BUSINESS × POLITICS × TECHNOLOGY
For much of modern history, we understood power as a two-pronged game. Corporations lobbied governments. Governments regulated corporations. The interaction between money and policy shaped the world.
But recently, things have changed, and two events in the same week have made it impossible to ignore: technology is no longer a tool for power. It is power itself.
The Precision Attack on Iran: Decades of Data Infrastructure
Technology played a central role in the scale and precision of recent attacks. But the part most people overlook is the timeline. What the world witnessed in just one news cycle took decades to build. Technology helped to significantly reduce the number casualties in the recent wars.
Gathering intelligence data across an entire region. Building data processing pipelines capable of handling battlefield inputs in real time. Linking satellite imagery and signal intelligence to existing military assets, then mapping all of that onto real-world targets on the ground, in real time.
That's the story of data infrastructure. The same principles we talk about in digital transformation: clean data, structured processing, a single data source. Applied on a military scale. The technology behind a precision strike has more in common with a well-designed data repository than most people would like to admit.
The issue here is not politics. The issue is that without the technology layer, none of this is possible. Technology has determined the shape of 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. Not because they were forced to. Because they chose to. And they have the means to make that choice.
The founding team are technologists. Dario and Daniela Amassei left OpenAI specifically because they disagreed with the company's direction. They built Anthropic on the principle that safety comes first, and that's reflected in how they make decisions. They care about how their tools are used and by whom.
They are creating the most powerful models on the market today. When you offer capabilities at the Opus level and developers choose your platform over alternatives, you have an advantage. Strong revenue. A large customer base. They don't need a government contract to survive.
Claude Code changed the game. Anthropic has built one of the most powerful programming tools released in years. That gives them a direct path into the developer ecosystem and enterprise revenue that has nothing to do with defense procurement.
Compare this to OpenAI, which many analysts have warned about concerns regarding its financial sustainability. 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, then it is an option.
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. But retaliating against a company for taking a principled stance, threatening its supply chain and access to chips, that's a completely different matter. Anthropic is doing nothing wrong. They are in a position of power that tech companies haven't had before, and they are using it.
I believe that Anthropic's leadership truly cares about what their model creates. They are perfectionists when it comes to product quality and safety, which demonstrates authenticity, not just form.
The Underground Economy: Cryptocurrency as Infrastructure for Crime
And then there's the third axis.
Blockchain and cryptocurrency have been playing a crucial role as financial infrastructure for criminal gangs, particularly in Cambodia, Myanmar, and some parts of the Middle East. The use case is a transit system. A way to move large amounts of money across borders undetected, with transaction confirmation speed.
In Human trafficking operations, money no longer goes through banks. It goes through thousands of e-wallets and specially designed cross-chain bridges that are untraceable.
This is still happening on a large scale, right now, as an underground economy operating in parallel with the legitimate financial system. Governments are fighting it with Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and tighter exchange regulations. But the gap between the speed of adoption by criminals and the speed of regulatory response is measured in years. It's not happening fast enough.
Again, the power lies in the technology itself. Who controls it, who understands it well enough to use it before others.