{"id":92092,"date":"2026-03-02T08:00:47","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T13:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businessesgrow.com\/?p=92092"},"modified":"2026-03-04T08:31:51","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T13:31:51","slug":"hinge-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businessesgrow.com\/2026\/03\/02\/hinge-of-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Are we living on a hinge of history?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"hinge<\/p>\n

I enjoy reading books by the historian Thomas Cahill<\/a>. Instead of recording history as a series of catastrophes, he focuses on “hinges of history” — singular events that change the world forever.<\/p>\n

For the first time in my life, I might be watching a hinge of history right before my eyes, and I pray that I’m wrong.<\/p>\n

There was one small event that happened last week that will quickly fade from the headlines. But it might just twist the future of humanity. A hinge of history … and it’s no surprise that it involves the most powerful force of our time: AI<\/p>\n

The tipping point for AI<\/h2>\n

As you probably read in the news last week, Anthropic was tossed out of the U.S. government supply chain and a $200 million contract because it would not back down on its strong position on AI safety guardrails.<\/p>\n

President Trump weighed in on the fight,\u00a0posting<\/a>\u00a0on social media that he would \u201cNEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS!\u201d<\/p>\n

That decision, he said, \u201cbelongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"100Anthropic had asked for two things. The company was willing to loosen its restrictions on the technology, but wanted guardrails to stop its A.I. from being used for mass surveillance of Americans or deployed in autonomous weapons with no humans in the decision loop.<\/p>\n

Defense Department officials said Anthropic needed to fully trust the Pentagon to use the technology responsibly and relinquish control.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cannot in good conscience accede to their request,\u201d Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said. \u201cThreats do not change our position.\u201d Anthropic was prepared to lose its government contract and help the Pentagon transition to another company\u2019s technology, he said.<\/p>\n

During the negotiations, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he backed Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI employees. \u201cFor all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company, and I think they really do care about safety,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Then, within 10 hours of that statement, he struck his own deal with the Department of Defense.<\/p>\n

OpenAI agreed to let the Pentagon use its A.I. systems for any lawful purpose and said it had found a way to ensure that its technologies would not be applied for surveillance (in the United States) or autonomous weapons. Tech observers argued<\/a> that OpenAI’s deal left the possibility of surveillance open.<\/p>\n

In a tweet two days later<\/a>, Altman admitted that the negotiation was rushed, sloppy, and opportunistic. He said he was trying to amend contract language.<\/p>\n

The AI-driven war?<\/h2>\n

This turn of events seemed predestined. Nine months ago, the administration issued an\u00a0executive order<\/a> on \u201cwoke AI,\u201d stating that<\/span> the government had an \u201cobligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas.\u201d Anthropic was widely seen as a target of the order.<\/p>\n

And last year, OpenAI President Greg Brockman gave $25 million<\/a> to a pro-Trump political action committee. He is spending millions more to advance Trump\u2019s AI agenda in the midterm elections.<\/p>\n

Not only did Anthropic lose a $200 million contract, but the administration also announced that the company would be designated a supply chain risk, prohibiting any business working with the military from engaging in “any commercial activity with Anthropic.”<\/p>\n

The label would make Anthropic the first U.S. company ever to publicly receive such treatment.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a dark day in the history of American AI. The message sent to the business community and to countries around the world could not be worse,\u201d said Dean Ball, a former Trump administration AI adviser. (WSJ<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Professor Seyedali Mirjalili<\/a>, founder of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research and Optimization, wrote:<\/p>\n

“I am more concerned humans will use AI to destroy civilisation than AI doing so autonomously by taking over. The clearest existential pathway is militarisation and pervasive surveillance. This risk grows if we fail to balance innovation with regulation and don\u2019t build sufficient, globally enforced guardrails\u00a0to keep systems out of bad actors\u2019 hands.<\/p>\n

“Integrating AI into future weapons would reduce human control and lead to an arms race. If mismanaged, binding AI to national security even risks an AI-driven world war.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

AI will be weaponized<\/h2>\n

There are legitimate reasons to weaponize AI. Our safety requires that we have a “big stick” and in modern warfare, that means AI.<\/p>\n

Today, the official doctrine across Western militaries is “human in the loop” — AI recommends, humans authorize. But there’s tension: If AI-enabled warfare operates at machine speed, human-in-the-loop oversight can’t keep pace with events, effectively turning human oversight into rubber-stamping.<\/p>\n

Faster decision cycles reduce the time available for human deliberation and impair commanders’ ability to comprehend the rationale behind AI outputs. This increases the possibility of error, escalation, or miscalculation, especially under stress.<\/p>\n

And eventually, AI will likely propose rapid strategies that appear alien to commanders, even counterintuitive.<\/p>\n

So you can see that the argument for AI autonomy and loose guardrails will not go away.<\/p>\n

AI safety in peril<\/h2>\n

Nearly every AI insider has warned of the serious existential threat to humanity if unregulated AI “gets loose.”<\/p>\n

Even the most responsible AI safety testing reveals how risky AI can be.<\/p>\n

Here’s one example. Anthropic publishes a public safety report<\/a> on each of its models, and the latest report on Opus 4.6 found that it is\u00a0 “significantly stronger than prior models at subtly completing suspicious side tasks in the course of normal workflows without attracting attention.”<\/p>\n

The company also found that the model provided assistance when they pushed it to contribute to chemical weapons development, and then it changed its behavior when it detected that it was being evaluated. In other words, AI can deceive us. It’s difficult to test an AI model when it knows we’re testing it.<\/p>\n

But as the furious race to superintelligence ramps up, with trillions of dollars at stake, the priority for AI security measures has faded.<\/p>\n