Tim and Dean team up with Scaling Laws hosts Alan Rozenshtein and Kevin Frazier for a joint episode on the fight between Anthropic and the Department of Defense.
In this episode, recorded on March 4, they analyze the Pentagon’s decision to declare Anthropic a supply-chain risk. Dean frames this as an assault on private property rights with no clear limiting principle, while Kevin digs into the shaky legal footing of invoking the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018 against a domestic company. They then turn to OpenAI’s competing Pentagon deal, including Sam Altman’s AMA on Saturday night.
The episode closes with a disagreement about what will happen next. Dean argues this is “act one, scene one” of an inevitable push toward government control of AI labs—a fight he’s tried to preempt through hybrid regulatory structures. Tim offers a deflationary counterpoint: this may ultimately be a personality-driven fight over a technology that will end up being important but not decisive.
