One AI CEO Said No to the Pentagon

This week, the biggest story in AI isn't a new tool — it's a fight that could change which tools you're allowed to use.

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The Big Story

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, just got blacklisted by the Pentagon. The reason: CEO Dario Amodei refused to let the military use Claude for autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance without human oversight. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Amodei a Friday 5 p.m. deadline to comply. He didn't. Within hours, Trump signed an order directing all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic products, and the Pentagon designated the company a "supply chain risk" — a legal label normally reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei.

Here's the twist that matters: OpenAI struck a Pentagon deal the same day with the exact same safety restrictions Anthropic was blacklisted for. Sam Altman confirmed OpenAI's deal includes prohibitions on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance — the same two red lines Amodei drew. The Pentagon accepted those terms from OpenAI while calling them "fundamentally incompatible with American principles" from Anthropic.

What this means for you: If your business has any federal contracts, you may need to audit your AI stack. The Pentagon's order bars contractors from using Claude even in unrelated workflows. More broadly, this is the first time a U.S. AI company has been treated like a Chinese telecom firm — not for espionage, but for maintaining safety policies. Your AI vendor choice just became a political risk factor, and that's a new reality worth paying attention to.

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Tool of the Week: WordPress.com AI Assistant

What it does: A native AI assistant built directly into the WordPress editor — no plugins, no copy-pasting into ChatGPT.

Why it matters this week: WordPress.com officially launched its built-in AI assistant on February 17. Unlike bolt-on AI writing tools, this one understands your actual site content and layout. It can write, rewrite, rearrange sections, generate images, and build entire pages from a prompt — all without leaving the editor.

How to use it:

1. Open any page or post in the WordPress editor. Click the AI icon in the toolbar.
2. Type a natural-language instruction: "Rewrite this section to sound more confident" or "Move testimonials above pricing."
3. For images, open your media library and use the AI generation tool to create on-brand visuals that match your site's style.

The layout editing is the standout feature. Instead of dragging blocks around, you describe what you want: "Add a three-column pricing table below the hero section." The AI handles the structure, and you fine-tune.

Pricing: Included at no extra cost for Business ($25/month) and Commerce plan subscribers. No separate AI subscription needed.

Try WordPress.com AI Assistant →

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Quick Picks

• Perplexity Computer — A $200/month agent that takes a high-level goal, breaks it into subtasks, and delegates across 19 AI models (Claude, Gemini, GPT-5.2, Grok). Aimed at replacing expensive research subscriptions. New Max subscribers get 20,000 bonus credits.
• Samsung Galaxy S26 — Launched at Galaxy Unpacked with "truly agentic AI." Upgraded Bixby plus your choice of Gemini or Perplexity as default agent. Multi-step background tasks: dictate "email John the meeting summary, check my calendar, and book an Uber" and walk away. Starts at $799.
• Sally AI — Meeting note-taker now auto-joins recurring meetings. Add invite@sally.io once to a recurring calendar event and it joins every instance — Zoom, Meet, and Teams. GDPR compliant, 35+ languages, tasks auto-detected from transcripts. 4-week free trial.

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