{"id":109994,"date":"2026-03-03T19:42:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T22:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tech.einnews.com\/article\/897339140"},"modified":"2026-03-03T19:42:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T22:42:09","slug":"this-tech-company-turned-into-a-resistance-icon-overnight-the-reality-is-much-darker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new7.shop\/zerocostfreehost\/index.php\/2026\/03\/03\/this-tech-company-turned-into-a-resistance-icon-overnight-the-reality-is-much-darker\/","title":{"rendered":"This Tech Company Turned Into a Resistance Icon Overnight. The Reality Is Much Darker."},"content":{"rendered":"

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Last July, Anthropic agreed to ink a $200 million contract<\/a> with the Pentagon, allowing the department broad-based use of its Claude model as the two prospective partners gradually worked out the final terms of engagement. Those were supposed to get etched last week\u2014only for Anthropic to undergo a decisive test<\/a> for its oft-professed ethical boundaries.<\/p>\n

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded that his team be allowed to deploy Claude\u2019s software in whatever manner they deemed pertinent, including applications for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weaponry, which were \u201cred lines<\/a>\u201d for Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. By Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump had ordered a six-month phaseout<\/a> of all uses of Claude at the federal level. Hegseth then designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk to national security<\/a>, all but forbidding any military contractors from doing future business with the company. A federal contract was subsequently bestowed upon Anthropic rival OpenAI, which unconvincingly<\/a> claimed that it would try to safeguard tools like ChatGPT from use in population surveillance and autonomous weapons.<\/p>\n

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The fallout for Anthropic has been remarkable. It\u2019s the first-ever American company to be deemed a supply-chain risk, which means it\u2019s already lost several users<\/a> across the federal government. But something even stranger emerged in the aftermath: a lotta liberal goodwill. Social media campaigners encouraged<\/a> their followers, even the A.I. skeptics, to download Claude en masse. Extremely online observers came up with bizarre metaphors<\/a> to characterize Anthropic\u2019s heroism  and pushed Claude to the top of the app-store charts<\/a> over the weekend. By Monday morning, there was a Claude service outage<\/a> that Anthropic attributed to \u201cunprecedented demand\u201d for its products. Even Sen. Brian Schatz<\/a> and Katy Perry got in<\/a> on the whole thing. (The fact that American commandos had amply used Claude to plan the Saturday strikes<\/a> on Iran did not appear to faze many of these folks.) Meanwhile, the complementary OpenAI backlash has been so pitched that it\u2019s pushed CEO Sam Altman into claiming he will amend<\/a> the surveillance terms of its Pentagon partnership.<\/p>\n