Anthropic Artificial Intelligence Military-Industrial Complex Pentagon

Anthropic’s Governance

By Yeo and Schiller

A few weeks ago, we posted about the clash between Anthropic and the Department of War (DoW). Our assessment was premature; developments have been racing ahead.

We asserted that Anthropic’s rejection of the DoW contract over the issues of domestic mass surveillance and the deployment of autonomous weapons, and its consequent replacement by OpenAI, occurred within the context of fierce competition between AI companies. Since then, Anthropic has sued the DoW and won in a San Francisco federal court, momentarily blocking the Pentagon from labeling the company a supply-chain risk. However, the company then lost on appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. Anthropic’s oral argument is scheduled for May 19 in Washington, D.C., at the appeals court.

It’s puzzling to see Anthropic taking on the DoW, but even more extraordinary is that when Anthropic sued the Pentagon, its rivals – Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Palantir – banded together to support it. Microsoft even filed an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief, as did employees from Google and OpenAI; and neither company’s management objected.[1] These corporations are locked in competition with each other in global markets, all the while trying to cozy up to the Trump administration. What’s happening? Is Anthropic acting as a bellwether, setting new ethical standards for the tech industry? Why are these rivals suddenly uniting against the DoW? This exceptional clash within the core of today’s military-industrial complex requires some additional exploration.

Until its widely publicized dispute with the Pentagon, Anthropic was relatively unknown to the general public. This was because Anthropic’s strategy has been to target the rapidly growing AI enterprise market: nearly one in three US businesses paid for Anthropic’s tools in March 2026,[2]  under a widely publicizedguarantee of security and trust – essential to winning their business (only recently has it springboarded into the consumer market as well). Thus, Anthropic generally flew under the public radar. In contrast, OpenAI’s strategy has focused overwhelmingly on the consumer market, in which it claims 900 million users[3] (however, as its competition with Anthropic intensified, OpenAI also began to cultivate the enterprise market).

A major plank in Anthropic’s “B2B” enterprise approach has been to leverage ties with the major tech companies, trying to get them to integrate Anthropic’s Claude AI model into their other applications.

Microsoft – which initially invested and exclusively used OpenAI – has more recently incorporated Claude into its enterprise suite. This was a boon to both companies. Microsoft is one of the largest government contractors, and its technologies are deployed across all levels of government, including the DoW and other federal agencies. If Anthropic is designated a supply chain risk and government agencies are forbidden to use it, then, Microsoft will need to find a Claude replacement and will be negatively impacted financially and strategically. Microsoft isn’t the only tech company that has incorporated Anthropic’s AI models. Others too are acting as both financial backers and users of Claude.

Google had invested more than $3 billion as of 2025 and owns a 14% stake in Anthropic.[4] Google and Anthropic have since greatly expanded their partnership, signing a deal in which Google may invest up to $40 billion, including $10 billion right away. This will further grant Anthropic access to much-needed computing power and infrastructure, including the use of Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) as an alternative to Nvidia GPUs (thus challenging Nvidia’s AI chip dominance).[5] Amazon, for its part, initially invested $8 billion.[6] Along with Google, Amazon is one of Anthropic’s cloud providers and its Claude models are used by AWS clients. The two companies then closed another circular deal, through which Amazon augmented its investment in Anthropic while Anthropic committed to spend $100 billion on Amazon’s computing power and chips.[7]

Palantir – the software provider that facilitates the tracking of immigrants for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, maintains close ties with the Israeli government, and provides technology (along with Google, Microsoft and Amazon) for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and mass surveillance of Palestinians – also backed Anthropic against the War Department.[8] Palantir itself had developed an AI-enabled military platform, the Maven Smart System (MSS), for the DoW which incorporated Claude AI. Maven is used to analyze battlefield data and to identify targets.[9]

Given these entanglements, it shouldn’t be a surprise that its interlocked rivals chose to back Anthropic: it was a matter of joint self-interest. When their profits and strategies came under threat – and not for any moral reason – the group set aside competition and challenged the government together. Underlying competitive dynamics nevertheless also persisted: this was an ad hoc arrangement aimed at protecting momentary common interests.

Anthropic’s AI model was, moreover, already deeply embedded in the U.S. military, as the company itself has affirmed: “Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences.”[10] So why did the company take the Pentagon to court in the first place? Was it because of pressure from some of its employees, whose pacifistic views may have matched those of many Google and OpenAI workers? Was it a function of Anthropic’s brand management, which emphasized safety and trust for its business clients – and ostensible sensitivity to morality more generally?

The answers to these questions remain open. However, Enrique Dans, a Senior Fellow with the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), underlines that a different factor is also involved. Anthropic’s fight against the Pentagon is additionally about “control of governance.” Dans clarifies this:[11]

“LLM providers are not selling neutral infrastructure. They’re selling models with built-in constraints, policies that can change, and enforcement mechanisms that can tighten overnight. … Anthropic’s stance wasn’t simply “ethical positioning.” It was product governance. The Pentagon’s stance wasn’t simply “buyer pressure.” It was demanding control of governance.“

In other words, underlying the rhetoric about “national security” and “supply chain risks” is a fight over control: whose strategy, whose decisions, will shape AI – the War Department’s or Anthropic’s?  This could be yet another reason why top AI companies are backing Anthropic: the outcome of Anthropic’s clash with the DoW could set a precedent with sector-wide ramifications that they would like to ensure turn out favorably.

Anthropic’s release of its fearsomely powerful new model raises the stakes even further. Anthropic initially restricted testing of Claude Mythos to banks and a select group of tech partners, so that they could try to secure in advance thousands of severe vulnerabilities that Mythos had detected in every major operating system and web browser.[12] Even before Claude Mythos’ limited release, Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent talked to major tech CEOs to discuss security issues around the AI model. Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei was one of participants along with xAI’s Elon Musk, Google’s Sundar Pichai, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, CrowdStrike’s George Kurtz and Palo Alto Networks’ Nikesh Arora.

Anthropic responded about the meeting and said, “Bringing government into the loop early – on what the model can do, where the risks are, and how we’re managing them – was a priority from the start.”[13] Shortly thereafter, Amodei separately met with White House staff chief of staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross.[14] Anthropic was again publicizing its “good citizen” approach to AI.

As we’ve stressed, Anthropic has tried to distinguish itself from other AI companies by recurrently emphasizing trust and safety. However, Anthropic is not the first company to walk this tightwire.  Google once used the slogan “Don’t be evil,” but it dropped the motto in 2018 to  move unencumbered into every territory of profit including military markets. Anthropic has not reached its Rubicon, but perhaps it is getting close: In late February, 2026, amid its dispute with the DoW, Anthropic updated its original safety policy – called the Responsible Scaling Policy – and removed its promise to pause development of any AI model deemed potentially dangerous.[15]

There is, however, a deeper issue – one that follows from the fight over governance mentioned above. 

The clash between Anthropic and the Pentagon has raised the question of whether a private company or the DoW will superintend governance of AI. However, this phrasing begs the real question – which is: Who should decide how, if, for what purposes, and for whom AI is used in the first place?

Shinjoung Yeo & Dan Schiller

[1] “Microsoft backs Anthropic in amicus brief to halt US DOD’s ‘supply-chain risk’ designation,” Reuters, March 10, 2026.

[2] Clara Murray, “Anthropic closes in on OpenAI as US business use surges,” Financial Times,  10 April 2026.

[3] Ibid.

[4]  Cade Metz, Nico Grant and David McCabe, Inside Google’s Investment in the A.I. Start-Up Anthropic, New York Times, March 11, 2025,

[5] Cristina Criddle and Ryan McMorrow, “Google to invest up to $40bn in Anthropic,” Financial Times, April,  24 April,

[6] Amazon Staff, “Amazon and Anthropic deepen strategic collaboration,” November 11, 2024.

[7] George Hammond and Rafe Rosner-Uddin, “Anthropic and Amazon agree $100bn AI infrastructure deal,” Financial Times, April 21, 2026.

[8] Mike Isaac, “Silicon Valley Musters Behind-the-Scenes Support for Anthropic,’ New York Times, March 18, 2026; Marwa Fatafta, AI for War: Big Tech Empowering Israel’s Crimes and Occupation, Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, October 26, 2025.

[9] Jon R. Lindsay, US Military Leans Into AI for Attack on Iran, But the Tech Doesn’t Lessen the Need for Human Judgment In War,  Conversation, March 11, 2026; Rich Duprey, Anthropic Deemed a ‘National Security Threat’ — Is Palantir Technologies At Risk? 24/7 Wallst.com.

[10] Dario Amodei, “Where things stand with the Department of War” Anthropic, March 5, 2026.

[11]Enrique Dans, “The Pentagon–Anthropic clash is a warning for every enterprise AI buyer,” Fast Company, March 12, 2026.

[12] Joshua Franklin, Akila Quinio and James Politi, “Scott Bessent called in US bank CEOs to discuss Anthropic model’s cyber risks,” Financial Times April 9, 2026.

[13] Samantha Subin, “Vance, Bessent questioned tech giants on AI security before Anthropic’s Mythos release,” CNBC, April 10, 2026.

[14] Jake Bleiberg and Margi Murphy, ‘White House Works to Give US Agencies Anthropic Mythos AI,” Bloomberg, April 16, 2026.

[15] Billy Perrigo, “Exlcusive: Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge,” Times February 24, 2026.

Anthropic Artificial Intelligence Military-Industrial Complex OpenAI

Anthropic as the AI moral standard-bearer? Think Again

By Yeo and Schiller

As Israel and the U.S. wage an illegal war against Iran, the U.S. government’s deployment of AI on the battlefield has become a question of how quickly and extensively the U.S. military will use it to bomb the Iranian people. On one hand, a recent standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon over guardrails on military uses of Anthropic’s Claude model has been cited to suggest that Anthropic is holding the moral high ground.[1] Because of Anthropic’s refusals to allow Claude to be used for domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapon systems, indeed, the U.S. Department of War (DoW) in retribution designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk to national security.[2] On the other, OpenAI has swiftly stepped in and secured a coveted U.S. military AI contract, allowing its tool to be used for classified military work.[3] But it would be a mistake to see Anthropic as a moral standard-bearer for the “ethnical” use of AI.

Debating which companies are more ethical obscures the fact that they all operate subject to the underlying imperatives of a capitalist political economy. Anwar Shaikh’s theory of real competition is instructive here, as competition functions as “the central regulating mechanism” of capitalism.[4] On the battlefield of real competition, firms must deploy every tactic, strategy, and new technology to survive and grow. Firms are inherently antagonistic, driven by the relentless pursuit of profit and expansion. To lag behind for too long is to perish.

Of course, government regulation may qualify or even arrest competition for more or less extended periods in specific industries. This does not alter its role of as “the central regulating mechanism” across the political economy.

Anthropic and OpenAI are locked in fierce real competition as they race to secure massive amounts of capital to fuel their respective businesses. The two companies have adopted different strategies: Anthropic has largely focused on B2B enterprises, while OpenAI has prioritized the mass consumer market. OpenAI, which has raised $110 billion,[5] is struggling to generate revenue and is projected to burn through $115 billion in cash by 2029 due to massive spending on computer power and infrastructure. [6] Meanwhile, Anthropic – which has raised a total of $64 billion – continues to lead in the enterprise Large Language Model (LLM) market share and is aggressively pushing to integrate agentic AI in the workplace.[7]

Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t just competing against each other. The “magnificent seven” – Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, Apple, and Tesla – are also in this fight and are investing vast quantities of capital and building out massive infrastructures to make headway in the AI market.[8] In 2025, AI-related tech spending across the S&P 500 exceeded $1.25 trillion and the “magnificent seven” – which made up 37% of the S&P 500 valuation at their peak[9] – accounted for roughly 28% of that total expenditure.[10] Moreover, they’re all competing globally, particularly against Chinese AI companies (a topic that warrants its own discussion).

Under such intense competitive pressure, none of these companies can afford to pass up the most lucrative AI market of all: U.S. defense contracts, which alone are projected to reach $29.48 billion by 2035. Military spending has long served as a financial backbone for tech companies[11] and it becomes even more critical as tech firms continue to scramble to find sustainable AI business models.

It is no surprise that Anthropic soon came back to the negotiating table with the Pentagon.[12] Anthropic, like any other tech company – Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, OpenAI, Palantir – is far from innocent. The company’s AI model Claude has already been applied to intelligence work. In 2025, Anthropic, along with Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s axis, was awarded a $200 million dollar contract with DoW to advance AI use in national security. In January of this year, in partnership with Palantir Technologies, Claude was used in the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.[13] Though Anthropic currently resists surveilling the American people, it appears willing to serve naked U.S. imperialism.

While we should hold these companies accountable and pressure them to resist the militarization of technology, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that any of them will sacrifice profit or business interests for some vague “moral commitment.” It is an imperative of capitalism that tech companies will ultimately do whatever it takes to compete, survive, and stay in the market – even if it means getting blood on their hands.

Shinjoung Yeo & Dan Schiller

[1] Shira Ovide , Anthropic lost the Pentagon but won over America, Washington Post, March 6, 2026.

[2] Amrith Ramkumar, Trump Administration Shuns Anthropic, Embraces OpenAI in Clash Over Guardrails, Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2026.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict and Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2016), 259-283.

[5] Cade Metz and Adam Satariano , OpenAI Raises $110 Billion to Fuel Growth, Extending A.I. Boom, New York Times, February 27, 2026.

[6] “OpenAI expects business to burn $115 billion through 2029, The Information reports,” Reuters, September 6, 2026.

[7] Jon Markman ,Anthropic: The $380 Billion Powerhouse Hiding In Plain Sight, Forbes. February 13, 2026.

[8] Tara Copp Elizabeth Dwoskin and Ian Duncan , Anthropic’s AI tool Claude central to U.S. campaign in Iran, amid a bitter feud , Washington Post, March 4, 2026.

[9] Lyle Daly, The Magnificent Seven makes up one-third of the S&P 500 – should investors be concerned? Yahoo Finance. October 29, 2025.

[10] Jurica Dujmovic, Investors are making a big bet on Big Tech’s AI spending. They’re about to learn if it paid off, Morning Star, January 28, 2026.

[11] Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (Icon Books, 2018); John Bellamy , and Robert W. McChesney, Surveillance Capitalism : Monopoly – Finance Capital , the Military – Industrial Complex , and the Digital Age, Monthly Review 66, no. 3, July-August 2014.

[12] George Hammond and Cristina Criddle, Anthropic chief back in talks with Pentagon about AI deal, Financial Times, March 4, 2026.

[13] Nick Robins-Early, What does the US military’s feud with Anthropic mean for AI used in war? Guardian, March 7, 2026 ; Ian Duncan and Tara Copp, After a deadly raid, an AI power struggle erupts at the Pentagon, Washington Post, February 22, 2026 ; Nick Robins-Early. Anthropic says it ‘cannot in good conscience’ allow Pentagon to remove AI checks, Guardian, February 26, 2026.

Anti-imperialism Ghana New World Information and Communication Order

Lessons from Ghana: Defiance in the Search for a New Media System

By ShinJoung Yeo

History tells us that no new media system has been built to challenge an established social order without a more general social movement. This may be seen in many national histories, including that of the United States – and it is also true for post-colonial Ghana, which will be the primary focus of this post.

There has been increasing interest in Ghana among scholars focusing on President Kwame Nkrumah, who fought against British colonialism, and who was part of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), sought internationalism, and experimented with building a nation with socialist ideals. Historians like Jeffrey Ahlman, P.A.V. Ansah, Ama Biney, Jennifer Blaylock, Frank Gerits, Matteo Grilli, Matteo Landricina and others have examined Ghana’s liberation movement and its post-colonial struggles.[1] This brief post draws deeply from these studies, particularly those concerning media and communications, to underline Ghana’s importance for Non-Aligned countries’ attempts to reconstruct their communications systems.

Ghana, which in 1957 was the first African country south of the Sahara to win independence, was a leading force in the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle. Under Kwame Nkrumah (1957-1966), a new media system was built as part of Ghana’s nation-building project and a Pan-African unity deeply rooted in internationalism.

However, before talking about Ghana’s case, it is important to emphasize that attempts to experiment with new media and communication systems were Herculean tasks for colonized and newly decolonized peoples – ones that emerged from many years of continued suffocation by the tentacles of old and new colonial powers and that faced aggressive Western propaganda machines and repeated CIA interventions.[2] Thus, the experiments were not perfect and involved mistakes and internal and external conflicts along the way; however, the visions that guided their struggles to build new systems continued to inspire additional efforts.

Under extremely hostile political and anemic economic conditions, Ghana pursued self-determination, economic transformation, and Pan-Africanism.[3] To achieve these political goals, Nkrumah positioned himself as part of the non-aligned nations. However, Ghana’s non-alignment didn’t mean political neutrality or not taking any position; rather, as Frank Gertris argues, it was a way to maintain political and diplomatic independence.[4] Nkrumah asserted, “Ghana does not intend to follow a neutralist policy in its foreign relations, but does intend to preserve its independence to act as it sees best at any time.”[5] His foreign policy principle, commonly known as “Positive Non-Alignment” or “positive neutrality,” embraced not only anti-colonialism, socialism, and Pan-Africanism, but also peace and disarmament. This framework provided a way for newly independent nations to survive and rebuild their countries.[6] For this exact reason, it was imperative for Ghana to control the production and flow of its own information: to permit the international news agencies to set the nation’s agenda was to ravage its own framework.

In 1949, Nkrumah urged immediate political independence and formed the Convention People’s Party (CPP) – breaking away from the conservative United Gold Coast Convention party.  The CPP wasn’t just a political party, but a movement backed by peasants, farmers, trade unionists, urban workers, civil servants, teachers, students, market women, and the unemployed.  C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian-born historian, reflected on the CPP and noted that, “in the struggle for independence, one market woman in Accra — and there were fifteen thousand of them — was worth any dozen Achimota graduates. The graduates, the highly educated ones, were either hostile to Nkrumah and his party or stood aside.”[7] The CPP movement spearheaded Ghana’s independence.

As the CPP mobilized Ghanaians to build a radical political party and unify against the British Empire, the party launched a newspaper, the Accra Evening News followed by Morning Telegraph and Daily Mail.[8] For Nkrumah – a journalist himself – newspapers were not merely tools to disseminate information and ideas; like Lenin, he saw them as both a “collective organizer” and “a weapon, first to overthrow colonialism and then to assist in achieving total African independence and unity.”[9]

Rejecting the pluralist marketplace media model, the newspaper was a political instrument and revolutionary tool to fight colonial propaganda and to build and sustain the movement.[10] Ghanaians recognized that the anti-imperial and anti-capitalist struggle had to be waged not only on political and economic fronts but also in the realm of information and communications. The Nkrumah government invested significant resources and personnel throughout his regime to build an independent media system to break from colonial political and economic media structures.

In 1957, on the cusp of independence, Ghana established the Ghana News Agency (GNA) under the Ministry of Information, which later became the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. It was the first news agency in Sub-Saharan Africa at a time when imperial news agencies –Reuters, Agence France-Presse (AFP), United Press International (UPI), and the Associated Press (AP) – dominated the global news market. The GNA, by establishing 10 foreign bureaus, gathering and centralizing Ghana’s own domestic and international news, countered the news from the imperial core.[11] And by 1966, Ansah points out that Ghana was able to lay down 5000 miles of teleprinter lines inside Ghana[12] – a major contributor to nation-building.

However, when Ghana established the GNA, the country lacked sufficient equipment, trained personnel, and infrastructure.

This was a consequence of being intentionally underdeveloped and exploited by European colonial regimes – articulated by Walter Rodney – not due to an innate inability on the part of Ghanaians.[13] Thus, for practical reasons, Ghana requested and received help from Reuters.

Nkrumah was fully aware of the danger of working with Reuters, which operated in the interest of the former colonial government. Doing so could have re-subjugated the GNA under the former colonial media system. In his speech at the opening of the GNA, Nkrumah reflected on this sentiment; he appreciated Reuters’ assistance but called for a “vault door policy”:  

Why should Ghana not have what I have chosen to call a vault door policy? A vault door does not remain shut all the time. It simply protects the treasure in it. A vault door can be swung open for legitimate transactions of benefit of both parties concerned, and it can be swung shut when predatory forces are in the neighborhood. The people of Ghana always expect the government to open and close the vault door in their best interest.[14]

Nkrumah’s Vault Door policy was not reckless courage; rather it was grounded in Ghana’s defiance and guided by its positive neutrality which advocated for Ghanaian and African interests.

Under Nkrumah, the Ghana Institution of Journalism was established in 1957 to train Ghanaians and other African journalists.[15] The government published several newspapers, including the Ghanaian Times, The Spark (inspired by Lenin’s revolutionary newspaper Iskra, meaning “spark” in Russian), Voice of Africa (VOA) magazine, and later took over the British-owned Daily Graphic. At the same time, they also lifted the ban on the import of publications from communist countries, which had been imposed by the British colonial state.

The purpose of the VOA magazine, published by the Bureau of African Affairs, was to unify the African liberation front. The magazine was distributed free of charge across Africa, and freedom fighters from various countries – who came to Accra as a revolutionary hub for training and to share strategies – became part of its distribution networks, which couldn’t be broken by the colonial authorities.[16]

However, the circulation of newspapers alone had limitations in reaching ordinary people when the literacy rate in Ghana was pitifully low after 100 years of rule by Britain – which had claimed to be “civilizing Africans.” As a result, Nkrumah’s Ghana adapted radio as an important tool for informing, educating, and raising political consciousness.

By the 1950s, radio had become a popular mass medium, but it was built for colonial regimes – political elites and European settlers. However, one week after its independence, the Ghanaian government announced that the Ghana Broadcasting System (GBS) would drop all BBC content and replace it with its own. This was a direct attack on Britain, which was also competing for influence in Africa against its new rivals – the US and the Soviet Union.[17]

In 1961, Ghana launched the Radio Ghana External Service to broadcast African news and share information from other liberation movements on their common struggles. Radio Ghana began broadcasting to West Africa and Central Africa in Arabic, English, French, Hausa, Portuguese, and Swahili.[18] In 1961, Nkrumah proclaimed that “The voice of this service will not necessarily be the Voice of Ghana; indeed, it will be the Voice of Africa.”[19] In fact, as liberation fighters were encouraged to contribute to the Voice of Africa magazine, they were also given airtime and asked to produce their own radio shows about their struggles and political situations. [20]

Besides newspapers and radio, Ghana developed its own television station, which was included in its second Five-Year Development Plan (1959–1964) and was part of the country’s broader modernization project.[21]

In 1959, the government sought advice from Canada, which was not a former colonial power, and set up a commission to conduct studies and make a recommendation on establishing a television service in Ghana. Blaylock’s research shows that Ghana accepted most of these recommendations but rejected commercial content to generate revenue.[22] The government understood that the commercial media model was not compatible with a socialist nation-building and the confrontation with neo-colonialism.

(more…)

Geopolitics Submarine Cables The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

Baltic Blow-Up

By Dan Schiller

Attempts to project dominance over the Baltic Sea have recurred for hundreds of years, as rival states have vied with one another over economic and military supremacy. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, the Baltic has again become a conflict zone. After the collapse of German Democratic Republic in 1989 and the reunification of Germany the next year; and the accession of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia to NATO during the 1990s and early 2000s, followed by the accession of Finland in 2023 and Sweden in 2024, the Baltic has been – nearly – encircled by NATO.   But for Russia. 

A tiny Russian exclave, Kaliningrad, fronts onto the Baltic, while Russia itself enjoys direct access via three additional ports located on the Gulf of Finland: Primorsk, Ust-Luga and St. Petersburg. Even as the US has sanctioned Russia’s fuel exports, supplies of Russian oil and liquified natural gas are being shipped across the Baltic to varied destinations.[1]

This contributes to making this sea one of the world’s busiest waterways, with 70,000 vessels sailing annually through the Oresund – the strait at the western end of the Baltic between Denmark and Sweden, through which ships then pass into the North Sea and ultimately into the Atlantic Ocean.[2] The combination of NATO oversight, heightened US policing of submarine cables across the world,[3] and Russian fuel shipments is turning the shallow Baltic into a fraught zone.

Indeed, the drama over undersea cables has recently become intense. Somewhere in the world, two to four undersea cables break every week, on average – usually because of ships’ anchors, fishing gear, or natural disasters.[4] Reports have circulated during recent months, however, purporting to trace at least four cable breaks in the Baltic back to sabotage. Given the world’s dependence on undersea cables to carry everything from social media messages to enormous financial transfers, these outages have been heavily publicized.

In each case, NATO countries have blamed Russia or China.  Finland and Germany have separately detained and boarded ships they suspect of deliberately damaging data and power cables with their anchors; a Norwegian military university researcher has pronounced that the cable infrastructure “presents an attractive target” and that there are credible accounts of sabotage around the world[5]; Germany’s defense minister leveled a charge of “hybrid” warfare against Russia.[6] NATO itself quickly assembled military assets to protect the seabed infrastructure under a new program called Baltic Sentry.[7]

However, did these incidents actually testify to a threat mounted by adversaries – or were they more routine cable-breaks? US intelligence officials asserted late in November 2024 that the two cable cuts reported by then were not deliberate acts, though European authorities had not discounted sabotage.[8] Despite the additional two ruptures since then, uncertainty remains.  The Washington Post reported on January 19, 2025 that several senior US and European intelligence officials believed that the cables had been severed by accident. Investigations by the US and a half-dozen European security services had turned up “no indication” that commercial ships suspected of dragging their anchors across seabed cables had done so intentionally – let alone at Moscow’s behest.  “Instead,” the Post related, “U.S. and European officials said that the evidence gathered to date – including intercepted communications and other classified intelligence – points to accidents caused by inexperienced crews serving aboard poorly maintained vessels.”[9] In other words, business as usual.

Despite this, NATO has mobilized to create a new power complex to monitor and repel perceived threats to the Baltic Sea’s cable infrastructure. And so the US struggle to control global communications expands, now into northern latitudes. 

[1] Vaibhav Raghunandan and Petras Katinas, “December 2024-Monthly Analysis of Russian Fossil Fuel Exports and Sanctions,” Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, January 10, 202; Malte Humpert, “Russia’s Gazprom Sends Baltic LNG Through Arctic Avoiding Africa Detour,” gCaptain, September 10, 2024.

[2] Michael North, The Baltic: A History (Cambridge: Harvard, 2015), 320-21; Elisabeth Braw, “Russia’s Shadow Fleet Is Putting Danish Waters in Danger,” Foreign Policy, March 26, 2024,

[3] Winston Qiu, “US and its Allies Issue Joint Statement on the Security and Resilience of Undersea Cables,” Submarine Cable Networks, October 7, 2024.

[4] Lane Burdette, “What To Know About Submarine Cable Breaks,” Telegeography,  November 21, 2024.

[5] James Glanz, Elian Peltier and Pablo Robles, “Undersea Surgeons,” New York Times, November 29, 2024; Baltic Sea could be deliberate act: Norwegian premier,” Anadolu Agency 30 December 2024; Melissa Eddy and Johanna Lemola, ”Severing of Baltic Sea Cables Was ‘Sabotage,’ Germany Says,” New York Times, November 19, 2024.

[7] Julian Borger, “NATO flotilla assembles off Estonia to protect undersea cables in Baltic Sea,” The Guardian, January 19, 2025.

[8] James Glanz, Elian Peltier and Pablo Robles, “Undersea Surgeons,” New York Times,  November 29, 2024; also, see Max Colchester and Bojan Pancevski, “The Deep-Sea Battle Over the World’s Data Cables Is Heating Up,” Wall Street Journal, January 23, 2025; Richard Milne, “Baltic Sea data cable damaged in latest case of potential sabotage,” Financial Times, January 26, 2025.

[9] Greg Miller, Robyn Dixon and Isaac Stanley-Becker, “Accidents, not Russian Sabotage, behind undersea cable damage, officials say,” Washington Post,  January 19, 2025.