🐺 Anthropic is in court today fighting the Pentagon

In partnership with

The Future of AI in Marketing. Your Shortcut to Smarter, Faster Marketing.

Unlock a focused set of AI strategies built to streamline your work and maximize impact. This guide delivers the practical tactics and tools marketers need to start seeing results right away:

• 7 high-impact AI strategies to accelerate your marketing performance

• Practical use cases for content creation, lead gen, and personalization

• Expert insights into how top marketers are using AI today

• A framework to evaluate and implement AI tools efficiently

Stay ahead of the curve with these top strategies AI helped develop for marketers, built for real-world results.

Download the Free Report

Hey there,

This week in AI: Anthropic goes to court TODAY to fight the Pentagon's supply chain blacklist, an open-source agent platform just hit its "ChatGPT moment," and Jack Dorsey fired 40% of Block's workforce because he says AI can do their jobs now.

Also, Oracle is planning to cut 30,000 employees to pay for AI data centers. The money has to come from somewhere.

Let's get into it.

📰 WHAT'S TRENDING

Anthropic Goes to Court Today to Fight the Pentagon's Blacklist
A federal judge will decide today whether to block the Trump administration's designation of Anthropic as a national security "supply chain risk." The dispute started when Anthropic told the Pentagon it wouldn't allow Claude to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons without human oversight. The Pentagon's position: we want to use it for "all lawful purposes," and if you set limits, you don't get contracts. Nearly 150 retired federal judges filed amicus briefs supporting Anthropic. So did 30+ employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, including Google chief scientist Jeff Dean. Court filings from last week revealed the Pentagon told Anthropic the two sides were "nearly aligned" just one week before Trump killed the deal entirely. Anthropic's CFO estimates the designation could cost the company billions. 🔗 Read more

OpenClaw Hit 250K GitHub Stars and Big AI Is Getting Nervous
OpenClaw, the open-source agentic AI platform, just had what CNBC called its "ChatGPT moment." The repo crossed 250,000 GitHub stars. Jensen Huang compared it to Linux at GTC 2026. Developers figured out they can run fleets of AI agents on personal hardware like Mac Minis instead of paying cloud rates. Forrester analyst Charlie Dai: "As foundation models rapidly commoditize, attention is moving toward agent frameworks." Chinese cloud providers are already shipping their own versions. Local governments in China are offering grants to startups building on it. The gap between open-source agents and proprietary APIs is shrinking by the month. 🔗 Read more

OpenAI Declared "Code Red" and Is Building a Super App
Anthropic now captures 73% of first-time enterprise AI spending. That number triggered what insiders describe as a "code red" at OpenAI. The response: merge ChatGPT, the Codex coding platform, and the Atlas browser into a single desktop app. Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, is leading the project. The goal is an app that can work on your computer to write code, analyze data, and browse the web on its own. No timeline yet. The mobile ChatGPT app stays separate. 🔗 Read more

Oracle Wants to Cut 30,000 Jobs to Fund AI Data Centers
Oracle is evaluating layoffs of 20,000 to 30,000 employees to free up $8-10 billion for AI infrastructure. The cash crunch traces back to a $156 billion deal with OpenAI that requires 3 million GPUs over five years. US banks have pulled back from financing the expansion, doubling Oracle's borrowing costs and stalling data center projects. The cuts would hit 12-18% of Oracle's workforce. Wall Street expects the company's cash flow to stay negative for years before those investments start generating returns. 🔗 Read more

Block Fired 40% of Its Staff Because of AI. The Stock Went Up 16%.
Jack Dorsey cut 4,000 employees from Block, dropping the company from over 10,000 to under 6,000 workers. His memo was blunt: "This is not driven by financial difficulty, but by the growing capability of AI tools to perform a wider range of tasks." He predicted most companies will reach the same conclusion within a year. Block's shares rallied 16% on the news. It's the largest single workforce reduction explicitly attributed to AI in corporate history. A Darden Business School analysis asked the question everyone's thinking: is Block a bellwether, or is AI the convenient scapegoat for cuts they wanted to make anyway? 🔗 Read more

The White House Wants to Kill State AI Laws
On March 20, the White House released a National Policy Framework for AI that recommends Congress create a single federal standard and preempt state AI regulations. No new regulatory body. Existing agencies would handle AI oversight in their own sectors. The framework also says states shouldn't be able to regulate AI model development or hold developers liable for how third parties use their systems. It's not binding, but the signal is clear: the administration wants one set of rules, and it wants them loose. 🔗 Read more

NVIDIA Launched NemoClaw at GTC to Own the Agent Infrastructure Layer
NVIDIA announced the Agent Toolkit and NemoClaw at GTC 2026. NemoClaw is an enterprise layer built on top of OpenClaw, designed for companies that want the autonomy of open-source agents with actual security guardrails. The stack includes OpenShell, a sandboxed runtime that gives agents access to databases and APIs while enforcing privacy and policy controls. Runs on dedicated hardware from DGX Stations to DGX Sparks. NVIDIA is making the same bet it made with CUDA a decade ago: own the infrastructure beneath the thing everyone's building on. 🔗 Read more

🧠 HERE'S THE THING

Today, a federal judge will decide whether the Pentagon can blacklist a company for saying "no."

Anthropic told the Defense Department two things: don't use our AI for mass surveillance of American citizens, and don't use it to fire weapons without a human in the loop. Two conditions.

The Pentagon wanted Claude for "all lawful purposes." Anthropic said there are lawful uses they still don't want to enable. So the Pentagon designated Anthropic a "supply chain risk." That's the same label reserved for Chinese telecom companies suspected of espionage.

Court filings from last Thursday revealed the Pentagon told Anthropic the two sides were "nearly aligned" on contract terms. One week later, Trump declared the relationship dead. That timeline raises questions about whether this was a policy decision or a political one.

Here's the part that should get your attention: Anthropic's competitors are siding with it. 30+ employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, including Jeff Dean, filed a brief saying the Pentagon's move threatens the entire American AI industry. 150 retired federal judges filed their own brief. Senator Elizabeth Warren called it "retaliation."

When your competitors show up in court to defend you, the other side has a credibility problem.

The precedent is what matters most. If the government can punish any AI company that sets conditions on its technology, no company will ever draw a line again. Every future contract negotiation starts with: remember what happened to Anthropic.

💡 Smart Moves

Webinar: Half Your Meetings Should Not Exist

Your team burns 31 hours a month in meetings. Not shipping. Meeting. March 24th at 12 PM EST we're showing you how to cut that in half. Register and get a free agenda template.

⏳ CONVERSION CORNER

Developers are running AI agents on Mac Minis instead of paying cloud API rates. OpenClaw crossed 250,000 GitHub stars because people realized local agent infrastructure costs a fraction of per-call cloud pricing. NVIDIA saw the same trend and built NemoClaw specifically for companies that want enterprise-grade agent deployment without the recurring API bill.

Now it's your move: If your team is paying per-API-call for repetitive AI tasks like data processing, code review, or content generation, look at what could run locally on dedicated hardware. Companies setting up local agent infrastructure now will have a structural cost advantage in 12 months. Compute is cheap. Switching costs only go up.

💎 DATA GEM

40%. That's how much of Block's workforce Jack Dorsey cut in a single announcement, explicitly because AI can do their jobs.

The stock rallied 16%. Wall Street didn't pause at the largest AI-driven layoff in corporate history. It cheered. Dorsey predicted most companies will make similar cuts within a year. Whether he's right or just early, the market's reaction tells you what investors already believe.

That's it for this week. Stay sharp out there.

Jake

P.S. If you know someone in government procurement or defense tech, forward this. The Anthropic ruling could reshape how every AI company negotiates federal contracts.