The Anthropic/Pentagon standoff, and a country launching a war on the same afternoon, has a career tech industry believer asking a question he never thought he’d ask.
I have spent most of my adult life in the tech industry. I am not going to pretend that makes me special; plenty of people have. And I am not going to be disingenuous about it either. I am in it for the money too. Always have been. There is no shame in that.
But for me it was never only about the money. It was, for lack of a better word, a belief system.
The tech industry I fell in love with had an ethos. Meritocracy. Talent rising regardless of where you came from, what you looked like, who you prayed to or didn’t, who you loved. The idea that technology belonged to all of humanity, not just one country or one government or one ideology. The belief, sometimes proven right, sometimes embarrassingly wrong, that what we were building actually made people’s lives better. Not just shareholders richer. People’s lives better.
“The meritocracy was real for some people and a polite fiction for others. The city on the hill had some ugly neighborhoods nobody liked to talk about.”
Now, I am not naive. The industry did not always live up to those ideals. Not even close. There was plenty of greed, plenty of exclusion, plenty of moments where the rhetoric about changing the world was cover for something a lot more ordinary. The meritocracy was real for some people and a polite fiction for others. The city on the hill had some ugly neighborhoods nobody liked to talk about.
But the legend was real. The principles were part of the DNA, even when the practice fell short. And that legend attracted people, good people, brilliant people, people who actually believed it and that belief shaped the culture in ways that mattered. It was worth something. It still is, or at least it was until recently.
This week tested that in a way I am still processing.
■ ■ ■
Friday, February 27, 2026 was not a normal news day. The United States launched major military strikes on Iran overnight. By Saturday morning, a war was underway. Earlier that afternoon/evening, the President of the United States was on Truth Social banning an American AI company from doing business with the federal government, calling them “radical Left” and accusing their CEO of having a “God-complex.” Followed by the company being declared a supply chain risk. And somewhere in the middle of all that, the tech industry was arguing—loudly, for once—about whether artificial intelligence should be used for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons.
I am still sitting with all of it.
The Anthropic story, taken on its own terms, is actually straightforward. Dario Amodei drew a line. He said his company’s AI would not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or for fully autonomous weapons systems. The Pentagon said those limits were unacceptable. The administration called it a supply chain risk, then a political problem, then finally just banned them. Meanwhile OpenAI’s Sam Altman sent a memo to employees Thursday night saying he agreed with Dario’s principles, and by Friday afternoon had cut his own deal with the Pentagon.
What Altman did there, while typical Altman, is not hypocrisy, exactly. That is how this industry works. Everyone navigates. Everyone calculates. The trick is watching who says what when the stakes are low versus who holds the line when they are not.
Anthropic held the line. That matters. But it is not really what I want to talk about.
■ ■ ■
What I keep coming back to is bigger and messier. It is the question of whether we— the tech industry, broadly—have lost the thread entirely.
When generative AI exploded onto the scene, a group of researchers and technologists signed an open letter calling for a moratorium on AI development. I remember reading it and thinking, with genuine affection and genuine dismissal, how quaint. How well-meaning. How wrong. The technology was coming whether anyone called a timeout or not. Better to be at the table. Better to build it right than cede the ground to someone who would build it wrong.
“I am not as sure about that now.”
Not because I think the technology is inherently dangerous, though it can be. Not because I have lost faith in the people building it, though some of them have done things that test that faith. But because I look at the environment in which this technology is now being deployed and I genuinely wonder whether anyone is steering.
We have a government that wants to potentially be able to use AI for mass surveillance of its own citizens. A Pentagon that labels a company a supply chain risk for refusing to remove safety guardrails. A president who bans companies from government contracts via social media post. And we have an industry that, for the most part, spent the last year cozying up to all of it, until this week, when the overreach became obvious enough that people started signing petitions and writing memos.
I have always believed tech is for all of humanity. Not one country’s military. Not one administration’s agenda. Not one ideological project.
I have always believed it should improve the human condition. Surveillance, autonomous weapons, political bans on companies that won’t comply, I am struggling to map those onto the value system I thought I shared with this industry.
■ ■ ■
I am a lifelong science fiction reader. I have spent enough time with Asimov, Herbert, Clarke and Gibson to know how these stories go when nobody stops to ask the hard questions before the technology is already everywhere. The cautionary tales are not really about the technology. They are about the human beings who chose speed over wisdom and power over accountability.
Here is the honest thing I need to say. I used to think the people calling for a moratorium were being naive. Now I think they were asking the right question, even if the mechanism they proposed was impractical.
Maybe the question is not whether to pause development. Maybe the question is whether we can agree — as an industry, as a society, as citizens of a country launching a war and banning AI companies on the same Friday afternoon — on what we are actually building this for.
Who does it serve? Who controls it? What lines don’t we cross, and who enforces them when someone does?
The legend of the tech industry, the one that drew me in and kept me here, was built on the idea that we were doing something that mattered beyond the bottom line. The money was great. The mission was greater.
Right now I am not sure we still believe that. And I am not sure enough people in positions of power are losing sleep over the fact that we don’t.
I hope I am wrong about that.
Authors Note: I wrote this article with the assistance of Claude Sonnet rather than ChatGPT, which I regularly use. I signed up for an annual subscription to Claude. It is my own small way of standing up for what I think is right.
