Primitive° 🇺🇸

Palantir CEO Alex Karp told you the most important thing about the Pentagon vs. Anthropic standoff. And nobody is connecting the dots. Watch and save this clip, then read this thread. Karp said something most tech CEOs would never say out loud: "A small island in Silicon Valley that would love to decide what you eat, how you eat, and monetize all your data should not also decide who lives in your country and under what conditions." He's talking about his own industry. And his argument is simple. There are elections, there are rules. There is a transfer of power from one president to another. Silicon Valley does not get to override that. "The view of Silicon Valley that we get to decide should not be the way these things are decided." This cost him everything. His house was protested for month, Palantir's offices were protested. Employees pushed back internally and some walked out. He didn't change course. Then the interviewer asked if he supports the Trump administration's approach. His answer might surprise you. "I've been a card-carrying progressive my whole life. My family is progressive. I have a degree in what amounts to progressive thought." He said he's never stopped being critical of this administration. He's not planning to vote for it. But then he said the thing that changes the entire Anthropic debate. "The core issue is: who decides?" Not whether the policy is right and not whether you agree with the mission. Who decides. He made it personal. "It's commonly known that our software is used in operational context at war." "Do you really think the warfighter is going to trust a software company that pulls the plug because something becomes controversial?" Let that sit for a second. "Currently, when you're a warfighter, your life depends on your software." "They will never trust you if you pull the plug just because you're unpopular." This is a man whose software powers classified military operations across the West. He's describing what happens when trust breaks. Now apply that to what's happening right now. Anthropic built Claude, the only AI running on the Pentagon's classified networks. It was used in the operation that captured Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro in January. The Pentagon loves it and it works. But Anthropic has two red lines: No mass surveillance of Americans and no autonomous weapons without a human pulling the trigger. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic a deadline: 5:01 PM Friday. Drop the red lines or face the Defense Production Act. Anthropic's CEO said no. "We cannot in good conscience accede to their request." But here's where it gets complicated. Anthropic isn't refusing to work with the military, Claude already does. It's refusing two specific things. Two. But here's the problem, congress hasn't passed a single law governing military AI. There are no elections on this and no rules. The Pentagon is using contract language and Cold War era emergency powers to decide the future of AI in warfare. That's not democracy either. Two private parties are fighting over rules that elected officials should have written years ago. The deadline is today. Friday. 5:01 PM Eastern. If the government forces these guardrails off, no AI safety commitment ever means anything again. If Anthropic wins, tech CEOs become the gatekeepers of American defense. Either way, the system is broken.

Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome. AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only. We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.

Coming this Sunday 🇺🇸

Elon Musk just identified the next crisis in AI. It’s not a shortage. It’s an unusable surplus. Musk: “By the end of this year, chip production will outpace the ability to turn chips on.” For three years the world was starved for silicon. Every lab, every government, every company racing to secure the chips that determine who wins the AI era. That bottleneck is ending. A new one is replacing it. Musk: “The chips are going to be piling up and not be able to be turned on.” Billions of dollars of the most advanced AI hardware ever built. Sitting dark. Not because the chips don’t work. Because there isn’t enough electricity to run them. You can’t print a power plant the way you print a chip. The fabrication plants scaled. The grid didn’t. And now the most valuable hardware in history is about to hit a wall that no amount of capital can instantly solve. Compute is about to become abundant. Electricity is about to become the most valuable commodity on earth. Three years obsessing over silicon yields. Physics doesn’t care about your chip architecture if your data center can’t pull enough megawatts. The war isn’t about who can manufacture the most silicon anymore. It’s about who has the raw power to plug it in. Whoever solves energy first doesn’t just win. They own the infrastructure everyone else needs to compete. The losers stack useless chips in warehouses waiting for power that never arrives. We built a trillion dollar engine and forgot the fuel. That’s the AI race right now.

universities are about to realize that they had been selling the wrong product for the 150 years. they thought they sold knowledge, then information became free. they pivoted to selling credentials but now credentials are just proxies. in the post-ai era the universities who survive will realize they were always selling 3 things: network, status signaling, and a 4 years of protected time to become an adult.

A Final Message From Scott Adams