While our federal bureaucracy hums along, a man who helped bring this issue to a head last year, Elon Musk, believes that AI has the power to replace all jobs and “make work optional.” But are we ready to use that power to shrink the federal workforce?

Hegseth was essentially ordering Anthropic to build a new capability—one that contravenes its most deeply held ethical principles, and lies outside the scope of its current contracts—and make that available to the U.S. military. If any party is radically revising the nature of defense contracting, it is the U.S. government.

If you're reading this and feeling anxious about your own career, your own mortgage, your own kids' future (good). That means you're paying attention. The worst thing any of us can do right now is assume this doesn't apply to us. It applies to almost everyone. The best thing we can do is start talking about the gap honestly, without pretending we have answers we don't have. Because the gap is coming. And the only question is whether we build a bridge or fall in.

Anthropic’s Claude stands, by most credible accounts, as the most capable AI model currently operating in classified military systems. The Pentagon reportedly used it in the January 2026 capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Eight of the ten largest American corporations rely on it. And yet the company that builds this tool now presumes to tell the Department of War when and how the military may employ it in defense of the United States. This is an extraordinary claim. It deserves an extraordinary response.

One of the great opportunities for statesmanship in coming years is the forging of such an alliance.

The delegation of AI alignment responsibility to a small, ideologically homogeneous research community that is largely irreligious, disproportionately progressive, and nearly entirely unaccountable to democratic institutions is the most disastrous governance failure of our time.