Nevermind. I had been optimistic that the President’s tweet signaled an off-ramp, but it doesn’t. Shame on the Department of War, shame on Pete Hegseth. A dark day in our country’s history.


The United States federal government is now, by an extremely wide margin, the most aggressive regulator of artificial intelligence in the world. Congratulations everyone.


Nvidia, Amazon, Google will have to divest from Anthropic if Hegseth gets his way. This is simply attempted corporate murder. I could not possibly recommend investing in American AI to any investor; I could not possibly recommend starting an AI company in the United States.


Think about the power Hegseth is asserting here. He is claiming that the DoD can force all contractors to stop doing business of any kind with arbitrary other companies.

In other words, every operating system vendor, every manufacturer of hardware, every hyperscaler, every type of firm the DoD contracts with—all their services and products can be denied to any economic actor at will by the Secretary of War.

This is obviously a psychotic power grab. It is almost surely illegal, but the message it sends is that the United States Government is a completely unreliable partner for any kind of business. The damage done to our business environment is profound. No amount of deregulatory vibes sent by this administration matters compared to this arson.


The U.S. government just essentially announced its intention to impose Iran-level sanctions, or China-level entity listing, on an American company. This is by a profoundly wide margin the most damaging policy move I have ever seen USG try to take (it probably will not succeed).