The attempt on Friday by Secretary of War Pete Hegsted to label Anthropic as a supply chain risk and commit corporate murder had a variety of motivations.

On its face, the conflict is a tale of three contracts and the associated working relationships.

The contract Anthropic signed with the Department of War (DoW) in 2025.
The new contract Anthropic was negotiating with DoW, that would have been modified to favor DoW, but where the parties could not reach agreement.
The contract OpenAI was negotiating and signed with DoW, which was per OpenAI modified favorably to OpenAI and thus may be modified further.

The contracts and negotiations need to be confidential, so we only have limited details, and especially only limited details have been shared in public.

We do know a lot, and we know a lot more than we did yesterday morning.

This post is what we know about those three contracts.

For further details and sources, and in particular for a more detail-oriented smackdown on a variety of false or misleading claims and takes, see the long version from yesterday. That post uses very careful qualifiers for [...]

---

Outline:

(01:58) The Original Anthropic Contract With DoW

(06:29) The Proposed Revisions to Anthropics Contract

(12:51) OpenAIs Contract With DoW

---

First published:
March 3rd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PBrggrw4mhgbksoYY/a-tale-of-three-contracts

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

“A Tale of Three Contracts” by Zvi