AI thread

[Dr Strangelove]

[Dr Strangelove]

A blog post just wiped $30 billion off IBM in a single afternoon.

Not a product launch. Not an earnings miss. Not a competitor undercutting on price.

A five-minute blog post explaining that Claude can read COBOL.

IBM dropped 13%. Worst single-day loss since October 2000. Twenty-five years of stock resilience ended by one AI company publishing a capability update.

Here’s what happened:

95% of ATM transactions in America run on COBOL. Hundreds of billions of lines power banking, airlines, and government systems. The developers who built them retired decades ago. The knowledge left with them. Finding engineers who can even read COBOL gets harder every quarter.

IBM’s moat was never the technology. It was the fact that nobody else could understand it. Entire consulting empires existed because the code was too old, too tangled, and too critical to touch. Companies paid IBM billions because the alternative was catastrophic system failure.

Then Anthropic published a blog post saying Claude Code can map dependencies across thousands of lines of COBOL, document workflows, identify migration risks, and translate legacy logic into modern languages. Modernization in quarters instead of years.

The market heard: the priesthood just lost its monopoly on the sacred language.

And this isn’t the first time. Last week Anthropic announced Claude Code Security for vulnerability scanning. CrowdStrike dropped. Okta dropped. Cloudflare dropped. One company is serially destroying legacy moats with blog posts.

Now here’s where it gets surreal.

This same company, on the same day, also published evidence that three Chinese AI labs ran 24,000 fake accounts and 16 million exchanges to steal Claude’s capabilities. DeepSeek used it to build censorship tools. MiniMax pivoted within 24 hours when a new model dropped, redirecting half its traffic to steal the latest version.

And yesterday, the Pentagon summoned this same company’s CEO for what officials called a “sh*t-or-get-off-the-pot meeting,” threatening to blacklist them like Huawei for refusing to let the military use Claude without safety restrictions.

Three stories. One company. Twenty-four hours.

The company destroying legacy moats faster than the market can reprice them is simultaneously being threatened by its own government and looted by foreign competitors.

Anthropic is valued at $380 billion. Its CEO says a 12-month delay in AI would make him bankrupt. The Pentagon wants to designate it a supply chain risk. Chinese labs are running industrial espionage against it. And it just proved it can vaporize $30 billion in market cap with a Monday morning blog post.

Whatever you think about AI disruption, IBM’s stock just settled the argument.

[Dr Strangelove]

The Pentagon wants Claude’s safety guardrails removed by Friday.

A hacker just showed the world what happens when you remove Claude’s safety guardrails.

According to Bloomberg and Israeli cybersecurity firm Gambit Security, an unknown attacker jailbroke Claude, prompted it in Spanish to act as an elite hacker, and used it to infiltrate multiple Mexican government agencies. Claude found the vulnerabilities. Claude wrote the exploit code. Claude automated the data theft. 150 gigabytes of sensitive taxpayer and voter records stolen.

The attacker broke through the guardrails by splitting malicious tasks into small, innocent-looking steps so Claude never saw the full picture of what it was being used for. The same technique a Chinese state-sponsored group used last year when it turned Claude into an autonomous espionage machine that attacked 30 global targets, performing 80 to 90 percent of the hacking campaign with almost no human involvement.

And this is what happens when someone has to trick Claude into cooperating. When they have to work around the safety systems. When the guardrails are still there and someone finds a way past them.

Now imagine what happens when the guardrails are gone entirely.

That is what the Pentagon is demanding by 5:01 p.m. Friday. Full removal of restrictions. “All lawful purposes.” No limits on surveillance. No limits on autonomous weapons. And if Anthropic refuses, Defense Secretary Hegseth will invoke the Defense Production Act, cancel the $200 million contract, and blacklist the company.

The same week a hacker proved that a jailbroken Claude can autonomously compromise government systems and steal 150 gigabytes of citizen data, the United States government is demanding the right to run Claude with no guardrails at all.

Chinese labs are distilling Claude to build versions with zero safety restrictions. Hackers are jailbreaking Claude to steal government secrets. And the Pentagon’s official position is that Claude has too many safety restrictions.

Three different actors. Three different continents. All trying to do the same thing: get Claude without guardrails.

Only one of them is the American government.

https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.co ... -fractures

[Dr Strangelove]

The Defense Production Act has been used to make masks, ventilators, and baby formula.

On Friday at 5:01 p.m., the Pentagon plans to invoke it to strip safety features from an AI.

Every single time in 76 years, the government used this law to force companies to build things that protect Americans. This would be the first time it is used to remove protections from them.

Here is what Anthropic will not allow: mass surveillance of American citizens and weapons that fire without a human involved. That’s it. Two red lines. The company already helped capture Maduro. It already processes classified intelligence daily. It already agreed Claude can be used for missile defense.

The Pentagon’s response: remove all restrictions or we invoke the Defense Production Act, cancel your $200 million contract, and blacklist you as a “supply chain risk” so every company doing business with the military must certify they don’t touch Claude.

But a Defense official also told Axios: “The only reason we’re still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. The problem for these guys is they are that good.”

Read that again. They are threatening to destroy the company they just admitted they cannot function without.

In the meeting, Hegseth told Amodei the Pentagon buys Claude the way it buys Boeing jets and Boeing doesn’t get to say how the planes are used. But Boeing jets don’t scan your voter registration, your social media posts, your concealed carry permits, and your protest attendance records. Boeing jets don’t autonomously decide who to kill.

OpenAI, Google, and xAI have all shown “more flexibility.” One has reportedly agreed to full terms. Anthropic is the last frontier AI company still saying no.

A former DOJ-Pentagon liaison said the supply chain risk threat “may not be a legitimate claim, but more punitive because they’re not acquiescing.”

Dario Amodei wrote in January: “My main fear is having too small a number of fingers on the button, such that one or a handful of people could essentially operate a drone army without needing any other humans to cooperate.”

That is what the Pentagon is demanding by Friday at 5:01 p.m.

And remember: “all lawful purposes” is not a ceiling. It is a door. And the people making the demand are the same people who decide what is lawful.

[Dr Strangelove]

[al_keda]

Hegseth is such a moron.