How a Contractor’s Claude Agent Got Into the Pentagon

Articles mentioned in this episode:

A Defense Contractor Gave Their Personal AI Agent Access to a Secure Pentagon System The Anthropic S-1 Filing Is Also an AI Doomsday Primer What’s Worth More Than Cash in San Francisco Real Estate? Anthropic Stock Massive Groups of Volunteers Are Ready to Face Down ICE at the Polls

You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer, and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com. How to Listen You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too. Transcript Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors. Brian Barrett: Welcome to the WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor. Zoë Schiffer: I'm Zoë Schiffer, contributing editor. Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science. Zoë Schiffer: This week, Anthropic has officially filed to go public. There is a lot going on in the hundreds of pages that the company submitted as part of its S-1 filing, from staggering earnings and losses, to warnings of AI's existential threat. Obviously, we're talking about Anthropic here. We'll discuss our key takeaways and why this IPO is kind of high stakes, not just for the AI industry, but honestly the entire US economy. Leah Feiger: We're also bringing you a scoop about how a defense contractor plugged Anthropic's Claude into a secure Department of Defense system, in what's really one of the most outlandish uses of AI in the government we've seen so far. Brian Barrett: And the midterms are right around the corner, just a few days away. Massive groups of volunteers all over the country are already getting ready to protect their communities from the potential that ICE officers show up at the polls. We'll get into how grassroots efforts like these are a reflection of a deeply uncertain election cycle. Zoë Schiffer: So on Monday, we learned that Anthropic finally pulled the trigger and publicly filed for its IPO. This has been highly anticipated for a bunch of reasons. Anthropic is expected to raise more money in its IPO than any company in history, and it would be the first major US company focused solely on building AI software to go public. To give you a sense of the scale that we're talking about, the company's valuation went from $183 billion a little over a year ago to $965 billion in its most recent round, and some expect that it could be worth close to $2 trillion once it starts trading. So the filing basically gives us the first real look inside Anthropic's business because it's a private company right now. It doesn't have to report a bunch of stuff. And the numbers are pretty extreme in both directions, billions of dollars in revenue and even more billions in losses, and hundreds of billions that the company has already committed to compute. Because there's a ton to unpack in this paperwork, I thought it would be fun to divide it into green flags, yellow flags, and red flags that we saw from the filing. What do you guys think? Brian Barrett: Yes. Leah Feiger: I'm astounded by how much money is at play here. This is, yes. Brian Barrett: What flag, Leah? What flag is that? Leah Feiger: I don't know. Zoë Schiffer: For the sake of the economy, it's green. Brian Barrett: Great. Green flag. Leah Feiger: For the sake of the economy, it's green. This is so much money, guys. Sue me, but the only thing I can think of right now is that article that WIRED ran a couple of months ago about how people were selling their homes in the Bay Area with the promise of Anthropic stock post-IPO. And I remember at the time I was like, "How close are we to this?" And Zoe said, "Oh, they're going to make so much money." Brian Barrett: Is it fair to say, Zoë, I feel like having the financials out there, yes, they're losing money hand over fist, but the financials I think are better than people were expecting maybe. At least, it feels like they put a lot of concerns to rest, not all of them, but this is a real business. This is a business that is growing. It's doing all the things you would want a business to do. Zoë Schiffer: Yes, I think absolutely. So its revenue hit $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, and it's grown more than 14 fold from the same period last year. I think we have to go back to 2022 and remember that when ChatGPT came on the scene, it wasn't even apparent that AI would have a real enterprise application. This was a consumer app that didn't have really any business case for it. And it wasn't until Anthropic came on the scene years later, it rolled out Claude Code that we started to really see like, oh no, there's a viable business and actually the majority of the money is going to come from other businesses using their coding product. This is also, I think, a key difference that you hear from insiders between Dario and Sam. People very close to Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, will say he wakes up every single day and says, "Enterprise code." That is the thing he cares about. And that's because that's the thing that makes money for these businesses. Whereas I think the perception from some is that OpenAI is a little more scattered and all over the place. And I think you can see that in the numbers. Brian Barrett: So they are leaning in. They have Claude code, huge success, enterprise code, huge success. I will say, to introduce a yellow flag, of that revenue that you talked about, very impressive revenue over $60 billion, nearly half of it came from three tech companies cloud marketplaces. So they are pretty heavily reliant on a small number of companies which are also competitors. It is this sort of tangled nest of reliances in this industry that feels, I think Anthropic didn't put it as one of its major risk factors. We can talk about the risk factors in a second because that was my favorite section, but it does feel like, where's the moat? Is there enough of one given how much they're relying on a handful of companies that are also developing their own AI, other AI products are getting better, open source products, open weight products are out there. How yellow is that flag? Zoë Schiffer: I think it's yellow. It's not surprising that a polyamorous worker cooperative would be incestuous in its business dealings. I was not shocked by that information. And it's not unusual for a small percentage of spenders to have an out-sized impact on a company's revenue. I think there was another number that Ramp put out recently, 80 percent of revenue for both Anthropic and OpenAI comes from about the top 1 percent of AI spenders. So the companies that are spending the most account for the vast majority of the company's revenues. But it is a vulnerability, because if there's a pullback and those companies start spending less, Anthropic is exposed. But another, I don't know where to put this flag. I think it's green. They were transparent about some of the risks involved in the IPO, some of the existential risks of AI generally. This is probably my favorite part in the whole thing. “Concerns have been raised ... That sufficiently advanced AI systems could, if not developed and safeguarded appropriately, pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” Leah Feiger: Incredible stuff. Zoë Schiffer: The use of the passive voice in this S-1, concerns have been raised by Dario to be so for real. Brian Barrett: Internally by Anthropic, I will say too, the phrase existential risk comes up three times. It's twice existential risk to humanity, once existential risk to society. So in that scenario, presumably there are still humans, they have just abandoned any semblance of a social contract. Zoë Schiffer: Great. Brian Barrett: Zoë, I love that this was a green flag for you, the fact that they're so openly- Leah Feiger: She's a transparent lady. Brian Barrett: And to be clear, they have been shouting this since they started that AI could kill everybody. This is not new for them. What I thought was interesting, and I'll call it a red flag, red flag for humanity, yellow flag for Anthropic, green flag for me because I love to talk about it. So the same thing that they cite as most likely to cause the end of human life on earth, is the thing that they also cite as one of their primary competitive advantages. And that is recursive self-improvement. So that's where an AI model can improve itself. And they're saying on the one hand, if AI models keep getting better at improving themselves, and can eventually improve themselves to the point where humans don't even need to look at it, closing the loop where AI just gets better, and makes AI better, and makes AI better to the point where we don't even understand what AI is doing anymore, but gosh, it's good and it's making a lot of money, that's the scenario in which AI is powerful enough to maybe end the world. But it's also, Anthropic notes also we're really good at that. We're investing a lot of money in that. That's how we're going to get ahead. Zoë Schiffer: And how relatable is that? Who among us doesn't have a shadow side that is equally augmented by the power that that shadow side gives you? Leah Feiger: To be clear, and WIRED covered this, as did basically everyone. When former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and said it was because Anthropic could bring about the end of the world, he specifically cited curbing RSI at the top of his list. This is the whole ballgame. Brian Barrett: Yes. And then the industry in general is very ... I think this is probably too extreme, but Bernie Sanders has a bill out there, and Ro Khanna has a separate bill that say, "Hey, let's just ban recursive self-improvement. Let's just say we're not doing that." I will say one little note is that the risk factors is the longest section of the prospectus. It's 94 pages, I believe. So they could have just said, "We have a shadow side and saved everybody. Zoë Schiffer: I would've understood. Brian Barrett: A lot of trouble." Leah Feiger: Can we talk about a red flag that I haven't gotten a great answer on yet, and I kind of need you to explain this to me like I'm a toddler? The compute bill, all of this technology costs so much money. I don't personally feel like I have an understanding of where the limit is, how you do not spend enough to use all of your money and also spend enough to not put yourself out of business and end your technology forever. Perhaps I do not understand compute in its entirety or where it comes from, but all of this together, this is just so much. Tell me. Zoë Schiffer: It is so much. I'm not going to pretend that I understand it. The scale of what we're talking about is, again, totally unprecedented. You get a lot of railroad analogies when you start talking about this stuff, but I will say that one key difference is that unlike the railroad companies, which were operating on slightly thinner margins, these are still very well-funded and rich companies. And so yes, they're investing a ton in compute, and they expect that that compute will be needed. So far it is, and they expect that to continue to rise. I personally think that that is a viable argument, but of course the flip side is like, well, if growth starts to seriously slow down, and they're left holding the bill for all of this compute that they've committed to, a lot of the contracts that Anthropic has signed, they can't get out of. That's going to be really bad, and it's going to be bad not just for Anthropic, but for the entire US economy. Leah Feiger: They call it their most significant operating cost, in quotes. Zoë Schiffer: Yes, absolutely. Brian Barrett: I think significant too, that unlike say SpaceX, unlike Meta, ot