The war on Anthropic heats up & the Ellisons are obsessed with WBD
Tech and politics are synonyms in 2026. Let's talk about it.
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Today’s agenda
Anthropic’s enemies in tech and government
The Ellisons are obsessed with Warner Bros. — why?
3 notable companies that are hiring
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Anthropic’s enemies in tech and government
TLDR: the tech right is activating hard against Anthropic over its refusal to allow unrestricted use of Claude by the American military. The Pentagon is threatening blacklisting the company, and Elon Musk is leading personal attacks on Anthropic’s alignment lead.
Key beats
After Anthropic wouldn’t give the Department of War a blanket license for use of Claude for all purposes and all classification levels, Pete Hegseth has threatened (Axios, paywall) to cut the government’s ties to the company by labeling it a “supply chain risk” — which would mean much of the military apparatus, including outside defense contractors and vendors, would have to stop using Claude.
Key to this is that, based on public reporting, Claude is the main frontier model that exists in the innards of the military — including via partnership through Palantir, and apparently used as part of the US kidnapping of Maduro (WSJ, paywall).
Following Anthropic’s release of a constitution for Claude, Musk and many on the tech right have been attacking Amanda Askell, the philosopher-and-alignment researcher leading key safety and morality work at the company. They’ve dug through her tweets to criticize her support for LGBTQ initiatives, amongst other things, and Musk said “Those without children lack a stake in the future” as part of a longer tirade against her on X.
Anthropic is probably looking for protection. During their most recent fundraise, they reportedly approached 1789 Capital (WSJ, paywall), which counts Donald Trump, Jr. as a partner, but were rejected over values disagreements. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led the $30B round, and you don’t have to think too hard to wonder about why Anthropic would go in that direction in this heated moment.
Our take: In the age of agentic capability, powerful people will not tolerate being limited from accessing the highest-order AI capabilities. Anthropic is taking a unique stand, but it’s in an extremely expensive and tight AI industry race. If this sort of pressure continues, from a government and oligarchy hellbent on breaking freedoms and norms, tech workers might want to start thinking about how to provide support for the industry’s spine — before it’s too late.
Related… the Ellisons really want to own media
If you haven’t been paying attention, it might be worth noticing that David Ellison (son of Oracle CEO, Larry) is aggressively pursuing an acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery after having already acquired Paramount, in what can only now be described as a feral obsession.
Netflix has been repeatedly trying to finalize an ~$83B deal to acquire WBD instead, a deal which itself is recommended by the WBD board, but the team at Paramount keeps making hostile bids and coming back with additional sweeteners (Variety).
Now, we have reporting that David Ellison — who is deeply entrenched with the Trump administration — is seeking government support to either block the Netflix deal (Reuters) or pre-clear the Paramount version through antitrust regulators.
In the age of AI, with Oracle massively invested in infrastructure and Larry Ellison backing AI companies across the board, one has to wonder why the family is so hell-bent on this acquisition. They could invest in media in a thousand different ways, without so much lunacy.
It’s politics, but it’s more than politics —
Yes, they’re part of the tech right that’s seeking to keep power as we head into 2026 and 2028 elections, and media is a main method.
But they’re also intimately aware that personalized and at scale generative media content is coming very soon, and at a scale we can’t yet fathom.
Acquiring media properties is about a combination of enforceable IP rights (perhaps one of the last remaining moats), training data, and, critically, the mediums themselves
Existing subscribers, channels, email newsletters, and online properties are extremely valuable right now, because the cost to produce and distribute media into these endpoints is approaching zero
For rising tech oligarchs, having as many distribution mediums (‘trusted pipes’) as possible to spam your message into might be worth any cost, especially if you think it’s existential
It’s going to get messy from here.
3 notables hiring
Tavus just launched Phoenix-4, a real-time human avatar model built to mimic emotional intelligence, and is hiring across research, engineering, and product roles in SF and remote.
Social music startup Hook just raised a $10M Series A and is hiring across growth, product, and engineering (NYC, LA, remte).
Complyance just raised $20M for their enterprise GRC platform and is hiring across sales and product (US remote, London, Berlin).
(btw, wondering about how the price of AI and AI products will impact you in this new era of agents and agentic products? take a read here.)
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