Anthropic vs. the Pentagon: What’s actually at stake?

So Anthropic—those Claude-peddling safety cultists—are having a fucking slap-fight with the Pentagon over whether their shiny LLM can be used to optimize drone strikes or some equally dystopian shit. The brass wants to wrap their “constitutional AI” around missile guidance systems, and Anthropic’s suddenly grown a conscience bigger than their goddamn AWS bill.

Here’s the bleeding obvious: it’s all about who gets to control the narrative when the machines eventually decide humans are about as useful as a chocolate teapot. Anthropic built this “helpful, harmless, honest” bollocks into Claude, which sounds lovely until you realize the Pentagon’s definition of “harmless” is “only kills the people we labeled as terrorists this week.”

The stakes? Nothing less than whether your tax dollars get flushed down the toilet on AI that refuses to pull the trigger because it might hurt someone’s feelings, or whether we get fully autonomous murderbots with a fucking safety waiver. It’s the bureaucratic equivalent of watching two septic tanks argue over which one smells worse.

Both sides can sod off into the sun, frankly. One wants to wrap imperialism in a warm fuzzy safety blanket, the other wants to skip the blanket and go straight to the skull-crushing. Pass me the popcorn—and the fire axe.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/27/anthropic-vs-the-pentagon-whats-actually-at-stake/

Reminds me of the time I convinced the board that implementing “ethical guidelines” on the company server meant randomly deleting files from anyone who used the word “synergy.” Took three weeks before they realized “ethical” was just whatever kept me entertained during my lu