Anthropic fought the Pentagon and its share price won

The AI giant's societal capital strategy has already earned it a valuation that has doubled in 10 weeks, even as the US government has tried to damage the business.

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.