Anthropic Isn't a #Resistance Hero (Slate, March 3, 2026)

[highplainsdem]

https://slate.com/technology/2026/03/ai-anthropic-openai-pentagon-resistance.html

-snip-

The hullaballoo around Anthropic’s fight overshadowed another major development last week: The company was ditching its “responsible scaling policy,” a safeguard, unique within the sector, meant to prevent it from developing risky A.I. tools too quickly. It’s not the first time Anthropic has been so flexible with its self-imposed rules. In 2024, it scrapped its blanket ban against selling Claude products to government spy agencies; just after Trump’s reelection, it also partnered with Palantir and Amazon to sell their tools to U.S. military customers. This year, the Pentagon made use of the Palantir-Anthropic suite in planning the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a campaign that killed dozens of locals. Even after the capture, Anthropic participated in a Pentagon bidding contest, proposing a system whereby Claude would interpret voice commands so as to guide offensive, semi-autonomous drone swarms that wold employ some human backup.

In the most technical sense, none of this violates the red lines that Amodei outlined around surveilling Americans or allowing his tech to power fully autonomous killing machines. But those lines appear all the thinner when you consider that Anthropic willingly outsourced Claude use to two corporations—Palantir and Amazon—that are actively enthusiastic about both applications, especially in partnership with this administration.

That kind of convenient ethical punt has been a constant of Anthropic’s brief life span. Long before it reneged on its promise of “responsible” and careful A.I. development, Anthropic used the same unethical shortcuts that have invited so much opprobrium upon competitors like Meta and OpenAI: mass-pirating copyright books and songs to speed up model training, allegedly circumventing Reddit’s anti-A.I.-crawler protections, and extending its timeline for retaining users’ private chats and Claude sessions. For a company founded by ex-OpenAI executives disaffected with Sam Altman’s business practices, it seemingly has little compunction about the aggressive tacks it’s already taken to shore up its $380 billion bottom line.

-snipping paragraph saying Anthropic does deserve credit for standing up to Hegseth's demands last week-

But to celebrate Anthropic’s move through a mass virtuous-capitalism campaign is to give it too much credit; the company did, after all, willingly lend itself to this administration and its most openly craven partners until the final minute. And considering Anthropic’s lifelong track record of forgoing the principles that supposedly animate its existence (including the “responsible development” ethos it cast off last week), no one with any standards should expect this conscientious objection to last either. Enjoy Claude if you want; it’s a remarkable chatbot. Just don’t expect it to do anything further to preserve our democracy, or anyone’s life, or your efforts to prevent A.I. from ruining everything.