Sovereign AI Infrastructure

Last Friday, the White House ordered every federal agency to stop using Anthropic products within six months. The Defense Secretary designated the company a “supply chain risk to national security” — a label normally reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei or Kaspersky. Anthropic’s crime: they refused to remove two safety guardrails from Claude before deploying it on classified Pentagon networks. No AI for mass domestic surveillance of American citizens. No fully autonomous weapons without human oversight. ...

In Brazil, when advising a customer on endpoint security, there was a mental model we never said out loud. The technical discussion would cover detection rates, false positives, memory footprint — the usual. But underneath it ran a question that never made it into the RFP: who do you want knowing what you’re doing? Russians or Americans? Kaspersky was the default for most of the market — and not because of ideology. Norton and Symantec had spent years earning their reputation for turning Windows machines into molasses, and McAfee was McAfee. Kaspersky worked. It was lighter, faster, cheaper. The fact that its telemetry flowed to Moscow rather than Langley was a feature, not a bug, depending on which side of the table you sat on. ...

A few years ago, I was having dinner with the Americas VP of a European energy supermajor — one of those companies that extracts oil from war zones, negotiates with regimes that don’t appear on polite lists, and operates in places where “political risk” means your assets might get nationalized or your personnel kidnapped. Seventy-plus countries. Active operations in Libya, Nigeria, Angola, Myanmar, Yemen. The kinds of places where security briefings come before breakfast. ...