Since President Donald Trump’s second term began, he’s had a tight relationship with Big Tech. At his inauguration, tech titans including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Google CEO Sundar Pichai sat behind him. Trump has traveled internationally with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. And Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Google and Nvidia are all donors to Trump’s planned $300 million White House ballroom.

Meanwhile, many of Trump’s actions have been controversial since the first day of his second term. Few companies have stood up to policies they might not agree with—including immigration crackdowns, the elimination of DEI programs, tariffs, major changes to U.S. energy strategy and military action. So when Anthropic—a major player in the growing AI space—issued red lines, including limits on how the military could use AI, that it would not cross for a defense contract, people throughout the business and tech community noticed.

Most AI contracts are not nearly as consequential as the one Anthropic was negotiating with the Pentagon, but any new AI project can fail if a company’s data is not prepared. Many companies dive into AI projects but don’t have a data foundation to handle them. I spoke with Mike Meyers, CIO of Clari Salesloft, about how to get going on AI—even if there’s also data work you need to do at the same time. An excerpt from our conversation appears later in this newsletter.

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The past week saw the expansion of two wars. One was the U.S. and Israel beginning armed conflict against Iran. The other was between the federal government, Anthropic and OpenAI.

The Pentagon sought unrestricted access to Anthropic’s AI tools for military purposes. Anthropic demurred, saying it didn’t want its models to be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. Nearly 800 people—many of whom are Google and OpenAI employees—signed a letter last week supporting Anthropic’s red lines, and urging other companies to limit how their technology can be used for military purposes.

The deadline for Anthropic and the Defense Department to finalize their negotiated agreement was 5:01 p.m. Friday. In the absence of an agreement, the government could either cancel its $200 million contract with Anthropic, or demand Anthropic’s technology against its will. No agreement was reached, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he will deem Anthropic a supply chain risk to national security, meaning anyone doing business with the U.S. military will not be able to use Anthropic’s technology.

Hours later, OpenAI reached an agreement with the Pentagon to provide AI for military classified systems. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a social media post that they secured prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems in their........

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