‘Anthropic and Alignment’

Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery:

In fact, Amodei already answered the question: if nuclear weapons were developed by a private company, and that private company sought to dictate terms to the U.S. military, the U.S. would absolutely be incentivized to destroy that company. The reason goes back to the question of international law, North Korea, and the rest:

  • International law is ultimately a function of power; might makes right.
  • There are some categories of capabilities — like nuclear weapons — that are sufficiently powerful to fundamentally affect the U.S.’s freedom of action; we can bomb Iran, but we can’t North Korea.
  • To the extent that AI is on the level of nuclear weapons — or beyond — is the extent that Amodei and Anthropic are building a power base that potentially rivals the U.S. military.

Anthropic talks a lot about alignment; this insistence on controlling the U.S. military, however, is fundamentally misaligned with reality. Current AI models are obviously not yet so powerful that they rival the U.S. military; if that is the trajectory, however — and no one has been more vocal in arguing for that trajectory than Amodei — then it seems to me the choice facing the U.S. is actually quite binary:

  • Option 1 is that Anthropic accepts a subservient position relative to the U.S. government, and does not seek to retain ultimate decision-making power about how its models are used, instead leaving that to Congress and the President.
  • Option 2 is that the U.S. government either destroys Anthropic or removes Amodei.

It’s Congress that is absent in — looks around — all of this. Right down to the name of the Department of Defense. The whole Trump administration has taken to calling it the Department of War, but only Congress can change the legal name. (Anthropic, despite its very public spat with the administration, refers to it as the “Department of War” as well. But serious publications like the Journal and New York Times continue to call the Department of Defense.)

Nilay Patel, quoting the same section of Thompson’s column I quoted above, sees it as “Ben Thompson making a full-throated case for fascism”. I see it as the case against corporatocracy. Who sets our defense policies? Our democratically elected leaders, or the CEOs of corporate defense contractors?

★ Monday, 2 March 2026