From oversight to coercion: How authoritarian governments are twisting AI safety to get tech companies to fall in line

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From oversight to coercion: How authoritarian governments are twisting AI safety to get tech companies to fall in line
Published: June 4, 2026 8:24am EDT

Michael Gregory
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Clemson University


(The Conversation) When researchers founded Anthropic in 2021, they said the race to build powerful AI was moving too recklessly. They inserted detailed safety measures into their products and marketed their commitment to safety as the corporate quality that distinguished them from competitors – notably OpenAI, the rival company they had left. In March 2026 that reputation was tested when the Trump administration declared that Anthropic was a supply chain risk.

The company had refused to remove built-in safeguards that prohibited domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons from products it had supplied to the Pentagon. President Donald Trump ordered the federal government to stop using Anthropic and its large language model, Claude, labeling the company a national security risk. Within hours, OpenAI made a deal to be the Pentagon’s supplier instead.

Despite Anthropic’s apparent stand, during its clash with Trump the company quietly scrapped the binding principles in its main safety policy. Several weeks earlier, Anthropic’s head of safeguards research had resigned, warning that “the world is in peril.” And a week after the Pentagon officially banned Claude, the U.S. military was still using the technology to select and target sites to bomb in Iran.

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The Trump administration, which follows the authoritarian playbook, has argued that AI safety standards and user restrictions are ideological impositions rather than sound engineering decisions. The “Preventing Woke AI” executive order of July 23, 2025, didn’t change what companies are allowed to do with their products. By by attaching the “woke” label to basic ethics protections, the administration made those protections politically costly to maintain. ...................(more)

https://theconversation.com/from-oversight-to-coercion-how-authoritarian-governments-are-twisting-ai-safety-to-get-tech-companies-to-fall-in-line-277945