Anthropic: The AI Company That Told Trump's War Machine to Go F**k Itself

[Amaryllis]

https://deanblundell.substack.com/p/anthropic-the-ai-company-that-told

Anthropic: The AI Company That Told Trump's War Machine to Go F**k Itself
The complete story of Anthropic's Pentagon war, Sam Altman/OpenAI's opportunistic betrayal, and why 1.5 million people deleted ChatGPT in 48 hours.
Dean Blundell

March 4, 2026

In a week that felt like a Tom Clancy novel written by someone who actually understands ethics, Anthropic — the company that makes the AI you might be reading this on — went to war with the Pentagon, got blacklisted by Trump, watched its rival stab it in the back, and somehow ended up #1 in the App Store. This is the full story. Buckle up, fellow nerds. It’s a good one…

The Setup: What Is Anthropic, and Why Should You Care?
Most people know ChatGPT. Fewer know Claude. That’s about to change.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela Amodei, along with a crew of seven former OpenAI researchers who looked at where OpenAI was heading and collectively said, “absolutely not.” They walked out of what would become the most profitable AI company on earth because they believed the race to commercialize AI was outpacing the ethical guardrails. So they built their own company — structured not as a profit-maximizing corporation, but as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), with a legally binding obligation to balance profit with its mission: ensuring AI benefits humanity.

Here’s why that corporate structure matters more than you think: Anthropic also created something called the Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT), which holds special Class T shares with the power to elect the company’s directors. That means no single investor — not Amazon, which has invested $8 billion, nor Google with its $3 billion — can override the company’s safety mission. The founders deliberately gave up long-term financial control to an independent mission guardian. In Silicon Valley terms, that’s basically insane. In democratic terms, it’s exactly what you’d want.

The board includes Dario and Daniela Amodei, alongside Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, venture capitalist Yasmin Razavi, Confluent CEO Jay Kreps, and Chris Liddell. This isn’t a MAGA boardroom. This is a group of people who built safeguards into the company’s DNA before the company even had a product. That matters because of what just happened.

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