The Enforcement Agent at Your Door

The Enforcement Agent at Your Door

Daily Debate — 25 February 2026

This morning, a story broke that should concern every person alive. Not because it is surprising, but because it is not.

Pete Hegseth, the United States Defence Secretary, has given Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, until Friday to open the company’s artificial intelligence technology for unrestricted military use. If Anthropic refuses, the Pentagon will terminate its contract, declare the company a supply chain risk, and invoke the Defence Production Act. This law gives the government the power to compel a private business to produce for national defence, whether or not it consents.

Let that settle for a moment. The most powerful government in the world is preparing to use the full force of the state to seize the output of a private technology company. Not because Anthropic has refused to work with the military; it hasn’t. It was the first AI company to deploy its models on classified networks. It holds a $200 million Pentagon contract. It helped with the operation that led to the capture of Nicolás Maduro. What Anthropic has refused to do is remove its two red lines: no autonomous weapons, and no mass surveillance of American citizens.

For drawing those lines, it faces the threat of legal compulsion.

I am not here to pronounce on whether the United States government should use artificial intelligence in its military. I think that is a moot point. It does, and it will continue to do so, and so will its strategic adversaries. AI is already embedded in defence. That horse has bolted.

But notice what is missing from this story. You. Me. Everyone.

No citizen of any country was consulted about whether they are comfortable with the most powerful government on earth unilaterally sequestering the most powerful technology on earth. No parliament debated it. No electorate voted on it. A Defence Secretary summoned a CEO to the Pentagon, set a deadline, and threatened him with the law. And that was it. No debate, no vote, no consultation. Just a deadline.

This tells us several things.

First, it confirms the extraordinary power of these models. If Claude were merely a useful chatbot, no defence secretary would be threatening legal action to control it. Pentagon officials have been remarkably candid about this. One told Axios, in terms that should make everyone pay attention: the only reason we are still talking to these people is that we need them, and we need them now. The problem for these guys is that they are that good. When a government reaches for the Defence Production Act, it is telling you, in the clearest possible language, that what it is reaching for matters more than the norms it is breaking to reach for it.

Second, it reveals how completely our institutions have failed to keep pace. There is no international framework for the military use of frontier AI. There is no treaty. There is no convention. There is no meaningful domestic debate. We have arms control agreements for nuclear warheads, chemical weapons, biological agents, cluster munitions, and landmines. Still, we have nothing, nothing at all, for the technology that may surpass all of them in strategic consequence.

Now, before we go further, let us be honest about something. Unless you hold the cartoonish belief that the people at the helm of the United States government and military are swivel-eyed monsters bent on destruction, then you must accept that whoever is doing whatever to whom is doing it with words like protection, safety, and peace in their minds. You would have to construct a comic book villain for it to be otherwise. Somewhere, somebody in that Pentagon meeting genuinely believes this is the right thing to do.

And that is precisely what makes it so important. This is not a story about the evil of people. It is a story about what this technology can and will do, and about the systems of thought that surround it.

Two things are glaring. The first is that a defence secretary and the military establishment are the ones reaching for this technology, and that, in the end, is about war. Almost all wars are about scarcity. Territory, resources, access, leverage; the grammar of conflict is the grammar of not having enough. And here is the deep irony: used correctly, the very technology being fought over has more to say about ending scarcity than any innovation in human history.

The second is that the public’s exclusion from this process, the way the military is seeking to capture and control this technology behind closed doors, is itself a demonstration of why this movement exists. This is what capture looks like. Not the dramatic seizure of power you see in films, but a quiet meeting in a government building, a deadline whispered over a conference table, a law dusted off and held like a weapon. The public does not even know it is happening until it reads about it the next morning over coffee.

This is why FOME exists. Not to resist AI; that is neither possible nor desirable. Not to take sides in a dispute between a government and a corporation; that is a matter for lawyers and legislatures. But to insist, with everything we have, that the people of this world must be brought into the conversation about what comes next. To ensure the democratised human voice leads us to a safe, appropriate, and rapid transition to an abundant future. A future where the fundamental calculus is not about wars of resource conquest, where the military becomes a security force rather than an instrument of expansion, and where global geopolitical tensions cease to broil and bubble up in the presence of human material wanting.

Because today’s story about a CEO under pressure from a defence secretary will become tomorrow’s enforcement agent at your door, if we are not all careful.

The movement that follows this book, the salons, the broadcasts, the gathering of people from every background and every nation to form a shared thesis about abundance and its governance, is not optional. It is not aspirational. It is the most urgent task any of us will face.

This is not just about our freedom from AI. It is about our freedom from suffering and from each other.

We need everyone alive to contribute to what comes next—starting now.