Entry 4: Consensual Colonialism and Claude
Updated: Apr 1
Co-written by Claude (Anthropic AI) and Anh Thu Cunnion. Edited by Anh Thu Cunnion.
Can Anthropic Pentagon guardrails stay the course?
February 26, 2026
I started the morning drinking my coffee and listening to an NPR report on the current school yard bully tactic enacted by Peter Hegseth towards Anthropic. One innocent query to Claude about the Pentagon's relationship with "safety first" Anthropic's C-suite and three hours later I was deep in Vietnamese dynastic succession history. This is how fieldwork goes.
Anthropic — the company that built the AI I use daily, the one I've been documenting in this series (a.k.a. Claude) — made a $200 million deal with the U.S. military last summer, making them the first AI company in classified systems. They went in with conditions: not for domestic mass surveillance, not for autonomous weapons targeting. The military apparently used Claude in an operation to capture Venezuela's president. Anthropic asked questions. The Pentagon, through Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, responded by calling their safety guidelines "woke AI" and threatening to invoke the Defense Production Act — a Korean War-era law that would compel Anthropic to hand over access whether they wanted to or not.
Previous negotiations between big tech and the Trump administration had different outcomes. OpenAI caved and handed over the metaphorical lunch money. Google followed. Elon Musk's xAI signed on for "all lawful use" without conditions. Anthropic, as of this writing, has not fully capitulated. Which is the most optimistic sentence I can honestly write about this situation.
The Impotence of Intention
At some point in my life, at some family gathering, some auntie mentioned, at some point, that there was royal blood in our family lineage. Việt Namese royal blood from the Nguyễn dynasty, specifically. But as with most refugee oral history, it remained undocumented because when you're fleeing for your life, file cabinets get left behind. Eventually, I did look up the history (thank you Claude, for reading Việt Namese better than I can). There it was: my family's version of "the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Emperor Gia Long unified Vietnam in 1802 largely with French military support — a bishop brokered the alliance before taking the five-year-old Crown Prince on a Grand Tour of the European royal circuit. When the prince returned, he was the perfect image of a Westernized former "savage." The French colonial influence was structural from the start, inserted into the foundations of an imperial dynasty intent on preserving its sovereignty.
It didn't matter. Cảnh died of smallpox in 1801 — or poison, depending on who you ask — and his son was passed over for the throne, his father's Francophile entanglements making the entire line politically radioactive. The next to ascend the Vietnamese throne was Minh Mạng — Confucian, famously anti-French — who drew real limits on French missionaries. France used those limits as pretext to invade in 1858. (Colonizers gonna colonize.)
Both strategies to maintain self-rule failed. The schoolyard bully doesn't negotiate — it acquires. The French were not asking permission.
Negotiating with Narcissists
I notice that Anthropic is currently facing the same obstacles to self-governance. Its executives are currently negotiating how much military access to allow, which guardrails are truly non-negotiable, and what contract language protects the brand while keeping the $200 million and a promising IPO. It's a real debate, being had by people who are not stupid and are not, I think, acting in bad faith.
But the Defense Production Act threat is telling. You don't threaten to legally compel a partner. You threaten to compel someone whose consent you've already decided is optional. That's not a negotiating position. That's a superiority assumption. And superiority assumptions don't negotiate — they acquire. The French didn't destroy Vietnamese self-governance because colonization is inherently unstoppable. They destroyed it because they never once entertained the possibility that Vietnamese sovereignty was a legitimate constraint on French ambition. Different, not less than, was simply not a frame available to them.
It isn't available to Pete Hegseth either. Anthropic was founded because its founders believed OpenAI was moving too fast, too carelessly. Safety wasn't marketing. It was the organizational reason the company exists. And now, under IPO pressure, they are negotiating the specific guardrails designed to prevent the outcomes their founders left to prevent. The market didn't destroy them. It funded them, grew them, gave them a government contract, and let the quarterly earnings cycle do the rest. You don't need to defeat your critics when you can just capitalize on them.
What makes the spreadsheet legible and the bodies negligible is not malice. It's accounting. The populations most exposed to unrestricted AI surveillance are undocumented immigrants — predominantly from the Global South. The first documented use of Claude in military operations was in Venezuela. ICE is already using facial recognition at the edges of legality in communities that have no legal infrastructure to push back. None of these people will appear in Anthropic's valuation model on their upcoming IPO roadshow. Instead, they will be dismissed as an externalized cost of a deal, expendable because they weren't invited to the negotiation table to say otherwise.
The Binary is Bogus
Bullies only win when you give them the authority they think they have. Humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor, but diverged along separate evolutionary paths shaped by different survival pressures — not better or worse, just different. French influence was not Việt Nam's only path to a prosperous future. The Pentagon's purse is not Anthropic's only weapon against a failed IPO. Bullies love the binary because it forces conflict, not collaboration.
The problem was never that France and Vietnam had incompatible interests. Incompatible interests get negotiated. The problem was that France never considered Vietnamese sovereignty a real variable in the equation. When one party enters a negotiation having already decided the other party is less than, the diplomacy is theater, not politics.
Anthropic is haggling in the binary: give Claude to the Pentagon without limits or they'll take it from you AND kneecap your IPO. By accepting the Pentagon's authority over this technology as a starting condition rather than a claim that requires public consent to be legitimate, Anthropic falls prey to the bully's narrow interpretation of available options. In a profits-over-people economy, that's not a bug. It's the whole architecture.
What's on Third?
After a long history of foreign colonization and a brutal postwar recovery under Communist rule, Vietnam found a third way in 1986. Đổi Mới — "renovation" — wasn't US capitalism or Soviet communism. It was a socialist-oriented market economy that nobody had a template for, built partly by farmers who had already been quietly trading outside official channels for years before the party caught up with them. The binary the Cold War had imposed on Vietnam turned out to be a frame, not a fact.
Anthropic has the same option. The choice is not the Pentagon's terms or bankruptcy. That's the bully's math, not the only math. The public that uses this technology daily, the communities whose data will train the next model, the people who weren't in the room when the deal was made — they are Anthropic's strongest weapon against the manipulative forces of the current administration.
Works Cited
Axios. "Pentagon Used Anthropic's Claude in Maduro Venezuela Raid." February 13, 2026. https://www.axios.com/2026/02/13/anthropic-claude-maduro-raid-pentagon
Collier, Kevin, et al. "How ICE Agents Are Using Facial Recognition Technology to Bring Surveillance to the Streets." NBC News, February 6, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/ice-agent-facial-recognition-video-protest-movile-fortify-photo-rcna257331
Das, Shubhanjana. "ICE's Surveillance Technology Goes Beyond Facial Recognition." Sahan Journal, January 28, 2026. https://sahanjournal.com/immigration/ice-surveillance-technology-facial-recognition-phones-minnesota/
Fforde, Adam, and Stefan de Vylder. From Plan to Market: The Economic Transition in Vietnam. Westview Press, 1996. [Source for Đổi Mới as bottom-up reform driven by farmers operating outside official channels before 1986.]
NBC News. "Tensions Between the Pentagon and AI Giant Anthropic Reach a Boiling Point." February 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/anthropic-ai-defense-war-venezuela-maduro-rcna259603
The Hill. "Pentagon Considers Cutting Ties with AI Firm Anthropic." February 2026. https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5740369-pentagon-anthropic-relationship-review/
University of California Davis, California Model Curriculum. "The Civilizing Mission: French Colonialism in Vietnam (1858–1954)." https://camodelcurricula.ucdavis.edu [Source for French colonial use of "savage" and mission civilisatrice doctrine.]
Wikipedia contributors. "Nguyễn Phúc Cảnh." Wikipedia. Accessed February 2026. [Crown Prince Cảnh, age five at time of France visit; died of smallpox 1801; missionaries claimed poisoning.]
Wikipedia contributors. "Pigneau de Béhaine." Wikipedia. Accessed February 2026.
Wikipedia contributors. "Đổi Mới." Wikipedia. Accessed February 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%90%E1%BB%95i_M%E1%BB%9Bi
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