Matthew Cullen, reporting for The New York Times:

President Trump has ordered all federal agencies to stop using artificial intelligence technology made by Anthropic. He disparaged the A.I. maker this afternoon as a “radical left, woke company” and accused it of trying to “strong-arm” the U.S. military.

Soon after, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he was designating Anthropic a “supply-chain risk to national security.” That would mean that any contractor or supplier that works with the military would be prohibited from doing business with the A.I. company. Anthropic, which spent today negotiating with the Pentagon, is expected to challenge the designation in court.

This news has permeated the tech right unlike anything else I’ve seen so far in this administration. The general consensus is that the Trump administration has overstepped a red line, and now the industry appears to be coalescing around Anthropic. This could just be my X feed, of course, but I feel like I know where the tide is turning in Silicon Valley just by spending enough time on that website. Here’s a far-right Republican account defending the Defense Department on X:

If a top AI CEO in China told the CCP to go kick rocks when they asked for help, that CEO would be instantly sent to prison.

This is the correct approach

Letting AI CEOs play politics and dictate policy for the military and soon the entire country like their own personal fiefdoms is appalling and undemocratic

If Trump doesn’t bring Dario to heel now, we will simply end up completely subjugated by him and his lunatic EA buddies

It’s not tough to see why the tech right has turned against these pro-China, anti-democracy regime sympathizers. Largely, whatever I had to say about the Anthropic drama has been covered in my prior piece about this topic, and I don’t have anything more to add. Rather, I find that this issue is important because it has galvanized the tech right into understanding, if only temporarily, that the Trump administration is not on the side of freedom and democracy. The tech right derided Murthy v. Missouri, the case where a Missouri sued the Biden administration for “pressuring” Meta to remove anti-vaccine content during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Supreme Court, unusually, ruled in favor of the Biden administration, and Silicon Valley had a panic attack.

The same tech right is now understanding that the Trump administration is doing much worse than whatever former President Joe Biden ever did. Again, they’re not fully there, because they’re getting closer. (If they were fully there, they’d connect the dots between Minnesota and Anthropic.) The Trump people have never been on the side of democracy; since Day 1, they have wanted to bring China and Russia to the United States and throw out 250 years of free market capitalism. The Trump administration is not capitalist — it is terrorist. It will do whatever is necessary to extract maximum punishment on the nation for bringing its leader shockingly close to prison. This is a regime hellbent on punishment, not free markets. It’s unsurprising that Anthropic — which will not be complicit in the mass surveillance of U.S. citizens — was the next subject of the administration’s ire.

The Trump administration has derided these abstract concepts — diversity, equity, and inclusion; general “woke” behavior; the kerfuffle over the phrase “any lawful use” — because it has no moral, legal, or administrative ground to stand on to defend its actions. The administration has no purpose. It doesn’t care about beating China and Russia to the AI race, ensuring AI doesn’t take Americans’ jobs, or using Claude to assist with tactical missions to defeat authoritarianism around the world. These ideals are too specific for the administration. They’re policy goals that it simply does not have. The only goal of the administration is to keep Trump out of jail until the day he dies, and it will surveil Americans, deploy the military to polling sites, postpone elections, and do whatever else it needs to do to prevent Democrats from ever holding elected office at a national level for as long as Trump is alive.

Anthropic is not “woke” — it’s a Silicon Valley AI company run by a billionaire who almost certainly wants Palantir contracts and tax breaks. Rather, Anthropic’s company culture is dominated by responsibility — it was formed after a group of top AI researchers at OpenAI deemed that the company did not take AI safety seriously. Safety is at the core of everything Anthropic does. I can confidently assert that this is not “woke” because this was Elon Musk’s stated goal when he founded OpenAI and later xAI. He has since abdicated these responsibilities because he has no interest in humanity if it costs him even a cent, but Anthropic has not. Anthropic’s values are at direct odds with the administration. One cares about Trump, the other cares about humanity. So, Anthropic gets besmirched as “woke,” a word that has no meaningful value anymore.

The administration has many words like this to describe behavior it does not like. “Woke,” “radical left,” “communist,” “Democrat,” etc. Whenever it uses these words, it just means that the leader is angry that someone is in the way of his freedom. I’m spending so much time on this point because Anthropic is hardly the most important part of this conversation. The critical bit Silicon Valley must grok is that the industry is being used as a pawn. It was blatantly lied to — the administration feigned libertarianism to get Silicon Valley’s support, and now that it has it, it wants to make the valley the enemy of freedom. Otherwise, it is the “radical left.” The Anthropic controversy is the most pertinent example of this, one that has finally gotten the tech right to briefly acknowledge that the administration is not on its side. I hope this trend continues as the midterms approach.