Steve Bannon says Anthropic 'had it right' in rejecting deal with the Pentagon - Business Insider

So Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist who once advocated for dismantling the 'administrative state,' has now emerged as an unlikely champion of AI safety restraint, praising Anthropic for rejecting a Pentagon deal because it was 'too dangerous.' This from the man who helped install an administration that's currently suing Anthropic over that very blacklisting — the cognitive dissonance would be impressive if it weren't so perfectly emblematic of Washington's regulatory clown car. The Pentagon wanted to operate Anthropic's frontier model Mythos with 'little guardrails,' according to Bannon's podcast remarks, which suggests someone in the Defense Department thought running a potential financial destabilisation engine with minimal oversight was a peachy idea.

Anthropic's refusal, which Bannon says 'had it right,' triggered the Pentagon's blacklisting that's now the subject of litigation — the same blacklisting that sent CEO Dario Amodei scrambling to the White House just last week to negotiate access. So we have a company that's simultaneously too dangerous for the Pentagon to operate safely, yet somehow safe enough for the White House to want access to, while being sued by the administration for being too dangerous to work with. It's a regulatory ouroboros eating its own tail, with Bannon playing the role of the snake's unexpected nutritionist.

What's particularly rich is Bannon's concern about 'little guardrails' coming from someone who spent years arguing for tearing down regulatory structures across government. His sudden conversion to the Church of Caution when it involves AI models that could 'destabilise global finance' — as Barclays' CEO just warned — suggests even the most deregulatory minds draw the line at technologies that might actually break the systems they want to dismantle. The Pentagon's ham-fisted approach of 'blacklist first, negotiate later' has created this absurd spectacle where the company warning about existential risks is being punished for taking those warnings seriously enough to say no to the world's largest military.