The Trump administration is preparing to climb down off a tree it spent two months sawing at. According to Axios reporting, the White House is drafting an executive action that would carve out a path for federal agencies to resume using Anthropic’s artificial intelligence systems, including the company’s most advanced model, Mythos, despite the Pentagon’s earlier designation of Anthropic as a “supply chain risk to national security.”
One source involved in the discussions described the maneuvering, saying the White House is looking for a way to “save face and bring em back in.”
That is a remarkable reversal. In late February, President Trump took to Truth Social to declare that he was directing every federal agency to “IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology,” adding, “We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth piled on, branding the company “woke” and slapping it with the unprecedented supply chain risk designation, a label normally reserved for hostile foreign actors. Anthropic sued. A federal judge in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction in the company’s favor in late March. The administration appealed. And now, eight weeks later, the same White House that vowed never to work with Anthropic again is quietly hosting “table reads” with industry on how to walk it all back.
The story matters far beyond the squabble between a Silicon Valley AI lab and the Pentagon. The original fight was triggered by Anthropic’s refusal to sign a contract clause permitting the federal government to use its Claude model for “all lawful purposes.” The company drew two red lines, and they are the kind of red lines that any constitutional conservative ought to read twice before reflexively dismissing.
Two Lines That Should Not Be Controversial
Anthropic told the Defense Department it would not allow Claude to be deployed for the mass surveillance of Americans, and it would not provide its model for fully autonomous weapons systems that remove human judgment from the decision to kill. The Pentagon refused to accept those carve-outs and demanded unlimited authority over how the technology could be used.
Read those two sentences again, slowly. The federal government insisted, in writing, on the unrestricted right to use a privately developed AI tool for whatever the government later decided was lawful, with no contractual prohibition on turning that tool against the American people themselves or on automating the act of killing without a human in the loop. A private company said no. The administration responded by trying to crush it.
The historic conservative position on questions like these has been clear for two centuries. James Madison warned in Federalist No. 51 that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary,” and that the great difficulty in framing a government was obliging it to control itself.
The Fourth Amendment was written precisely because the Founders understood that an unaccountable surveillance apparatus is a threat to liberty regardless of which party happens to operate it. The principle does not change when the surveiller wears a uniform we like.
The Surveillance Problem Is Not Hypothetical
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been explicit about why his company drew the line where it did. In a February interview, he pointed out that under current law, recording every conversation in a public space is not technically illegal. What changes when AI is added is scale. Amodei warned that artificial intelligence makes it possible to assemble scattered, individually innocuous data points into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life, automatically and across the entire population, in a way that simply was not possible before.
That is not a left-wing concern. That is the concern of every American who watched the Obama-era IRS target tea party groups, who saw the FBI weaponized against Catholics attending Latin Mass and parents at school board meetings, who lived through the FISA court abuses that produced the Russia collusion hoax, and who observed how readily federal agencies aligned themselves with social media platforms to suppress dissenting speech during the pandemic.
Conservatives spent the better part of a decade warning that the federal surveillance state, once built, would be turned against ordinary citizens regardless of who held office. To now insist that a private company hand the keys to that surveillance state over to whoever happens to run the executive branch, with no contractual limit on how the tool may be used, is to surrender the argument entirely.
Autonomous Weapons and the Question of Human Judgment
The second red line concerns weapons. Anthropic has stated that partially autonomous weapons of the kind currently being used by Ukrainian forces are vital to the defense of free nations, and the company has even acknowledged that fully autonomous systems may eventually be necessary for national defense. Its objection is narrower. Today’s frontier AI systems hallucinate. They make confident errors. They are not reliable enough to be trusted with the decision to take a human life without a human authorizing that decision.
The Department of Defense’s own existing directive on autonomous weapons, DODD 3000.09, requires that all such systems “allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.” Anthropic was, in effect, asking the Pentagon to honor in contract what it already claims to honor in policy. The Pentagon refused.
“Thou shalt not kill,” the Sixth Commandment instructs. The Christian moral tradition has spent two thousand years working out the conditions under which the taking of life can be justified, building the just war doctrine of Augustine and Aquinas around the principle that lethal decisions require moral agents capable of judgment, proportionality, and accountability.
Removing the human entirely from the loop, handing the trigger to a statistical model that cannot be cross-examined, repented, or held to account, is not a technical refinement of warfare. It is a category error about what warfare is.
The Selective Application of the “Woke” Label
Hegseth’s branding of Anthropic as “woke AI” deserves scrutiny on its own terms. The word has done an enormous amount of useful work over the past decade in identifying a genuine ideological project, but it loses its meaning when it is stretched to cover anything the speaker happens to dislike. A company that refuses to provide its product for warrantless surveillance of the American population and for kill decisions made without human authorization is not engaging in critical race theory. It is engaging in something closer to old-fashioned republican virtue.
One of the more telling details in the recent reporting is that OpenAI and Google have both signed Pentagon contracts under the “all lawful purposes” standard, while claiming privately that they too honor the same two limits Anthropic insisted on writing into the contract itself. The difference is that Anthropic wanted the limits in ink. The others were happy to leave them as gentlemen’s agreements with an executive branch that has shown, in administrations of both parties, a remarkable elasticity in its definition of “lawful.”
The Climbdown
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Amodei earlier this month for what both sides described as a productive conversation. The Treasury Department, which had begun offboarding Anthropic products, is reportedly among the agencies looking for an offramp. The proposed executive action would allow agencies to work around the Pentagon’s supply chain risk designation, even as the underlying contractual dispute remains unresolved.
The administration is discovering what large institutions usually discover when they pick fights with technically superior products. Claude is currently the only large language model deployed on the Pentagon’s classified networks. The military is still using it, but on older, more restrictive terms of service, and is not receiving the latest model updates. The cost of the principle, it turns out, is being paid in capability.
What the Right Should Take From This
The instinct to cheer when a “Silicon Valley” company gets bloodied by a Republican administration is understandable after a decade of tech-industry hostility toward conservative speech and conservative voters. But the question worth asking is whether the precedent being set serves long-term conservative ends.
If the federal government can designate a U.S. company a national security risk because that company refuses to authorize the unrestricted use of its product against American citizens and for unsupervised lethal decisions, then the same mechanism is available to every future administration. The Biden White House that pressured social media platforms to suppress speech, the Garland Justice Department that mobilized federal resources against parents and pro-life advocates, the Lerner-era IRS that targeted political enemies, all of these would have welcomed a tool that allowed them to treat any private firm refusing to cooperate as a threat to national security.
“Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.” The psalmist’s warning is not a counsel of cynicism but of structural humility. Power passes from one hand to another. The constitutional and contractual limits we tolerate today become the limits used against us tomorrow.
The White House appears to have figured out, two months and one preliminary injunction later, that the fight was not worth the prize. That is a welcome correction. The harder question is whether the principles at stake will be remembered the next time an administration of either party decides it would prefer a cooperative private sector to a principled one.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
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The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
