When Anthropic refused the Pentagon’s demand for unrestricted military use of its AI models in February 2026 – and was promptly designated a “supply chain risk to national security” – it looked like an unusually principled stance for a company at this scale. A $US380 billion ($530 billion) business telling the US military no, and wearing the consequences.
It is, in fact, a well-trodden pathway in tech. Uber launched illegally in Australia in 2012, accepting criminal charges and regulatory hostility as the cost of building a consumer base large enough to force legislative change. Facebook ignored privacy regulators across multiple jurisdictions for a decade, calculating that a big enough user base would eventually compel governments to accommodate the platform rather than exclude it.
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