Machining World First Transparent Hydraulic Press Tools

YouTube:

Welcome to another exciting episode of Beyond the Press, where we take you behind the scenes of creating our unique transparent tools for our 150 ton hydraulic press seen on hydraulic press channel.

In this episode, we dive deep into the process of designing, machining, polishing, and testing our latest creation - transparent tools made from high-quality acrylic. We've invested 3000€ into these plastics to ensure we're working with the best materials possible.

Watch as we transform these raw materials into fully functional, transparent tools through a meticulous process of design and machining. Our workshop is buzzing with the sounds of lathes, milling machines, and polishers, all working in harmony to bring our vision to life.

We'll guide you through every step of the process, from the initial design sketches to the final polishing touches. You'll see firsthand how we maintain the transparency of the acrylic while ensuring the tools are robust and functional.

But we're not just about the process - we're also about the results. That's why we put our transparent tools to the test, demonstrating their effectiveness and durability.

This video is a must-watch for anyone interested in machining, workshop processes, tool creation, or simply enjoys watching a satisfying transformation from raw materials to finished product.

Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe to Beyond the Press for more behind-the-scenes looks at our workshop and the fascinating world of tool creation.

Note that I did not watch the whole thing. I started at the beginning, sampled four or five sections and then zipped to the end for the first test at about 30:17. Wonderful!

Government surveillance and AI (the Pentagon vs. Anthropic)

Ezra Klein, Why the Pentagon Wants to Destroy Anthropic, NYTimes, Mar. 6, 2026.

My guest today is Dean Ball. He is a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and author of the newsletter Hyperdimensional. He was also a senior policy adviser on A.I. and emerging tech for the Trump White House, and the primary staff drafter of America’s A.I. Action Plan. But he’s been furious at what they’re doing here.

Somewhat into the conversation:

Klein: Didn’t Pete Hegseth have posters around the Department of War saying: “I want you to use A.I.”?

Ball: [Laughs.] They are very enthusiastic about A.I. adoption.

Here’s how I would think about what these systems can do in a national security context.

First of all, there’s a longstanding issue that the intelligence community collects more data than it can possibly analyze. I remember seeing something from, I forget which intelligence agency, but one of them, that essentially said that it collects so much data every year that it would need eight million intelligence analysts to properly process all of it.

That’s just one agency, and that’s far more employees than the federal government has as a whole.

What can A.I. do? Well, you can automate a lot of that analysis — transcribing text and then analyzing that text, signals intelligence processing, things like that. That’s one area. Sometimes that needs to be done in real time for an ongoing military operation, so that might be a good example.

Then, another area is that these models have gotten quite good at software engineering. So there are cyberdefense and cyberoffense operations where they can deliver tremendous utility.

Klein: Let’s talk about mass surveillance here, because my understanding from talking to people on both sides of this — and it has now been fairly widely reported — is that this contract fell apart over mass surveillance at the final, critical moment.

Emil Michael goes to Dario Amodei and says: We will agree to this contract, but you need to delete the clause that is prohibiting us from using Claude to analyze bulk-collected commercial data.

Ball: Yes.

Klein: Why don’t you explain what’s going on there?

Ball: The first thing I want to say is that national security law is filled with gotchas.

It’s filled with legal terms of art, terms that we use colloquially quite a bit, where the actual statutory definition of that term is quite different from what you would infer from the colloquial use of the term. [...]

... this incident is in the training data for future models. Future models are going to observe what happened here, and that will affect how they think of themselves and how they relate to other people.

“Surveillance” is the collection or acquisition of private information, but that doesn’t include commercially available information. So if you buy something, if you buy a data set of some kind and then you analyze it, that’s not necessarily surveillance under the law.

Klein: So if they hack my computer or my phone to see what I’m doing on the internet, that’s surveillance.

Ball: That would be surveillance. If they put cameras everywhere, that would be surveillance.

But if there are cameras everywhere, and they buy the data from the cameras, and then they analyze that data, that might not necessarily be surveillance.

Klein: Or if they buy information about everything I’m doing online, which is very available to advertisers, and then use it to create a picture of me — that’s not necessarily surveillance.

Ball: Or where you physically are in the world. Yes.

I’ll step back for a second and just say that there’s a lot of data out there, there’s a lot of information that the world gives off — your Google search results, your smartphone location data, all these things.

The reason that no one really analyzes it in the government is not so much that they can’t acquire it and do so. It’s because they don’t have the personnel. They don’t have millions and millions of people to figure out what the average person is up to.

The problem with A.I. is that A.I. gives them that infinitely scalable work force. Thus, every law can be enforced to the letter with perfect surveillance over everything. And that’s a scary future.

Klein: We think of the space between us and certain forms of tyranny, or the feared panopticon, as a space inhabited by legal protection. But one thing that seems to be at the core of a lot of fear is that it’s, in fact, not just legal protection. It’s actually the government’s inability to have the absorption of that level of information about the public and then do anything with it.

Ball: Yes.

Klein: And if all of a sudden you radically change the government’s ability without changing any laws, you have changed what is possible within those laws.

Friday Fotos: 51 Pacific in review

Hiring of software engineers is UP

Citadel Securities published this graph showing a strange phenomenon.

Job postings for software engineers are actually seeing a massive spike.

Classic example of the Jevons paradox. When AI makes coding cheaper, companies actually may need a lot more software engineers, not… pic.twitter.com/Ov4xmotDfc

— Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) March 5, 2026

The Discipline of Literary Criticism: A Quixotic Essay about Thinkers, Methods and Authority

New working paper. Title above, links, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/164963582/The_Discipline_of_Literary_Criticism_A_Quixotic_Essay_about_Thinkers_Methods_and_Authority_A_Working_Paper 

SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=6352618 

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/401591370_The_Discipline_of_Literary_Criticism_A_Quixotic_Essay_about_Thinkers_Methods_and_Authority

Abstract: This working paper examines the intellectual status of literary criticism as an academic discipline in the United States. Beginning from a playful prompt inspired by Tyler Cowen’s book GOAT: Who Is the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does It Matter?, the essay initially sets out to identify the “greatest” literary critics. Very quickly, however, the exercise reveals a deeper problem: unlike economics, the population of figures who count as literary critics is difficult to define, and the criteria by which they might be evaluated are far from clear. The project therefore shifts from ranking critics to examining the boundaries, origins, and intellectual ambitions of the discipline itself.

The essay traces the emergence of contemporary academic literary criticism to the mid-twentieth century, using Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry as a marker of the New Criticism’s institutional consolidation within American universities. From there it examines the crisis that arose in the 1960s when disagreements about interpretation raised doubts about whether literary criticism could claim the status of cumulative knowledge. The 1966 Johns Hopkins structuralism conference serves as a pivotal moment, bringing figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida into the orbit of literary studies and helping to catalyze the rise of “Theory”—a broad set of interpretive approaches drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and other disciplines.

Through discussions of figures such as Coleridge, Frye, Girard, Derrida, and Harold Bloom, the essay explores competing conceptions of literary criticism: as pedagogy, as cultural guardianship, as theoretical inquiry, and as personal commentary on great works. Bloom’s eventual retreat from academic criticism toward a more public and personal mode of literary judgment is treated as emblematic of the discipline’s ongoing uncertainty about its intellectual foundations.

Contents

Introduction: The Formation of an Academic Discipline 3
1. The search for GOAT Literary Critics 6
2. A discipline is founded: Brooks & Warren, Northrop Frye, and S. T. Coleridge 23
3. Structuralism and its aftermath: Girard, Lévi-Strauss, and Derrida 32
Character in the Age of Adam Smith [GOAT economist], an interlude 56
4. What’s up with the Bard? [Bloom, Cowen, and Girard] 59
Harold Bloom and Hillis Miller on the Demise of Literary Studies 71
5. Harold Bloom, the one and only 73
Appendix 1: The Chatbots Comment on this Essay 94
Appendix 2: Commentary on the Profession 98
Appendix 3: Open Letters about Literary Criticism 100
Appendix 4: Naturalist Literary Criticism 101

Introduction: The Formation of an Academic Discipline

I started this project on a whim, as I often do. Tyler Cowen had just announced his book, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter, and I thought: Why don’t I do the greatest literary critics? And that’s what I set out to do.

But I had no plan, just a vague intention. When I began this project I had no idea, for example, that I would end it with a discussion of Harold Bloom, giving him more attention than any other critic or that I would deposit a longish piece about Susan Sontag in the middle of my Bloom discussion. No, I didn’t plan that, I hadn’t even anticipating discussing Bloom at all.

Once I got started, however, whole thing evolved more or less organically and is something of an opportunistic hodge-podge of various kinds of intellectual materials, prose that I’ve written (the biggest single chunk of material), lists from Wikipedia, queries to ChatGPT, charts from Google Ngrams, and topic model charts. Why don’t we agree that its form is an exercise in avant-garde criticism intended to mime the jagged and fuzzy state of the discipline?

This diagram depicts the argument that has emerged during this exercise. Read it as moving from the past, at the left, on through the present to the future, at the right:

I locate the beginning of the contemporary academic discipline of literary criticism in the mid-20th century pedagogical anthology, Understanding Poetry, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warran, which I discuss in some detail later in this essay. Commentary on literature shades off into the past back through Samuel Johnson in the modern world and through Aristotle in the ancient world, and both classical and vernacular literature was studied in the nineteenth-century German universities that provided the model on which American universities were established, but the contemporary academic study of literature is based on interpretive methods and ideas that crystalized in the middle of the 20th century. Brooks & Warren are a convenient marker of that activity. It was known as the New Criticism, a term still in use for a certain body of work.

By the 1960s, however, that interpretive activity had become problematic. Some critics became bothered by the fact that different critics arrived at different interpretive conclusions about the same texts. “How,” they came to wonder, “how can we count this as knowledge if we can’t agree on meanings?” And so, some scholars at Johns Hopkins invited a group of Continental thinkers, mostly French, but not entirely, to a symposium in the Fall of 1966. The symposium was organized around structuralism, an interdisciplinary movement of the human sciences that emerged in Europe at the middle of the century. A French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss was the nominal head of the movement. He was invited to the symposium, but couldn’t make it. As it turned out, however, the star of the conference was a young philosopher, Jacques Derrida, who skewered Lévi-Strauss with his contribution, thus sowing the first seeds of poststructuralism. Note that neither of them is a literary critic, but they have had as much if note more influence on literary criticism than anyone who was and is primarily a literary critic.

And so I have indicated them at the middle of the diagram, with one of them pointed toward the future and the other pointing toward the past. The direction of those arrows reflects my judgment, but it should by no means be considered as reflective of the discipline. The discipline would come to reject Lévi-Strauss, but an increasingly large portion of it would come to at least accept, if not embrace, the insights of Derrida. I have a great deal to say about that later in the essay. And I want to say a bit about my own position in this – I was a student at Johns Hopkins when the French landed – just a bit later in this introduction.

Derrida’s method, deconstruction (a word he coined), opened the floodgates to a variety of interpretive methods that came to be collectively known as “Theory,” with a capital “T.” Theory is the application of some approach to the study of the human mind and/or society that is used as a vehicle for interpreting literary (and other) texts. Psychoanalysis and Marxism were the first through the door followed by feminism, African-American studies and so on and so forth.

Understandably many (older) critics resisted these new dispensations, none more forcefully than Harold Bloom. While he spent a few years trying to go along with the program, during the 1980s he broke ranks and not only abandoned poststructuralism but he pretty much abandoned academic literary criticism in favor of addressing himself to the general educated public in through edited collections and a variety of books, including one on American religion (which I’ve read), and big fat books on The Western Canon and Shakespeare. I’ve given over the last 20 pages of this essay (excluding the appendices) to Bloom, with a diversion into Susan Sontag, though it becomes 35 pages if you include the immediately preceding remarks on Shakespeare’s position in the canon, a reasonable inclusion given that Bloom is Bardolator in Chief.

That accounts for the position of Bloom on the chart, right of center at the apex of a triangle trailing off into the past. He abandoned the modes of thought ushered in by Brooks & Warren and retreated into a more personalistic mode of criticism, one that allowed him to luxuriate in his own opinions as amplified through his tremendous, but ultimately narrow, erudition. Bloom became an empire unto himself.

As for me, as I said, I was a student at Johns Hopkins when the structuralism conference took place. I didn’t attend it, didn’t even know it was happening, but I was introduced to structuralism and semiotics by Dr. Richard Macksey, a book-collecting polymath who did much of the organizational groundwork for the conference. Without going into detail, I decided that the natural progression from Lévi-Strauss was into cognitive science and computational semantics, which I pursued with David Hays in linguistics while getting a Ph.D. in English at The State University of New York at Buffalo. And that effectively took me well beyond the disciplinary boundaries of literary criticism.

While I have continued my interest in literature and have written both practical commentary and theoretical and methodological studies, I have also pursued other intellectual interests – cultural evolution, cognitive science, music, film, graffiti, this and that. The upshot is that I am not as widely and deeply read in literary criticism as I would have been had I decided to mind my Ps and Qs for the last 40 years.

That’s an obvious disqualification for writing a longish essay intended to do for literary critics what Tyler Cowen did for economists, identify the GOATs (Greatest of All Time). But that, as you will quickly see, that’s not what I ended up doing. Rather, I used that objective as a vehicle for examining the origins and boundaries of the academic discipline of literary criticism, which I have depicted in that diagram. And that, I would argue, is a task for which my outsider status suits me well. I can see what’s going on in a way that those in the middle of it cannot.

You be the judge.

Have at it.

* * * * *

Note: I’ve included appendices listing various articles I’ve written about the profession. The last one is about the opportunities opened up by computing, both as a conceptual model and a practical tool.

Sun (dirty) snow Hoboken

Market Volatility in Asia Swings on Energy and AI

Meaghan Tobin, What the Extraordinary Market Volatility in Asia Says About Energy and A.I. NYTimes, Mar. 5, 2026.

Stocks across most of Asia rallied on Thursday, a day after tumbling over fears around the region’s heavy reliance on imported oil and gas.

The turnaround illustrates the hair-trigger reactions of investors around the world who are trying to assess the immediate and possible long-term effects of the strikes on Iran by the United States and Israel and the repercussions around the Persian Gulf, where much of the world’s oil and gas is produced. [...]

Over the past year, intense optimism about artificial intelligence has led investors to pour money into tech stocks in Taiwan and South Korea. The two places make most of the equipment like computer chips and servers that power the world’s A.I. systems. They also depend on imports for virtually all of their energy.

The stock market seesaw served as a reminder not only of the central role that these two East Asian democracies play in the global economy, but how bullish investors remain about A.I.

There's more at the link.

A Lesson from the 60s: “For What It’s Worth”

TO WAR! Part 1: War and America's National Psyche

Once again I"m bumping this to the top of the queue. And for obvious reasons. Once again a foolhardy President has taken the country into a war with no obvious end in sight, just a squandering of human live and productive resources.

* * * * * 

As part of a special WAR EDITION of New Savanna I'm reproducing a set of notes I wrote up during the 2000 Presidential Election. I first published them on NS back in November of 2011 and I'm republishing them now in recognition of yet another turn in the long-spinning wheel of American mythology. Yet another bump to the top, as I'm thinking of this stuff, this time in connection with the relationship between war and nationalism.

Everything is connected to everything else and the causal forces meeting in the historical present stretch back into the past without end. Figuring out where to start is not easy. My sense is that we need to focus our attention on the dissolution of the Soviet Empire in the late 1980s. That left the nation without a national scapegoat, thus radically altering the nation’s psycho-cultural landscape. We no longer had Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire to kick around.

As some of you may know, my thinking on these matters has been strongly influenced by an essay Talcott Parsons published in 1947 on “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World”. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.

For the most part I have used Parsons, and others as well, in arguing about the nature of racism in the USA. While Africans were brought to this country for economic reasons it seems to me that during, say, the 19th century African Americans increasingly assumed a dual psychological role in the white psyche. On the one hand, they were a source of entertainment. On the other, they were convenient scapegoats, as became evident with the lynchings that emerged during Reconstruction and continued well into the last century. That is to say, African America served as a geographically internal target for the ethnic and nationalist antipathy Parsons discussed.

Thus we have the thesis in Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March (U. Chicago, 1999). They argue that African Americans have been able to move forward on civil rights only during periods where the nation faced an external threat - the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the major wars of the first half of the 20th century. When the external danger had subsided, gains were lost. From my point of view, they’re arguing that, when external danger looms large and demands attention, the citizenry can focus aggression there and so ease up on the internal colony. Beyond this, of course, it becomes necessary to recruit from the colony to fight the external enemy, both physically and propagandistically - be kind to your black citizens when you fight the Nazis, etc.

  

Vietnam was the last major war of the Cold War period. As it receded into the past, a political backlash set in and affirmative action came under attack. That’s the situation we faced when the Soviet Empire collapsed. With the major external threat suddenly collapsed, there was a crisis of aggression - I’m reminded of the phrase “conservation of aggression” coined by Robert Wright. The fall of the Evil Empire deprived a great many people of an object for aggressive impulses. What then, happened to that aggression?

It got directed elsewhere. My sense is that the political rhetoric on a number of issues heated up in the wake of the fall: gun control, abortion, the arts, gays, affirmative action, violence in the media. A number of these issues come under the rubric of the so-called “culture wars”. Each of these issues was already on the political agenda, and had been there for some time.

Sexy music had been inspiring pulpit denunciations and legislative action since the early decades of the 20th century. Movies have been problematic since the beginning and the NAACP put itself on the political map by organizing protests against “Birth of a Nation.” But, it seems to me, that the scope of politicized cultural contest broadened. [If I’m correct, then this could be verified empirically by doing content analysis of periodicals, looking at opinion polls, crime rates, etc.]

Perhaps the most interesting redirection, however, was into the so-called War on Drugs. Political concern about drug use is not, of course, new. It goes back to Prohibition - which, was, of course, intimately linked with that objectionably sexy music - and got redirected by and in reaction to the counter-cultural 60s and 70s. However, it is my impression that the current effort ramped up in the wake of the Soviet collapse.

This war on drugs has had substantial material consequences: increased law enforcement and court activity, a considerable increase in the prison population and, of course, in the prison industry. Our prisons now have a relatively large population of non-violent offenders who are disproportionately black, taken off the voting rolls as felons, and available for labor in various prison-based enterprises. I do not know whether or not the increase in the economic “weight” of the prison sector is roughly equal to the losses suffered by the defense sector. I would, of course, like to know.

Regardless of how those numbers work out, my basic point is simply that the end of the Cold War changed the psycho-cultural system in a major way. Psycho-cultural aggression had to be redirected and much of it was redirected at targets within the country, rather than externally. That redirection is the central political phenomenon of the 90s and is responsible for much of the ugliness and programmatic futility of current politics.

Addendum 2011: Obviously, this internal redirection of aggression continues. It may well have gotten worse – I wonder what ‘sentiment analysis’ would turn up if applied to documents written over the past decade? The problem facing us, of course, is not that of finding suitable targets for this displaced aggression. No, we have to restructure our way of living so as to reduce our need to have such targets. That’s a tough one, and one that will take a generation or three.

Addendum 2014: Obviously the Arab world is a perfect target for this repressed aggression. We've got a long-standing and well-crafted Orientalist mythology of the exotic and crazy Arab Other. I fear we're going to be banging on this nail for a long time.

 

Note 2026: The second post in this series has a clip from the Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup, that can be taken as a comment on how Trump arrived at the decision to attack Iran: TO WAR! Part 2: A Marx Brothers Analysis of America's War Craziness.  

Readership for tech media is WAY DOWN

No discussion of tech media can get past this basic traffic fact: in the AI world, Google and social no longer refer traffic, which means that the vast majority of readers just never find you in the first place. Analysis: https://t.co/zZW6PhxhZ2 pic.twitter.com/WgBUIDWoIF

— Danny Crichton (@DannyCrichton) March 3, 2026

The river: across, up, and back

The Chinese are optimistic about AI, no Doomers

Vivian Wang, Where are China’s A.I. Doomers? NYTimes, Mar. 4, 2026.

People in China are among the most excited in the world about A.I., according to a KPMG survey of 47 countries last year. While 69 percent of people in China said the technology’s benefits outweighed its risks, only 35 percent of Americans agreed. Other polls have shown similar disparities.

The question is, why?

The answer may be related to how the technology has been deployed in each country, as well as how the government and industry leaders have talked about it.

I don’t find this at all surprising. AI Doom is a projective fantasy, as I argued a couple of years ago in 3 Quarks Daily. Continuing on:

... Chinese tech companies have focused intensely on real-world applications for A.I. By contrast, many leading American tech companies have been focused on more abstract goals, like developing the most cutting-edge model, or achieving artificial general intelligence.

In addition, most of China’s leading A.I. models are free to use, unlike in the United States, where users have to pay for chatbots like ChatGPT to access all their features. (In fact, Chinese companies have been giving away money and luxury cars to entice people to download their apps.)

As a result, Chinese consumers are feeling the benefits of A.I., said Bai Guo, a professor who studies the digital economy at China Europe International Business School in Shanghai.

“A lot of things can already be helped by A.I., and people find that interesting, that’s useful, and so there are quite a lot of positive and active feelings toward it,” Professor Bai said. Potential dangers, such as unemployment or increased inequality, still feel remote.

The Chinese government has emphasized practical use: “Officials say that A.I. could help solve China’s thorniest problems, such as inequalities in health care, or an aging work force.” And so:

In August, the government laid out a plan, called A.I.+, for A.I. to penetrate more than 70 percent of Chinese society by 2027, and 90 percent by 2030. The plan said A.I. will “promote a revolutionary leap in productive ability” and “create higher-quality, beautiful lives.”

Because Chinese officials are promoting A.I. as an economic engine, they may also be silencing those who are more pessimistic about it. Crashes involving autonomous driving have attracted widespread attention online, only for posts to be censored. State media outlets have compared concerns about job loss for taxi drivers to the Luddite movement.

However:

Users have also raised concerns about how easily the government’s restrictions can be bypassed. A Chinese feminist group recently highlighted tutorials for making sexually explicit deepfakes that circulate openly on Chinese social media. Attempts to report the images were unsuccessful, the group said.

The Chinese government has also begun more directly addressing the technology’s potential for disrupting jobs, mental health or the Communist Party’s grip on power. [...]

For all of its potential, China must not let A.I. “spiral out of control,” Mr. Xi warned during a recent meeting of the leaders of the Communist Party.

There’s more at the link.

OJ and waffle

The Pentagon's position on Anthropic is legally hopeless

Michael Endrias and Alan Z. Rozenshtein have a substantial article about the Anthropic mess: Pentagon’s Anthropic Designation Won’t Survive First Contact with Legal System, Lawfare, 1,2,26.

From their introduction:

From the government's perspective, Claude does pose some concerning vendor reliability issues. But the specific actions Hegseth and Trump took have serious legal problems. The designation exceeds what the statute authorizes. The required findings don't hold up. And Hegseth's own public statements may have doomed the government's litigation posture before it even begins.

After considerable reasoning:  

Step back and consider what these positions amount to together. The government is arguing that Claude is so vital to military operations that it cannot tolerate any contractual restrictions on it—while simultaneously claiming that Claude poses such a grave supply chain risk that the entire federal government must stop using it, every defense contractor must sever commercial ties with its maker, and the company should be cut off from the cloud infrastructure it needs to survive. It’s like the joke from “Annie Hall”: The food is terrible and the portions are too small.

That might be funny as a bit of Borscht Belt humor. It is less amusing as a description of the United States government's strategy toward one of the companies leading America's effort to develop what may be the most important technology of the century. What Hegseth is actually describing is not a supply chain risk determination but something closer to the beginning of a partial nationalization of the AI industry: Seize the technology and, if you can’t, destroy the company to ensure that no future AI developer dares negotiate terms the Pentagon dislikes.

Arbitrary and capricious review requires, at minimum, logical coherence. The government cannot credibly maintain that a vendor is indispensable, that its continued integration poses no immediate danger, that its technology is reliable enough for active combat operations in Iran, and that it is nonetheless so dangerous it must be severed from the entire federal procurement ecosystem—all in the same week. Even a court inclined to defer on national security matters will notice that these propositions cannot all be true at once. [...]

The most obvious: if the Pentagon finds Anthropic's usage restrictions unacceptable, it can simply decline to renew the contract and move to a competitor. That is a routine procurement decision, available to any buyer who dislikes a vendor's terms. It requires no supply chain designation, no secondary boycott, and no government-wide ban. The fact that the government reached past this straightforward option for the most extreme tool in the procurement arsenal—one designed for foreign adversaries infiltrating the supply chain—is itself evidence that the designation is doing something other than managing supply chain risk. [...]

The legal problems are so glaring, in fact, that a cynical possibility suggests itself: The administration knows this won't survive judicial review and is doing it anyway, so that when they inevitably lose, they can still claim to have gone hard against Anthropic. This is designation as political theater: a show of force that was never meant to stick.

But there is another possibility. The administration may genuinely believe that a Truth Social post and a procurement statute designed for state-influenced Russian and Chinese tech companies can destroy an American AI lab over a contract dispute. If so, they are in for a rude awakening. The statute wasn't built for this, the facts don't support it, and the courts will say so.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

The Shipyard

David Gallagher, The Exact Shade of Gray; THE SHIPYARD. By Juan Carlos Onetti. The New York Times, June 16, 1968.

An unexpected consequence of Doomer propaganda: The Pentagon wants to control the Doomsday Device

Casey Mock, Pete Hegseth Got His Happy Meal, Tomorrow's Mess, March 2, 2026.

Concerning the current dust-up between the Pentagon and Anthropic:

Something like this was always going to happen. Not because of Hegseth specifically, not because of this administration, but because of the narrative the AI safety community — the world that produced Anthropic, and whose language Anthropic still speaks even while disavowing its label — has been pushing for at least the last three years.

 [Oh, much longer than that, much longer. – BB]

Imagine a six-year-old whose entire media diet includes a steady stream of McDonald’s commercials, a Happy Meal ad at every break, focused on whatever toy is the latest to be included along with the McNuggets. Now put that child in a car that drives past a McDonald’s. What happens?

The Rationalist and Effective Altruist communities — the intellectual cultures that gave us Anthropic, influence many of their employees, and which still shape how Dario Amodei talks about his company and his technology — have spent the better part of a decade insisting, with increasing urgency, that artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology in human history. Maybe it’s civilization-ending; maybe it’s civilization-saving. Either way, it’s the hinge on which everything henceforth turns.

With policymakers and the media largely having accepted the premise, thus surrendered was the argument for treating AI like a normal technology subject to normal governance. Policies being pushed by Effective Altruist groups, like 2024’s SB1047 in California — deprioritize harms happening today for theoretical existential ones in the future; despite the fact that today’s harms that could be existential for the folks experiencing them. These groups incessantly made the case that whoever controls this technology controls the future, and so the hypothetical future needs to be prioritized now. In a Washington now run by people who tend to impulsiveness and contemptuousness of institutional constraint — well, it’s easy to see where this was headed. Hegseth saw the ads for the toy, and so now he wanted his Happy Meal. [...]

Yet the prognostications of the doomer community have been, nearly without exception, wrong — not in small ways, but in the foundational sense that the imagined trajectory keeps failing to materialize. [...]

Thus, this news reveals the rationalists’ under-examined blind spot: they cannot model the messy Pete Hegseths of the world, even as their claims whet Hegseth’s appetite. The rationalist view of the world assumes, at some level, that the relevant actors are optimizing for well-understood, predictable variables and a clear understanding of what best serves their self-interest. What it cannot account for is bad faith, impulsiveness, ideological motivation untethered from evidence, random instances of force majeure, and personal whims and petty rivalries. And so while the doomer community spent years warning about uncontrollable AI systems that do things their creators didn’t intend, they apparently did not consider what would happen when the humans currently running the United States government got access to technology they’d been told was the hinge of history.

H/t Gary Marcus.

I've published an article about Doomers in 3 Quarks Daily: On the Cult of AI Doom, September 12, 2026.