Author: Yeo and Schiller

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.

Libraries Working Class

Academic Libraries in Class Society

By Yeo and Schiller

[Editor’s note (10/3/2024) Please see the comment below for additional historical context about Queens College]

A shocking disparity defines the US system of information provision.  At one extreme is the multi-trillion-dollar corporate wealth of the for-profit information industry. At the other end is the growing – and deliberately inflicted – poverty of our public information sector.  During the past half-century, capital and class together have gravely worsened this disparity.

Scholars have analyzed the depredations visited by the for-profit information industry on the information sphere in general, and libraries in particular. Corporations have enclosed and raided governmental and other public information sites, while doing everything in their power to vilify the belief that information is, and should be, a social good.[1] A recent appellate court decision to ban the Internet Archive from lending out digital copies of half a million books to the public is only the latest troubling example.[2]

Concomitantly, libraries have faced declining budgets which have forced them to significantly hollow out collection development and other public services and relinquish their traditional functions to for-profit database providers and publishers – at the same time expanding and highlighting rare and precious special archival collections to prospective donors and possible political allies as if this is the sole function of libraries.

However, a closely related second factor has also been at work: a class logic. According to Mary Jane Petrowski, associate director at the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL),[3] between 2012 and 2021, 31% of full-time librarian positions, 54% of all other paid full-time staff, have been lost in community colleges. At colleges that offer Baccalaureate and Masters degrees, 34.2% of full-time librarian positions, 55.4% of all other full-time staff have disappeared. For universities that grant PhD degrees, by contrast, the number of full-time librarians has actually increased by 13.7% (while all other full-time staff has dropped 21.7%).

Community college libraries serving mostly working-class students, in other words, have been gutted. Eliminating more than 30% of librarian positions and 50% of staff over a decade means that these libraries find it difficult to remain open.[4] And within colleges that offer Baccalaureate and Masters degrees, there is a comparable disparity. For instance, Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), has only 9 full-time librarians including cataloging and special collections librarians serving about 16,500 overwhelmingly working-class students[5] – among them 48% are first-generation college students.[6] Since 2019, the library has lost 10 full-time librarian positions to retirement and departure. These positions remain unfilled. Thus, the library is struggling to provide adequate public services like reference and instruction, and is only able to cover the bare minimum of collection development for many subject areas – 30 out of the 58 subjects defined by the library as needed to support dozens of majors, minors, and programs have no subject specialist assigned.[7]

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Anti-Trust Laws Competition Google Monopoly

A Paradox: Corporate Power Increases As Corporate Competition Grows

By Yeo and Schiller

This is the first of an intermittent series that will focus on the growing need to impose limits on corporate power in communications and on the communications market as a whole.  In the current moment of right-wing mobilization and social polarization, it will also be important to try to examine some of the Left’s assumptions about its reliance on communications systems.

*

On 6 August 2024, Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Google had maintained a monopoly in search, and therefore violated U.S. antitrust law. [1] Google said it would appeal the ruling.

After more than two decades of promoting neoliberal policies of unregulated growth for the internet sector, antitrust activism has revived among policymakers, think tanks, and academics.[2]  Starting at the tail-end of the Trump administration and continuing under the Biden administration, the U.S. government has renewed anti-monopoly investigations to rein in the tech giants. The government has sued four of them: Amazon, Google (twice), Apple, and Meta.[3] This has been welcomed across the political spectrum.

These anti-trust actions, according to Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), are “part of protecting the free market [to] ensur[e] that market outcomes – who wins and who loses – [are] determined by fair competition rather than by private gatekeepers who can serve as de-facto private regulators.”[4] This argument is rooted in neo-classical economics: The FTC asserts that the current market requires correction because it has “deviated” from “fair” competition, as would exist in a “perfect” market.  This view resonates among those who, on the left, embrace a critique of “monopoly capital.” [5]

This renewal of antitrust is to be welcomed, even if it is undertaken for an inadequate reason.  A stronger rationale for mounting a political attack against the titans of the internet would be anchored not in neoclassical economics but, rather, in a sweeping critique of corporate power. Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple and the rest are bad actors for a panoply of reasons. Economically, they stomp all over smaller businesses, whether customers (e.g., advertisers) or suppliers (e.g., news media). Politically, they damage democracy through lobbying, government contracts and other means. Culturally, they saturate us with commercialism, pushing away alternatives. Environmentally, their mammoth data centers force the pace of global heating. In addition to all this, their business model is built upon privacy transgressions, as it surveils and channels individuals as corporate preferences demand.

We should welcome vigorous antitrust policies, therefore, inasmuch as these make it more difficult for the tech companies to continue to have free rein, even if these policies are not based on a far-reaching critique of corporate power – and even if, paradoxically, in the real world of contemporary capitalism, corporate competition has actually intensified.

For, contrary to many accounts, corporate competition has not lessened but increased, alongside the financialization and transnationalization of the political economy. Without a clearer understanding of how competition is structured within the larger framework of today’s capitalism, we won’t be able to strategize on how to limit corporate power – via antitrust or other, more comprehensive means.

Competition is a consequence of capital’s inherent drive for profitable expansion.[6] It is in turn the feature of capitalism that spurs technological change, the search for new markets, and the re-organization of labor to be as productive as possible. In the process of competing, firms may temporarily ally with competitors out of corporate self-interest, to maximize profits.

The intensity of competition often is presumed to correspond to the number of firms in a given industry; if that number is small, then it is supposed to be less competitive.  However, this is not necessarily true. Anwar Shaikh, Stephen Maher, Scott Aquanno, and others have argued that competition is, first and foremost, over profits rather than sales or market shares (though the latter are not unimportant).[7]“It therefore takes the form of competition between investment opportunities” within and between industries.[8] Intensity of competition is in turn not a function of the number of firms; rather, it hinges on the mobility of capital regulated by profitability: “the mobility of capital implies that new investment will accelerate relative to demand in industries with higher rates of profit and decelerate relative to demand in industries with lower rates of profit.”[9]

This mobility is facilitated by finance, and by new forms of financialization, which ease the flows of capital across and within industries and countries. Financial capital is notably well-integrated into today’s tech sector.[10] The search engine industry constitutes a major example.

In 2023, the global search engine market was worth $ 205.48 billion, and it is expected to reach $507.37 billion by 2032, with a compounding annual growth rate of 11%.[11] Competition in this sector is in fact intense.

Three big asset management financial firms – BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street – are all major shareholders of Google, but that does not preclude them from also investing in new search engine companies. Even if one captures a small fraction of $205.48 billion, this is enough incentive for capital to invest, if the profit rate is high enough. A stream of search engine start-ups continues to spring up.[12]

Foremost, Microsoft Bing is still in the search engine game, as is Yahoo!, which is majority-owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Management. Apple has plenty of cash on hand to develop its search. It has spent billions of dollars building out its mapping service and app search. Amazon and Meta function as vertical search engines which index a specific domain, and they are eroding Google’s main source of ads revenue. As of 2023, Amazon is the third-largest advertising platform in the US with $49 billion in ads revenue, trailing behind Google and Facebook.[13]

Google has tried mightily to defend its market share and to deflect competition, including paying Apple $22 billion in 2022 aloneto be its default search engine, but it faces a Sisyphean task to eliminate competition. Economist Howard Botwinick explains the theoretical issue: “Within the context of large-scale enterprise, the relentless drive to expand capital value is necessarily accompanied by a growing struggle over market shares. These two dynamics, accumulation and rivalry, are inextricably bound up with one another.”[14]

In addition, competition has spiraled as firms seek to adapt never-ending new technologies to build adjacent and profitable new markets. Search, social media, e-commerce, mobile, cloud, AI, etc. appear to be separate domains, but all are in play among the major tech companies – which foray into each other’s territories while defending their existing profit centers. In each case they are competing to carve out new profitable businesses, even beyond the internet sectors, through ventures into military, automobile, pharmaceutical, agriculture, education, and healthcare markets.[15]

With AI technologies, there are still further entries into the search market. Open AI, backed by Microsoft and major venture capital, is building its own search engine and threatening Google’s core business. During the first six months of 2024 alone, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta spent $106 billion on AI capital investment.[16] As Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called Godfather of AI, puts it, now that the genie has been unleashed they have no choice but to compete in this domain.[17] Other AI entrants have also plunged into the fray. AI-based search engines Perplexity[18] and Genspark[19] have already raised millions of dollars from asset management firms and venture capital.

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