Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, told the Pentagon it would not remove safety guardrails from its tools for use in mass surveillance or autonomous weapons systems. The Trump administration's response was not to find another contractor. It was to threaten Anthropic's destruction.
As "Hvylya" reports, Anne Applebaum addressed the threat on the To The Contrary With Charlie Sykes podcast, calling it a textbook case of state coercion against private enterprise.
"This is the threat that the Republican Party talked about for years - the threat of the state taking over capitalist companies," Applebaum said. "And absolutely this is what they're doing." She pointed to a broader pattern: the administration manipulating private companies, demanding shares, dictating how they spend money or operate.
The irony, Applebaum argued, is total. "When they scream about Marxism and communism and the threat of state control - this is it. This should be the libertarian nightmare. This is what they've been saying they were afraid of all along - that companies would be dictated to by the government."
What made the Anthropic case stand out was the nature of the threat. Governments have always chosen one contractor over another. But telling a company "we're going to destroy your business" for refusing a single demand is, in Applebaum's words, "something that we've never seen before, at least not in modern times." The message to the rest of Silicon Valley was unmistakable: comply fully or face annihilation.
Sykes noted the story would have dominated national debate in any other week. Instead, it arrived alongside the opening salvos of a war with Iran - one more data point in what Applebaum mapped as converging threads of unchecked executive power, dismantled institutions, and a tech sector discovering the cost of proximity to an administration that demands total loyalty.
Also read: "Go Big and Go Fast": What JD Vance Told Trump Behind Closed Doors About Striking Iran