inside the Pentagon’s classified computing systems. ...

The United States Department of Defense just did something it has never done before: it officially designated an American company a “supply chain risk to national security.” The company? Anthropic — maker of Claude, one of the most capable AI systems on the planet. This label was designed for foreign adversaries. Companies with backdoors in their hardware. Firms controlled by hostile intelligence services. It’s been used publicly exactly once before, against a Swiss cybersecurity firm with reported Russian ties. ...

An American AI company just got the treatment usually reserved for Chinese tech firms tied to foreign adversaries. The Pentagon officially designated Anthropic — maker of Claude, darling of the AI safety movement — a “supply chain risk to America’s national security.” The crime? Refusing to let the military use its AI without restrictions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Welcome to the new era of AI politics, where building safety guardrails gets you blacklisted by your own government. ...

Imagine you’re one of the most successful AI companies in the world. Developers love your model, enterprise revenue is soaring, and your technology is running inside classified military networks. Then the government tells you to drop your ethical red lines — and when you refuse, they blacklist you entirely. That’s not a thought experiment. That’s what just happened to Anthropic. In the most dramatic week in AI policy since the technology entered public consciousness, the Trump administration effectively declared war on one of America’s most prominent AI companies — while its chief rival rushed to fill the void. The fallout is reshaping the relationship between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon in real time. ...

The AI industry just had its most dramatic week since ChatGPT launched. In 72 hours, one company drew an ethical line, got punished by the federal government, watched its biggest rival rush in — and then watched that rival face a consumer revolt so fierce it had to backtrack publicly. This isn’t just corporate drama. It’s the first real stress test of whether AI companies can have principles and survive. ...

The biggest story in AI right now has nothing to do with benchmarks, parameters, or funding rounds. It’s about what happens when an AI company tells the world’s most powerful military “no” — and what happens when its rival says “yes.” Over five extraordinary days, the AI industry lived through its most dramatic ethical crisis yet. The fallout reshaped public perception of the two leading AI labs, forced a hasty contract amendment, and turned Anthropic’s Claude into the most downloaded free app in America. ...

Users vote with their thumbs. Last weekend, they pressed delete. ChatGPT mobile uninstalls in the U.S. surged 295% day-over-day on Saturday, February 28, according to Sensor Tower data. For context, ChatGPT’s typical daily uninstall fluctuation averaged about 9% over the past month. This wasn’t noise. This was a consumer revolt. The trigger: OpenAI signed a deal with the Department of Defense — now officially rebranded as the Department of War under the Trump administration — to deploy AI models in classified military environments. The timing was brutal. The deal landed hours after the government blacklisted rival Anthropic for refusing to sign a similar agreement without safety guardrails. ...