February 27, 2026, was a flash point in the cold war between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C.
The AI giant Anthropic had drawn a red line with the Pentagon, forbidding the military from using its product for autonomous weapons or the mass surveillance of Americans. The Pentagon retaliated by ending their contract and designating Anthropic a supply-chain risk. Anthropic has since sued to overturn this designation.
The feud-turned-legal battle is an acute example of a long-festering dynamic: technologists who want control over the use of their creations and who do not trust the government to understand or regulate their products, and policymakers wary of an unelected tech oligarchy that has become its own power center in American society.
Trae Stephens is no stranger to this dynamic.
