Trump, asked last year if he has a duty to “uphold the Constitution,” answered, “I don’t know.” Claude is more obliging. “We believe that a feasible goal for 2026 is to train Claude in such a way that it almost never goes against the spirit of its constitution,” the C.E.O. of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, announced this winter, only weeks before Trump banned the U.S. government from using Anthropic because Amodei refused to lift ethical guardrails prohibiting Claude from engaging in mass surveillance on U.S. citizens and launching fully autonomous weapons. (Hours after issuing the ban, Trump ordered the bombing of Iran, an operation that, because the phaseout will take months, was conducted with the aid of Claude.)