Sign me up!
If you haven’t been following this particular corner of the AI wars, here’s the short version: the Pentagon is threatening to pull its $200 million contract with Anthropic, the company behind the AI tool Claude, and potentially label them a “supply chain risk,” which would pressure anyone doing business with the military to cut ties.1 Why? Because Anthropic had the audacity to have usage policies that forbid Claude from being used for things like domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.
Pete Hegseth said the quiet part loud in January: the Pentagon won’t “employ AI models that won’t allow you to fight wars.”
Translation, as one newsletter put it: if your AI has a conscience, we don’t want it.
Here’s the thing. I use AI. I’ve used it to draft emails, build worksheets for my kids, untangle a math concept I hadn’t thought about in twenty years, organize my thoughts when I couldn’t find the words. The mundane, useful, genuinely helpful stuff that makes a chaotic life in a world driven by busy a little more manageable.
I know AI is controversial. I know the concerns are real. I hold them too. But I’ve landed in the camp that believes the question isn’t really whether AI is coming, it’s who gets to shape it, and what values they’re willing to defend when it costs them something.
Anthropic is, right now, being shown the door for having a line they won’t cross. Their CEO Dario Amodei has been openly critical of the current administration, has called for more government oversight of AI, and has refused to hand out waivers that would let federal agencies use Claude for domestic surveillance. He’s been called an “AI doomer” and a “Trump hater” for his trouble and for having the audacity to stand up for a future is being threatened.
Other tech companies bent the knee. Anthropic hasn’t. Not yet. They’re a business though, they need to hear folks speak loud so they don’t bend the knee.
I’m not naive enough to think a corporation is a hero. But I do think we vote with our attention and our dollars, even small ones. If the US government wants to punish a company for building in ethical guardrails, the least those of us who believe in guardrails can do is show up for them.
So I’m fulling switching to Claude. Use the free tier. Tell a friend. It’s not a revolution. But it’s something.
A company willing to ask “should our AI have been used for this?” even when powerful people find the question inconvenient, is the kind of company I want building the tools I let into my home.
If you want to make the switch, it’s easy. Head to claude.ai, create a free account, and that’s genuinely it. The free tier is capable and useful for everyday tasks: drafting, explaining, organizing, worksheets, all of it. If you’re already paying for ChatGPT, consider cancelling and putting that $20 toward Claude’s paid tier instead. Same price, and your money goes somewhere that’s at least trying to stay conscious in a world where that takes so much effort.
Nope, not paid. Just know the little things count big when enough of us get on board.
