The Plot Against Intelligence, Human and Artificial

Reverse DEI comes for Claude

Source: Business Insider

So far I personally have made almost no use of AI. But I know people who use it all the time. Broadly speaking, they fall into two groups. Some use AI casually or for fun; they generally use OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Some use it to get serious work done; they generally use Anthropic’s Claude.

My impressionistic take is confirmed by data on market shares, which by the start of 2026 showed Anthropic rapidly overtaking OpenAI, the early leader, in adoptions by enterprises — businesses and other organizations trying to accomplish well-defined tasks.

Among the organizations that have found Anthropic’s AI models more useful than those of its rivals is the Department of Defense, which relied heavily on Claude until early this month — which is when Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense who calls himself the secretary of war, suddenly banned the use of Claude. As I pointed out the other day, Hegseth seems determined to exalt ignorance and wage war on expertise and hard thinking; it turns out that his war on human intelligence is also a war on artificial intelligence he doesn’t like.

To justify the ban, the defense department declared that Anthropic is a supply chain risk, and it is trying not just to end its own use of Claude but to prevent any contractors doing business with the department from using Claude.

There’s no mystery about the motivation for banning Claude. Anthropic has said that it wants assurances that its products won’t be used for fully autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of Americans. This has enraged Trump officials: David Sacks, the administration’s AI and crypto czar, has accused the company of supporting “woke AI.” So an administration for which seeking vengeance against perceived enemies is a central motivation is naturally trying to punish Anthropic and damage its business.

But the fact that the Trumpist-Anthropic feud is understandable doesn’t make it normal or acceptable. In fact, the designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk is a terrible omen for America’s future, in at least three ways.

First, it’s obviously illegal. Designating a potential contractor a supply-chain risk isn’t something the government is supposed to do casually. The legal basis for such a designation, embodied in the federal government’s acquisition guidelines, is very specific:

“Supply chain risk” means the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of a covered system so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise degrade the function, use, or operation of such system (see 10 U.S.C. 3252).

So supply chain risk is about sabotage or subversion. “This company is too woke” doesn’t meet that definition.

Second, denying government contracts to a company because the administration doesn’t like that company’s politics is a seriously corrupt practice. Think of it as the flip side of crony capitalism: while throwing taxpayer dollars at companies it considers friends — especially because they personally enrich members of the administration or the president’s family — the administration is freezing out companies it considers enemies. If this practice becomes the norm, as it surely will if these people remain in power, it will waste money because the government is denying contracts to vendors who offer the best value but aren’t sufficiently MAGA. It will also further corrupt our politics, as businesses feel the need to be demonstratively pro-Trump if they want federal contracts.

Finally, the Defense Department is now doing exactly what people like Hegseth have always accused supporters of DEI of doing — refusing to hire the best people for the job, refusing to give contracts to the best suppliers, in the name of political correctness. The Pentagon’s managers and tech experts clearly believe that Claude is the best tool for many purposes, but they have been ordered not to use it because their political masters don’t like the company’s politics.

Imagine the reaction if the roles of the parties were reversed — if a Democratic administration were denying the U.S. military the tools it wants to use because it considered the company supplying those tools too conservative. Republicans wouldn’t just be protesting; they’d be screaming “treason.”

Indeed, while I can’t judge how much damage telling the military to stop using Claude — just as a war was starting! — will do, it’s clearly a move that weakens national security. And what this move tells us is that the Trump administration cares more about fighting wokeness than it does about keeping America safe.

MUSICAL CODA

The verse in binary spells “free”