Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to the Pentagon this week and demanded an AI with no safety guardrails — threatening to declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk" if it refused. So I decided to look into what exactly the Pentagon might want to do with that technology.

What I found is a set of AI capabilities that go far beyond chatbots and image generators. We're talking about WiFi routers that reconstruct human bodies through solid walls, Pentagon lasers that identify you by your heartbeat from 200 meters, Chinese gait-recognition systems that ID you with your back turned and face covered, and autonomous drone swarms that run a full kill chain — find, fix, finish — with no human individually controlling each step. Every item in this video is documented, sourced, and in many cases already deployed.

This is the landscape Anthropic seems to understand it's operating in. And it's the landscape the Pentagon wants full access to. The full written analysis with all sources is available to paid subscribers at The Rip Current.

Originally published at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts: https://theripcurrent.com