BUSINESS × POLITICS × TECHNOLOGY
For much of modern history, we understood power as a game with two players. Corporations lobbied governments, governments regulated corporations, and the exchange between money and policy shaped the world.
Recently that has changed. Two events in the same week convinced me that technology has become a source of power in its own right, alongside money and policy.
The precision attack on Iran: decades of data infrastructure
Technology was central to the scale and precision of the recent attacks, and it helped to sharply reduce the number of casualties in these wars. What most people overlook is the timeline. The world watched it unfold in a single news cycle, but it took decades to build.
Someone had to gather intelligence data across an entire region and build pipelines that could process battlefield inputs in real time. Someone had to link satellite imagery and signals intelligence to existing military assets, then map all of it onto real targets on the ground, also in real time.
That is a data infrastructure story. It runs on the same principles we talk about in digital transformation (clean data, structured processing, a single data source), applied at military scale. A precision strike has more in common with a well-designed data repository than most people would like to admit.
I'm leaving the politics aside here. Without the technology layer none of this would be possible, and the technology shaped the outcome.
Anthropic said no to the U.S. Department of Defense
A private tech company told the U.S. Department of Defense that it would not provide unrestricted access to its AI models. Nobody forced that answer on them. They chose it, and they were in a position to choose.
The founders are technologists. Dario and Daniela Amodei left OpenAI because they disagreed with the company's direction, and they built Anthropic on the principle that safety comes first. That principle shows in how they make decisions: they care about how their tools are used and by whom.
They also make the most powerful models on the market today. When you offer Opus-level capability and developers pick your platform over the alternatives, you get strong revenue and a large customer base, and you don't need a government contract to survive.
Then there's Claude Code, one of the most powerful programming tools released in years. It gives Anthropic a direct line into the developer ecosystem and into enterprise revenue that has nothing to do with defense procurement.
Compare OpenAI, whose financial sustainability many analysts have raised concerns about. When you need every contract you can get, saying no to the Department of Defense isn't really an option. When you don't need it, it is.
From a consultant's perspective: the Department of Defense isn't wrong to want unrestricted access to AI. National security is a legitimate use case. Retaliating against a company for taking a principled stance, by threatening its supply chain and its access to chips, is a different matter. Anthropic is doing nothing wrong. Tech companies haven't held this kind of power before, and Anthropic is using it.
I believe Anthropic's leadership cares about what their models create. They are perfectionists about product quality and safety, and to me that reads as conviction rather than image management.
The underground economy: cryptocurrency as infrastructure for crime
The third axis is crime.
Blockchain and cryptocurrency have become financial infrastructure for criminal gangs, particularly in Cambodia, Myanmar, and parts of the Middle East. They use it as a transit system to move large amounts of money across borders quickly and without being detected.
In human trafficking operations, the money no longer passes through banks. It moves through thousands of e-wallets and purpose-built cross-chain bridges that can't be traced.
This is still happening at scale, right now, as an underground economy running in parallel with the legitimate financial system. Governments are fighting it with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and tighter exchange regulation, but criminals adopt new tools years faster than regulators respond, and the response is not keeping up.
In all three cases, the power sits with whoever controls the technology and understands it well enough to use it before anyone else does.