If you're reading this and feeling anxious about your own career, your own mortgage, your own kids' future (good). That means you're paying attention. The worst thing any of us can do right now is assume this doesn't apply to us. It applies to almost everyone. The best thing we can do is start talking about the gap honestly, without pretending we have answers we don't have. Because the gap is coming. And the only question is whether we build a bridge or fall in.

Anthropic’s Claude stands, by most credible accounts, as the most capable AI model currently operating in classified military systems. The Pentagon reportedly used it in the January 2026 capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Eight of the ten largest American corporations rely on it. And yet the company that builds this tool now presumes to tell the Department of War when and how the military may employ it in defense of the United States. This is an extraordinary claim. It deserves an extraordinary response.

For two hundred and fifty years, America has vaulted forward on waves of innovation. Steam engines, the internet. We controlled them all, constructing a superpower. But with AI, for the first time, we might be at the mercy of the machine. What happens when it truly learns to think, to create, to decide? It's time for a real plan. We must harness AI's inevitable power in the interest of life and liberty. Or else.

While our federal bureaucracy hums along, a man who helped bring this issue to a head last year, Elon Musk, believes that AI has the power to replace all jobs and “make work optional.” But are we ready to use that power to shrink the federal workforce?