The Market Is Rigged and Sam Altman Has the Receipts
In 2016 Sam Altman compared Donald Trump to Hitler and built a website to track his lies.
Keep that man in your head as you read what follows.
On Friday 28 February 2026, the US Department of Defense designated Anthropic a supply chain risk to national security. The same designation it uses for Chinese state-backed technology companies. The same designation it uses for Huawei.
Anthropic’s offence was refusing to let the Pentagon use its AI for mass domestic surveillance of American citizens or fully autonomous weapons systems. Two red lines. Both narrow. Both documented. Neither of which had affected a single government mission to date.
Within hours of that designation, Sam Altman announced OpenAI had secured the Pentagon contract Anthropic just lost.
The man who compared Trump to Hitler and built a website to track his lies just took the government contract of the company that refused to help that same government surveil its own citizens.
What Anthropic actually refused
This matters because the framing coming out of the Pentagon is that Anthropic tried to place its terms of service above the US Constitution. Pete Hegseth called it “a cowardly act of corporate virtue signalling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.”
What Anthropic actually refused was contract language, introduced late in negotiations, that would have allowed its AI safeguards to be “disregarded at will.” Not a blanket refusal to work with the military. Not a refusal to support lawful operations. A refusal to sign away two specific protections it had maintained throughout months of negotiation.
The Pentagon’s own position was that domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons are already illegal, so the restrictions were unnecessary. If that is true, if the Pentagon genuinely has no intention of conducting mass surveillance of Americans, then agreeing to those two restrictions costs them nothing. The resistance to codifying them is the tell.
What OpenAI actually agreed to
Sam Altman said OpenAI’s deal contains the same core protections Anthropic fought for. He also said the Pentagon can use OpenAI’s technology for “any lawful purpose.”
