With swords and nunchucks, humanoid robots take centre stage at China’s Super Bowl

The Hero We Need

Laddering highlights your strengths by illuminating a competitor’s weakness. Imagine if Kara Swisher, my Pivot co-host, said, “I’m the host with good hair.” It’s a branding twofer: an organic reminder that your adversary sucks and you are wonderful by comparison.

Enter Dario Amodei, the Jekyll to Altman’s Hyde. During a recent contract negotiation with the Department of Defense, Anthropic refused to remove safeguards prohibiting the use of the company’s technology in autonomous weapons and the mass surveillance of Americans, believing those applications can’t be safely and reliably performed by today’s AI. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded with a shakedown: The U.S. would brand Anthropic a supply chain risk or seize their tech via the Defense Production Act. To Hegseth, the corporation isn’t an entity, subject to a fair legal system, that creates the profits that help fund the Defense Department, but an entity that is either with us, or against us. If this movie starring man-children hopped up on steroids they buy at gas stations sounds familiar, trust your instincts. Law firms, universities, and Big Tech have bent the knee, while the rest of corporate America has adopted a duck-and-cover strategy in the face of tariffs that are both illegal and stupid, i.e., hurting others while hurting ourselves.

In contrast, Amodei stood up … for humanity, safety, and the rule of law: Companies have the right to do business with the government, as well as the right to decline, without fear of punishment. Publicly, Altman supported Amodei, but in private he did the deal Anthropic wouldn’t. The following day, after news of Altman’s deal broke, U.S. uninstalls of ChatGPT increased 295%, and Claude climbed to No. 1 in the App Store. Anthropic’s annual recurring revenue surged to $19 billion, from $14 billion just a few weeks ago, adding an estimated $150 billion to its valuation. Altman / OpenAI came across as reckless, duplicitous, and self-serving. Amodei / Anthropic came across as safety-conscious, honest, and selfless.

A year ago, I predicted the first CEO who forcefully and publicly resisted Trump could reap significant benefits, both reputationally and commercially. With its reputation for breaking barriers and the boldness chromosome in its DNA, I thought / hoped it would be Nike. But Amodei just did it … and Microsoft followed his lead, filing a brief in support of Anthropic’s lawsuit seeking to block its designation as a supply chain risk. As one of the largest government contractors, Microsoft has more to lose than almost any tech company. But as Andrew Ross Sorkin put it, “Microsoft decided the cost of staying silent was higher.”

Scott Galloway