Former head of ‘Pentagon’s think tank’ joins Anthropic - Defense One

So the Office of Net Assessment — the Pentagon's internal futurist shop, the place that coined 'Revolution in Military Affairs' — is losing its former boss to Anthropic. He's now a 'strategist-in-residence,' a job title that screams 'we needed a corner office with a view of the revolving door.' His remit? Analysing how AI affects U.S. institutions and competition with China. Because nothing says 'detached strategic analysis' like moving straight from the DoD's think tank to a company that sells advanced AI back to the DoD. The revolving door has been upgraded to an OODA loop.

Anthropic, meanwhile, positions itself as the safety-conscious alternative to OpenAI. But safety-conscious labs still need former Pentagon officials to decode what the military actually wants — and to help them get it. This isn't corruption; it's the natural churn of the military-intellectual complex. The Office of Net Assessment was created in 1973 to think long-term about strategic competition. Now it's feeding talent into the very industry it was supposed to assess from outside. Move fast and break things? No, move deliberately and manipulate procurement.

The timing is exquisite. Just as the US and China escalate AI competition, the person who used to think about China for the Pentagon now thinks about China for Anthropic. Call it 'dual-use' in the most literal sense: one day you're shaping national strategy, the next you're shaping product roadmaps. The gap between public service and private gain has shrunk to the width of a job title. And 'strategist-in-residence'? That's not a title. That's a confession of how we now govern technology: through revolving doors, not guardrails.