AI Bros Wanted Trump. Now They Learn What Happens When You Tell Him No.

from the guess-your-chatbots-can’t-predict-the-future-very-well dept

Last year, in Fascism For First Time Founders, I warned the tech industry what happens when you cozy up to authoritarians. As I wrote then:

Innovation requires trust. Not just between individuals, but institutional trust. People need to believe that contracts will be enforced, that property rights will be protected, that the rules won’t change arbitrarily based on the whims of whoever’s in charge.

Building a startup requires long-term thinking. You’re asking employees to bet their careers on your vision. You’re asking investors to put money into something that might not pay off for years. You’re asking customers to trust that your product will be supported and improved over time.

None of that works in an environment where the rules change based on political caprice.

As you’ve probably heard, on Friday that political caprice came home to roost for many in Silicon Valley when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced he was declaring Anthropic a “supply chain risk” and that no one with US military contracts could have a commercial relationship with the company any more (a gross exaggeration of what being declared a supply chain risk actually means, but that’s besides the point).

We’ve criticized these “supply chain risk” designations going back years, but mainly for how they tend to be used to prop up American companies against foreign (usually Chinese) competitors with little evidence regarding the actual risk. Of course, you can easily understand the stated intent of an “SCR” designation: if there’s a foreign company with ties to a government that is averse to the US, there is always a risk that the company could agree to sneak backdoors or spyware into the network and do something bad. Hell, it’s what the US does.

But here, it makes no sense at all. The only “risk” was Anthropic saying its technology shouldn’t be used for domestic mass surveillance or to power autonomous killing machines. There is no underlying risk.

It’s worth pausing to note just how modest Anthropic’s red line actually was. They weren’t refusing to work with the military. They weren’t demanding the Pentagon adopt pacifism. They simply said their AI shouldn’t make kill decisions without a human in the loop, and shouldn’t be used for mass surveillance of American citizens. That’s it. That’s the “duplicity” and “betrayal” that Hegseth is ranting about. A company said “maybe don’t let the robot decide who dies on its own” and the response was to try to destroy them.

Hell, the entire point of the designation had nothing to do with any actual risk. It was a clear attempt by the US government to destroy a tech company that pushed back ever so slightly on the Trump administration.

Just like we warned last year in the fascism piece, that government will always turn on you:

Every authoritarian regime in history has eventually turned on the business community that initially supported it. The oligarchs who think they can control the dictator always end up learning the hard way that the dictator controls them.

And yet, the AI bros went hard for Trump. As someone who still finds the tech to be quite useful when used in thoughtful, careful ways, this is part of what has frustrated me. So many people in the AI space went out of their way to insist that if they just got Trump elected, it would be clear sailing for AI.

If you listen to some Silicon Valley VC bro podcasts, there was a common refrain: the Biden admin supposedly tried to destroy tech, and how much better Trump is for tech. Every time I hear that it makes me wonder what sort of world these people live in.

It’s true that the Biden administration’s policy on AI was not great. It was clear that it was influenced by too many knee-jerk “AI doomers,” but ultimately the actual policy was a toothless set of principles, while asking federal government employees to take some steps to push for more responsible AI tools, and that was about it. It didn’t really do much at all, and certainly didn’t do anything meaningful in slowing down or limiting AI companies.

But, to hear the AI bros who rushed out to loudly support Trump, Biden was trying to destroy the entire American AI industry and hand it to China.

Yet, on Friday, it was the Trump admin that was out there trying to actually destroy the American AI industry. Pete Hegseth’s tweet is unlike anything you ever saw or heard from the Biden admin:

If you can’t see the image, it’s a pathetically long tweet that reads:

This week, Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon.

Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic.

Instead, Anthropic and its CEO Dario Amodei, have chosen duplicity. Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission – a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.

The Terms of Service of Anthropic’s defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield.

Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable.

As President Trump stated on Truth Social, the Commander-in-Chief and the American people alone will determine the destiny of our armed forces, not unelected tech executives.

Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles. Their relationship with the United States Armed Forces and the Federal Government has therefore been permanently altered.

In conjunction with the President’s directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic’s technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.

America’s warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final.

I’m sure he thought that “defective altruism” line was really clever.

This wasn’t a total surprise. The two sides had been sparring publicly all week, each daring the other to blink first—a game of bro chicken that ended with Hegseth driving straight into one of the few sectors still propping up the US stock market.

But, fascism destroys the businesses that suck up to it. It creates chaos and uncertainty. Again from my piece last year:

Authoritarian systems are fundamentally unpredictable. The rules change based on the leader’s mood, personal vendettas, or political needs. That’s the opposite of the stable, predictable environment that innovation requires. When political favor matters more than legal precedent, no one can plan for the future.

Fascism destroys everything that makes innovation work right. The fact that, on a random Friday evening, the Secretary of Defense can claim that he can force anyone who does business with the US military to cut all ties to one business that slightly annoyed him during contract negotiations is exactly the kind of nonsense I was discussing.

This is the kind of chaos you get. Not reasoned debate. Not a simple decision to part ways of a contract dispute. No, the Trump administration decided to destroy a company for the sin of telling it no.

That Sam Altman quickly swooped in to grab a contract from the Defense Department doesn’t much matter in the grand scheme of things (we’ll cover the sneaky details of that arrangement separately).

It does, kinda, matter that Hegseth turned a simple contract dispute into an attempted corporate death sentence, weaponizing a supply-chain security designation that was clearly designed for tech the US government fears could be infiltrated by hostile foreign nations.

Yet, under Hegseth’s order, Chinese AI models would technically be more welcome in America’s military supply chain than Anthropic’s. The “supply chain risk” designation is now being used to punish a domestic company for having safety guidelines. DeepSeek, with its direct ties to the Chinese government, faces fewer restrictions than a San Francisco company that committed the cardinal sin of asking for human oversight on killing decisions.

This is what fascism gives you. Not just uncertainty. Not just the destruction of institutions that innovation relies on. But the sheer unadulterated pettiness and vindictive spite of 12-year-old bullies.

Sure, President Biden’s AI plan had a few things that were marginally annoying and probably forced some DC policy people to have to spend a bit more time doing a bit more paperwork. But Biden didn’t tweet out a plan to destroy one of the biggest AI companies because it said “yo, our tech is not safe enough to be making decisions on who to kill without any human review.”

The AI bros who supported Trump should have known this. There’s plenty of history about how this works. They always think that by sucking up to the authoritarian, he’ll give them what they want (the freedom to do whatever they want without consequence).

But that’s not how it works in a fascist society. The fascists will always ask for more. They will always cross your red lines. And if you dare to stand up to them? They will directly and deliberately set out to destroy you as punishment to act as a warning to others never to defy the will of the dictator and his petty henchmen.

Perhaps the funniest response to all this was from Dean Ball, who went into the Trump administration to basically write Trump’s silly AI action plan. Over on X after Hegseth’s announcement, he had a bit of a meltdown about how much damage Hegseth was doing to the entire American AI industry.

Well, yeah, dude. That’s what fascist governments do. You joined the administration to help craft their leopard’s spots strategy and now you’re shocked—shocked—that the leopards started eating faces?

No one comes out of this looking good, of course, no matter what the end result of this mess turns out to be. The Trump administration continues its reputation as a destroyer of basically everything, including the last remaining golden goose that has propped up the stock market for the last year. OpenAI looks opportunistic at best. And Anthropic—which, notably, was never as deeply embedded in the MAGA tech cheerleading squad—is now the example of what happens to anyone in the industry who dares to push back, even modestly. That’s the environment the AI bros who backed Trump created for everyone.

And, again, the public trust in the technology takes another hit. Siding with the strongman wannabe dictator is never a good look, and it reflects poorly on you across the board.

The fact that AI hatred seems to be spreading about as fast as Donald Trump’s approval ratings are falling, perhaps the AI bros should have asked their magic answer machines to predict what happens when you side with a wannabe dictator because you heard that the last guy wanted you to do a bit more paperwork to make sure your AI bots were less likely to do harm.

The “Fascism For First Time Founders” piece was a warning. What happened Friday evening was just an exclamation point.

And hey, to the AI bros who went all in on MAGA? Maybe next time you’re on a podcast complaining about how the government is destroying tech, you could mention that the Biden plan you hated so much was just annoying paperwork, while the guy you vocally supported is out there taking a baseball bat to an entire industry because Pete Hegseth couldn’t get his killing bot.

Gotta love that “American dynamism” at work.

Filed Under: ai, autonomous weapons, dario amodei, donald trump, fascism, pete hegseth, supply chain risk, surveillance

Companies: anthropic, openai