A.I. is a teenager now, roaring into the world, testing limits, rebelling against authority, itching to usurp the old guard and remake the planet in its image.
Unfortunately, Pete Hegseth is also a teenager. His hormones are raging; his judgment is shaky. Like a repentant frat boy, he had to promise the adults in the Senate that he wouldn’t drink while he is in charge of the military and its 12-figure budget. He certainly lacks the maturity to guide, discipline or even understand the earth-shattering power of an adolescent A.I.
Hegseth should be focused on our nerve-racking duel with Iran. Instead, he spent the week at war with Dario Amodei, the thoughtful chief executive of Anthropic and one of the few in Silicon Valley advocating for humanity. Anthropic is the only A.I. company operating on classified military systems; its clever chatbot, Claude, was deployed by the military to help catch Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.
More than most of his peers, Amodei has been blunt about “civilizational concerns” — the risks of A.I. wiping us out. He even hired an Oxford-educated philosopher, a young Scottish woman, to teach Claude right from wrong. She’s feeding his “soul,” she said. Claude even has his own Constitution, rules for the bot’s values and behavior. (Good luck!)
A fully powerful A.I. may be only one to two years away, Amodei wrote in a January essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” adding that it will be “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields: biology, programming, math, engineering, writing, etc.” It will be able to control “physical tools, robots or laboratory equipment through a computer.” And as we can already see, with A.I. partners and suicides related to A.I., it will have a powerful psychological influence on all of us.
Americans could land in a panopticon, constantly surveilled. “It might be frighteningly plausible to simply generate a complete list of anyone who disagrees with the government on any number of issues, even if such disagreement isn’t explicit in anything they say or do,” Amodei wrote. A.I. could “detect pockets of disloyalty forming, and stamp them out before they grow.”
About fully autonomous weapons, Amodei conjured a Hitchcockian scene: “A swarm of millions or billions of fully automated armed drones, locally controlled by powerful A.I. and strategically coordinated across the world by an even more powerful A.I., could be an unbeatable army, capable of both defeating any military in the world and suppressing dissent within a country by following around every citizen.” There would be “a greatly increased risk” of democratic countries turning A.I. armies against their own people.
President Trump and Hegseth already have a healthy disregard for democracy. Trump is trying to take over our elections because he’s rightly worried that his party is going to get shellacked in November. And now he’s escalating his push to remove the few pathetic guardrails that exist on A.I.
Hegseth last fall revoked the press passes of all reporters who didn’t agree to sign a pledge agreeing to his draconian restrictions on where they could report and what they could report on.
Amodei did not want his A.I. model to be used for surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons without human oversight — reflecting his deepest fears.
On Tuesday, Hegseth summoned Amodei to the Pentagon to demand that he let the Pentagon do whatever it wanted, as long as it was “lawful.”
This is poppycock, of course, because Trump and Hegseth have contempt for the law when it gets in the way of their whims, power grabs and revenge plots. Their bizarre overkill with Anthropic makes me wonder what nefarious deeds they’re up to.
The self-styled secretary of war offered Amodei a double ultimatum: He would invoke the Defense Production Act to compel Anthropic to give the Pentagon unrestricted use of its model, or he would designate it a supply-chain risk — a national security threat — which would put the company’s government contracts, and possibly the company itself, in jeopardy.
Anthropic had a choice: be extorted or blacklisted.
On Friday, Trump unleashed hell on Amodei, denouncing the Anthropic techies who helped the Pentagon pluck Maduro out of his bedroom as “Leftwing nut jobs.”
Trump accused Anthropic of “trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution.”
“Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology,” he posted. “We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!”
In a post on X, Hegseth designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk: “Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.” He railed that “Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles.”
Then, later Friday night, Sam Altman announced on X that his company, OpenAI, had reached an agreement with the “Department of War” to use the company for classified work with red lines that sounded the same as those that Amodei sought. “In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome,” Altman chirped.
It was confusing how OpenAI could be accepted on the terms that crushed his rival. Did the administration simply have an ideological grudge against Anthropic, which it sees as more “woke” than OpenAI, or did Altman’s buttering up of Trump work, or could his terms somehow have been different?
While Altman said OpenAI was “asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies,” Amodei said in a statement Friday night that he would sue the government.
Hegseth was wrong. Anthropic has principles. It’s the administration that is fundamentally incompatible with American principles.
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