“We can say the department was somewhat directionally correct with the Claude and Anthropic decisions and discussions around Claude's ability to throttle models. On deployed edge compute in secret enclaves, they couldn't reach in and throttle a model. However, on unclassified, which is where a preponderance of military work occurs, they showed the ability to reach into these systems for their commercial customers and downgrade them without saying anything and without alerting them. … That exact same logic applies to the Starshield enterprise.”
ChinaTalk · Geopolitics & World Affairs · November 2026
Context
The panel was discussing what a new Congress will do about SpaceX's Starshield. McIntosh argues the Pentagon's dispute with Anthropic over vendor control of models validates its fear of commercial companies holding a kill switch on military systems.
Transcript
Do we is now when we talk about the Elon of it all? I mean, like, what do you do about SpaceX? Yeah.
…I think, yeah, there's just going to be so much investigations into who pressed the button, who turned it off. And there's going to be a lot of PMs on the gov side who are going to be happy to point the finger. I was hearing that before the election where people were just openly complaining about
…they showed the ability to reach into these systems for their commercial customers and downgrade them without saying anything to them and without alerting them. And they did that when Fable was first released. So that kind of validated the Pentagon's fears. We don't want to give a commercial company this amount of control over something that we're going to employ. This is what our fear was. That exact same logic applies to the Starshield enterprise. If you're going to say that we are going to use Starshield as a backbone for military communications, C2, command and control, we're going to use it on communications platforms. We're going to use it for drone driving or whatever. Then, yes, there's going to be zero way that they're going to let a commercial company still have control over it. There also gets to be the whole issue. This is…
There's so much dependence on Start Shield for a lot of these robotic and autonomous systems we got deployed. We're fielding all these forces, including in CENTCOM, where that's the only comms network that you've got available to you. And to have that be dependent upon whatever Elon wants to do…
I think that's right. I think, too, just stepping back a little bit more broadly, just kind of looking at the defense tech, Neoprimes, the small startups, things like that. One, we saw yesterday, Shield AI did an acquisition of a counter-UAS system, which is interesting because one of their better…
Adam Smith has been as the chair, soon-to-be chair of HASC, right? He's been around for a long time. He's done this before. I think he very much knows the difference between hunting for corruption and bad deals and making sure that he has, I think, been on record of saying he understands the value…
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