Matteo Wong writes:

Dean Ball helped devise much of the Trump administration’s AI policy. Now he cannot believe what the Department of Defense has done to one of its major technology partners, the AI firm Anthropic.

After weeks of negotiations, the Pentagon was unable to force Anthropic to accede to terms that, in Anthropic’s telling, could involve using AI for autonomous weapons and the mass surveillance of Americans, as my colleague Ross Andersen reported over the weekend. So the government has labeled the company a supply-chain risk, effectively plastering it with a scarlet letter. The Pentagon says that this means Anthropic will be unable to work with any company that contracts with the administration. That could include major technology companies that provide infrastructure for Anthropic’s AI models, such as Amazon. The supply-chain-risk designation is normally reserved for companies run by foreign adversaries, and if the order holds up legally, it could be a death blow for Anthropic.

Ball, now a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, was traveling in Europe as all of this was unfolding last week, staying up as late as 2 a.m. to urge people in the administration to take a less severe approach: simply canceling the contract with Anthropic, without the supply-chain-risk designation. When his efforts failed, Ball told me in an interview yesterday, “my reaction was shock, and sadness, and anger.”

In the aftermath of the decision, Ball published an essay on his Substack casting the conflict in civilizational terms; the Pentagon’s ultimatum, in his reckoning, is “a kind of death rattle of the old republic, the outward expression of a body that has thrown in the towel.” The action, he wrote, is a repudiation of private property and freedom of speech, two of the most fundamental principles of the United States. In today’s America, Ball argued, the executive branch has become so unstoppable—and passing laws has become so challenging—that the president and his officials can do whatever they want. (When reached for comment, a White House spokesperson told me in a statement that “no company has the right to interfere in key national security decision-making.”)

Yesterday, I called Ball to discuss his essay and why the standoff with Anthropic feels, to him, like such a dire sign for America. Ball is far from a likely source of such harsh criticism: He’s a Republican with close ties to the Trump administration who departed on good terms after its AI Action Plan was published, and an avid believer that AI is a transformational technology. Other figures who are influential among conservatives in the tech world, including the Anduril Industries co-founder Palmer Luckey and the Stratechery tech analyst Ben Thompson, have vigorously supported Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s move. Luckey, a billionaire who builds drones for the military, suggested on X that crushing Anthropic is necessary to defend democracy from oligarchy. Thompson wrote yesterday in his widely read newsletter that “it simply isn’t tolerable for the U.S. to allow for the development of an independent power structure—which is exactly what AI has the potential to undergird—that is expressly seeking to assert independence from U.S. control.” Thompson likened the necessity of destroying Anthropic to that of bombing Iran.

But Ball sees the Trump administration’s strong-arming of the tech industry as a sign of his country falling apart—a decline, he told me, that he has been watching for decades, and which the AI revolution might only accelerate. [Continue reading…]