Last April, I wrote a post titled, “Do We Still Have a Democracy?” Back then the answer to that question wasn’t entirely self-evident. The administration was clearly acting as if it were above the law, snatching legal immigrants off the street without due process, making policy by government decree instead of through the legislature, and ignoring federal court orders. But we’ve had many presidents who have stretched the legal bounds of their authority before, including Trump during his first term, and still the Republic survived.

In the intervening ten or so months, things have started to look clearer both in degree and in kind. Snatching immigrants off the street escalated into killing American citizens who interfered with ICE operations. The very idea of passing a significant bill into law in Congress has come to feel as obsolete as a Congressional declaration of war. And the administration’s violations of federal court orders have become, if anything, yet more brazen.

Those are the differences in degree. But in the last week we’ve also had two examples of differences in kind.

The first was the Secretary of War’s designation of Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” in response to the AI company’s refusal to agree to his contractual terms for use of Claude by the military. Since news is coming this week at a thousand miles per hour, here’s a brief recap of events:

During the Biden administration, Anthropic licensed its AI to the Pentagon. It stipulated two conditions in its contract: that its technology not be used for mass, warrantless surveillance of Americans (which the government can legally do with commercially available metadata), and that it not be used in autonomous weapons systems with no human involvement.

When the Trump administration renewed the agreement, it initially agreed to these terms. But at some point along the way, the Pentagon changed its mind. The two conditions, it now argued, represented a usurpation of state powers by a private corporation. As a matter of principle, no democratic government could ever allow it.

However you may feel about mass surveillance, fully autonomous weapons systems, or the Trump administration, it’s not a crazy position to take. Most people would agree that private corporations shouldn’t dictate U.S. military policy, strategy, or tactics. Whether that’s what Anthropic’s contract terms represented is debatable. As Dean Ball points out, every defense contractor stipulates restrictions on the use of its products — that’s why they have a contract in the first place. But the principle is hard to dispute.

But even if you agree with the Department of War’s characterization of Anthropic’s contractual terms, the normal thing to do when you reach an impasse is to call off the negotiations and go seek another vendor. But Pete Hegseth, being Pete Hegseth, couldn’t restrict himself to just doing the normal thing. Instead, he designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” which, according to his dubious interpretation of the law, not only bans Anthropic from any further defense contracts and bans other defense contractors from using Anthropic when working on military projects, but also bans any company with a defense contract from having any commercial relationship with Anthropic at all. Such companies would include Anthropic’s biggest investors, and AI infrastructure companies like Nvidia that no AI company can operate without. It’s a Cuba-level embargo. There is no way Anthropic could survive under these conditions.

The implications of this threat are astonishing. As Ball points out, they represent nothing less than the end of private property. Consider this analogy: One day, government agents show up at your front door and say they want to buy your house at fair market value. You’ve been thinking of selling anyway, so you’re happy to negotiate with them. But then you learn that their purpose for buying your house is to convert it into a bomb factory. You don’t feel great about that use of your house, so you say, look you can buy my house and move into it, but I’m going to put in the contract that you can’t use it to make bombs.

The government isn’t interested in your house if they can’t make bombs in it. In the normal course of events, both parties would just walk away from the deal, disappointed. But these government agents go further. They accuse you of trying to dictate government policy and designate you a terrorist. Now nobody will hire you or do business with you or invite you to their Super Bowl party. You become an unemployed social pariah and lose your house to foreclosure.

Your next door neighbor has been watching all of this happen to you. The next day, the government knocks on his door and tells him they’re interested in buying his house. What do you think he’s going to say?

Just days after Hegseth’s supply chain threat designation, the United States went to war with Iran (using Claude). This is the second “difference in kind” we’ve seen in the last few days.

The absolutely undemocratic nature of the decision to attack Iran has been too amply commented on to be worth reciting in detail. Suffice it to say that the President never even bothered to make a case for war to the public, so little do our opinions on the question matter to his decision-making, let alone to seek authorization from Congress. One can feel free to make the case that it’s within the President’s legal authority as the Commander-in-Chief to do whatever he wants with his military, short of using it against American citizens. But normally you expect the government to at least to pretend to care about public opinion. Those days are apparently over.

But things are even worse than that. This war has put not only the health of our democracy in question, but the extent of our sovereignty as well. Iran is a regional power, not a global one. Its geopolitical rival is Israel, not the United States — Iran is an American preoccupation only because it’s an Israeli obsession. And at least the timing of the attack, if not the attack itself, was, by the administration’s own account, determined by Israel, not the White House. Not only do Americans’ opinions no longer matter to the American war machine — our interests don’t count, either. Our government is more than happy to risk American lives for foreign interests if that’s what the donor class wants.

Among the many threats posed by Artificial Intelligence is the deterioration of the conditions that make democracy possible. As our jobs are replaced by AI agents, human beings will become less essential to the health and growth of the U.S. economy. And as we become less essential, we will see our bargaining power with the state erode along with our economic value. Aside from philosophical ideals, why would the government recognize our civil rights if it had the option not to? In oil-rich countries where human labor is less essential to economic growth, we see how little bargaining power citizens have with their oligarchical states, and how little their individual rights are respected. Economists call this the “Resource Curse.” The threat posed by AI is the same; some writers have called it “The Intelligence Curse.”

One could make the case that this is already happening. Our government no longer concerns itself with what you or I think about a new war in the Middle East. It doesn’t need to, as long as it can safeguard its access to the technology that makes warfare possible. And to secure that tech, it has shown itself willing to question the principle of private property itself.

We live in a stage set version of a democracy, where the props and the furniture are plain to see but their only function is to help us voluntarily suspend our disbelief. If there’s a ghost in the machine it is fading away. Soon there will be only machine.