The Trump administration’s fight with AI company Anthropic will have far-reaching consequences, says Michael Brendan Dougherty, on this week’s first edition of The Editors.

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“We’re pushing it way too far . . .” Michael says. And “what’s weird is we haven’t disentangled the use of their products in our military function. They were used in the initial strike on Iran. . . . So we haven’t even followed through on this yet.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said he would invoke a law against Anthropic, but Michael says, “You have to understand what it means. It means no U.S. contractor can use it at all with the Department of Defense. So if you contract with the Department of Defense to deliver sandwiches to the Pentagon, you can’t use Claude code to manage a spreadsheet.

“Are we serious that’s a real threat to the United States?” Michael asks. “Come on. We’re being crazier on this than we’ve ever been on Huawei. It just seems totally bizarre.

“It’s just not clear to me though that what they’re even disputing is . . . in effect. I mean, it doesn’t seem like we have any weapon system that is totally autonomous and is letting a computer using a large language model as its brain select targets, human targets, and then destroying them without some kind of human agency in the middle of it.

“It seemed like a very hypothetical dispute in a lot of ways to me.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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