Nigeria, March 2 -- Within days of the United States Department of War terminating Anthropic's federal contracts and designating the company a supply-chain risk, OpenAI announced a separate agreement to deploy its models inside classified government networks. Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, told staff the company had retained meaningful limits around surveillance and autonomous weapons. He also said, pointedly, that OpenAI shares Anthropic's red lines.

That sequence - escalation against one company, agreement with another, both claiming to hold the same principles, is the story that requires examination. Not because one company won and another lost, but because of what the episode reveals about how AI governance is actually taking ...