Hegseth Summons Anthropic CEO Amid Dispute Over Using AI in Military

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is bringing in Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei into the Pentagon on Tuesday in an attempt to strong-arm him into lifting restrictions on the Pentagon using its Claude AI program for mass surveillance and unmanned weapons systems.

Claude has been the target of a federal push to make its AI tools available within classified networks—as it’s currently the only AI model available in that capacity. But this partnership is reportedly on life support, as the Pentagon is threatening to void Anthropic’s contract and deem it a “supply chain risk” for not complying.

“Just the DoD persecuting an up-and-coming tech company because they won’t want their product to be used to kill people,” one X user mused.

“Anthropic knows this is not a get-to-know-you meeting,” an anonymous senior Defense official told Axios. “This is not a friendly meeting. This is a shit-or-get-off-the-pot meeting.... The problem with Dario is, with him, it’s ideological. We know who we’re dealing with.”

Amodei has often cited his own qualms about the risks of his technology ending up in the wrong hands, even as he gifts it to Hegseth. But this upcoming meeting will reportedly be an ultimatum that either sees restrictions lifted or business taken elsewhere—a behemoth of a task given how deeply entrenched Anthropic’s AI system already is in the Department of Defense.

Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019. Five days later, federal authorities told New York detectives to “stand down” in their investigations into the child sex trafficker.

Recently released documents from the Justice Department’s Epstein files reveal a new chronology of the events surrounding Epstein’s final arrest, Just Security reported Monday.

Email exchanges that took place between July 10 and 11, 2019, indicate that the FBI “directed” New York law enforcement to cease their Epstein investigations, including the New York District Attorney’s Office, or DANY, and the NYPD’s Special Victims Unit, or SVU.

“FBI reached out to NYPD leadership already and they were told that SVU has been directed to stand down and that all Epstein stuff needs to go to and through us. DANY could still try to go forward with their own investigators, so I think it is worth a call over,” reads one message obtained by Just Security.

Epstein died in prison in August that year.

The “stand down” directive circulated internally among several FBI agents in January 2020 with regard to investigating Epstein’s longtime criminal associate Ghislaine Maxwell and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former British prince.

“After our arrest was public some phone calls were made amongst NYPD brass and I’m pretty sure there [sic] investigation was closed and differed [sic] to us. I’m not totally sure of DANY’s involvement into that investigation or if they ever stopped. Our assumption was obviously that they closed anything they had after his death,” the FBI email reads.

“It may be an issue though if DANY somehow was continuing an investigation into Pri[n]ce Andrew or his best friend Maxwell. This is something we may want to figure out I’m hoping they are continuing to differ [sic] this case to us but we may not know without making a few inquiries.”

The concern was apparently over the potential for “competing cases” and internal anxieties that the public—and the FBI’s international partners in the U.K.—would be mixed up by news reports of multiple investigations from different agencies.

The Democratic National Committee’s secret report on why Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election has reportedly found that the Biden administration’s approach to Israel’s massacre in Gaza cost her key votes.

DNC personnel who worked on the report met with the pro-Palestinian IMEU Policy Project in a closed-door meeting, Axios reports, and the group told them that Biden’s and Harris’s support for Israel dampened support from progressives and young voters.

During the meeting, “the DNC shared with us that their own data also found that policy was, in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election,” Hamid Bendass, a spokesperson for the IMEU Policy Project, told Axios.

The report was deliberately buried last year, and now we can see one of the reasons why. The war in Gaza has divided Democrats, as well as the country as a whole, with many Americans agreeing with the conclusions of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a United Nations commission that Israel committed a genocide of Palestinians in the territory.

While Harris called for a ceasefire during the campaign, she avoided criticizing Israel or calling for any kind of decisive action to end the war, such as an arms embargo on Israel, putting conditions on the billions of dollars of U.S. aid to Israel, or withdrawing support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who now has an International Criminal Court warrant out for his arrest over Gaza.

The 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was noticeably absent of any Palestinian American representation and barely acknowledged the massive death toll in Gaza, seeming to purposefully sideline pro-Palestinian Democratic voices. Ahead of the 2026 election, pro-Israel groups are already spending millions in Democratic primaries. Keeping this report secret, and refusing to address the issue of unconditional support for Israel, would mean that the Democratic Party has learned nothing from 2024.

Surprise, surprise: Homeland Security Kristi Noem completely made up that far-fetched story about deporting a cannibal, multiple federal law enforcement officials told The Intercept.

Speaking to Fox News’s Jesse Watters in June, Noem recounted a terrible tale she claimed to have heard from a U.S. air marshal about a cannibal who tried to “eat his own arms” while being deported out of the country. Noem later repeated the story as she and Donald Trump toured “Alligator Alcatraz,” the president’s wetland-themed concentration camp in the Florida Everglades.

At the time, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE wouldn’t respond to requests to confirm Noem’s story. Now multiple federal law enforcement officials—including one from the DHS—are saying it’s a lie, The Intercept reported Monday.

“That is completely made up,” a senior federal law enforcement official told The Intercept. “That never happened.”

Two other federal law enforcement officials said there was absolutely no evidence to corroborate Noem’s story. One source told The Intercept that officials went to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division to ask about the incident. “There was no information about it. It never took place. It’s a lie,” the source said.

When asked about whether they believed the story actually came from an air marshal or the secretary, one official was certain that it had come from the secretary.

The story never sounded particularly true. When pressed for more details at the time of her original telling, Noem couldn’t summon a single one. “He said he was literally eating his own arms. That for him, he was, that is what he did. He called himself a cannibal, ate other people, and ate himself,” she stammered. She said the man was taken off the flight to receive medical attention and then put back into the system.

Noem had used the chronicle of the cannibal as an example of the “kind of deranged individuals” who were being removed as part of Trump’s sweeping deportation efforts.

There is ample evidence to suggest that a cannibal is not the kind of person the Trump administration is deporting. CBS News reported that less than 14 percent of the immigrants arrested by ICE during Trump’s first year back in office have charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses.

Noem’s fake cannibal is just one of the many dangerous lies being peddled by DHS—as calls for her resignation continue to mount.

Newly reported components of the Epstein files reveal that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was much more involved with Jeffrey Epstein than he had previously let on.

Last year, in an interview on the New York Post’s Pod Force One podcast, Lutnick claimed he cut off all contact with “that disgusting person” after he and his wife were invited to tour Epstein’s Upper East Side townhouse in 2005. Epstein was, at the time, the Lutnicks’ Manhattan neighbor.

But previously unreported elements of the Epstein files reveal that the two men shared mutual involvement in a business venture until at least 2018, the year before Epstein was found dead in his jail cell.

That business was AdFin Solutions Inc., a since-shuttered digital ad technology company that both Epstein and Lutnick invested with in 2012, days after Lutnick visited the pedophile’s island with his family in tow.

Lutnick signed the contract via an LLC held by Cantor Fitzgerald, where Lutnick was employed as the chief executive officer, according to a British whistleblower and former affiliate of Cantor Fitzgerald who spoke with Mother Jones.

Since the files became public, the MAGA strategist has attempted to distance himself from Epstein, and by extension AdFin.

A Department of Commerce spokesperson told CBS News that Lutnick “had limited interactions with Mr. Epstein.” A source close to the secretary claimed that Cantor was a “minority investor” in AdFin and that Lutnick did “not have any knowledge of who the other investors were” at “the time of doing the deal.”

But that is incredibly unlikely. Lutnick would ultimately become a significant figure for AdFin, a detail that has raised doubts about his supposed ignorance about the company’s long-term investors.

An email dated May 28, 2018, further solidifies that Lutnick was well aware that Epstein had remained involved with the venture. The message, between Epstein and a recipient referred to as “HWL” (Lutnick’s middle name is “William”), discusses potential revenue growth for the blustering company.

Epstein asked HWL, “What do you think the prospects for adfin are?”

HWL’s reply, marked as “the sole property of Cantor Fitzgerald LP and its affiliates,” suggested that the company could be “producing revenue finally.”

“This is their year,” HWL wrote to Epstein. “Next 12 months they need to become economically self-sufficient.”

The exchange also includes affable conversation about Epstein’s apparent knowledge of Lutnick’s properties, and his desire to purchase a “guest house” following Lutnick’s last real estate acquisition.

Despite the mounting evidence, Lutnick vehemently denied his widely reported connections to Epstein during a congressional hearing earlier this month.

On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy’s appeal against a lawsuit attempting to hold them liable for their contributions to climate change.

The suit, initially brought by the city of Boulder, Colorado, and Boulder County, argued that Exxon’s and Suncor’s aggressive advertising and fossil fuel sales were to blame for high temperatures and more frequent wildfires. They also argued that both companies were breaking consumer protection law in the process. In a ruling last May, the Supreme Court allowed the lawsuit to move forward in state court. The oil companies appealing the decision aren’t arguing that they aren’t contributing to climate change, but that the issue is a federal and not a state one.

This decision comes just days after President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency revoked the 2009 endangerment finding that determined greenhouse gases to be a real public health risk that could be addressed via the Clean Air Act, effectively crippling the administration’s regulatory power.

The 21-year-old man shot dead after entering Mar-a-Lago with a shotgun and gas canister on Sunday was an “outspoken” Christian, a strong Trump supporter, and obsessed with the cover-up of the Epstein files, according to people who knew him.  

Austin Tucker Martin of Moore County, North Carolina, was met by two Secret Service agents and a Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputy inside the north gate of Mar-a-Lago around 1:30 a.m, while President Trump was in Washington, D.C. When Martin was ordered to put down his weapon, he put the gas canister down and raised the shotgun. All three men then opened fire and killed Martin. 

His co-workers shared texts they’d received from Martin just days before his death. 

“I don’t know if you read up on the Epstein Files, but evil is real and unmistakable,” Martin said in a February 15 text message obtained by TMZ. “The best people like you and I can do is use what little influence we have. Tell other people about what you hear about the Epstein files and what the government is doing about it. Raise awareness.”

His co-workers at the Austin at Pine Needles Lodge and Golf Club in North Carolina told TMZ that he was upset by what he believed was a government cover-up and often mentioned powerful people “getting away with it.”

Martin was reportedly particularly disturbed by the latest tranche release, which revealed sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s ties with people like the former Prince Andrew, former Obama White House attorney Kathy Ruemmler, and Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, among others. 

Martin is the second person to attempt to enter Mar-a-Lago with the intent to kill the president, and the third in general. In 2024, Ryan Routh attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at the Florida estate. He was recently sentenced to life in prison. And of course, Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to kill Trump in Pennsylvania in 2024. All three were white men. 

Senator Mike Lee scrubbed his comments about ICE after he realized he had painted the agency as the baddies.

The Utah Republican was excoriated by liberals Sunday after he posted an eyebrow-raising comparison on X in which he suggested that Democrats were OK with masked cartel members but not masked federal agents.

“Cartel hitmen wear masks. Leftists aren’t complaining,” Lee wrote, referring to an image of masked Mexican cartel members at a gas station from earlier that day.

Mexican authorities killed famed cartel kingpin Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes on Sunday, sparking a wave of violence across the country that saw vehicles torched, businesses destroyed, and dozens of people killed.

But Democrats were quick to point out that the parallel only made ICE look worse.

“Yes. Cartel hitmen wear masks. That’s why ICE shouldn’t,” responded Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“Oh dear Mike,” wrote Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy. “I literally couldn’t make our argument better than you do. The bad guys wear masks. The good guys don’t.”

Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz highlighted that other law enforcement agencies are not allowed to conceal their identities in the way that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has over the last several months.

“Mike, I would like ICE to have the same standards as a local police department, not cartel hitmen,” he posted.

The message must have gotten across, as Lee has since erased his post.

ICE agents’ masks are one of the primary drivers of the partial government shutdown, which entered its second week Monday with no clear end in sight. Lawmakers remain firmly divided on how to continue funding the Department of Homeland Security. Democrats have offered a funding arrangement so long as Republicans agree to reform ICE as per a list of 10 demands that include requiring federal agents to identify themselves, take off their masks, and obtain judicial warrants before forcing their way onto private property.

GOP congressional leadership, however, does not seem willing to change the status quo at all. Republican members have decried the seemingly bare-minimum stipulations as “impossible” and “totally unrealistic.”

Donald Trump was particularly happy to congratulate the U.S. men’s hockey team on their Olympic gold medal over the phone, gushing over their performance and inviting them to Tuesday’s State of the Union address as well as the White House.

The women’s team? Not so much.

Both teams had dramatic, overtime wins over Canada to win gold in Milan, with the women’s victory coming on Thursday and the men’s on Sunday. In the locker room phone call to the men’s team shortly after their victory, Trump joked about having to invite the women’s team as well.

“I must tell you, we’re gonna have to bring the women’s team, you do know that,” Trump said as the entire men’s team laughed with the president. “I do believe I probably would be impeached.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. women’s hockey team said Monday that the team received an invitation from Trump to the State of the Union and that they’re “sincerely grateful,” but can’t attend “due to the timing and previously scheduled academic and professional commitments.”

“We are sincerely grateful for the invitation extended to our gold medal–winning U.S. Women’s Hockey Team and deeply appreciate the recognition of their extraordinary achievement.... They were honored to be included and are grateful for the acknowledgment,” the spokesperson said.

It’s not a good look for the president to be favoring the men’s team over the women’s when both achieved hard-fought victories over Canada, a country where hockey is the national sport (and where Trump has caused unnecessary tension). It brings to mind Trump’s long history of sexism and refutes the administration’s claim that it cares about women’s sports. Both teams can be celebrated without an ugly joke.

This story has been updated.

She’s baaaaack: Judge Aileen Cannon just barred the Department of Justice from releasing the second volume of former special counsel Jack Smith’s report on Donald Trump.

In a 15-page order Monday, Cannon approved two motions to block the public release of Volume II of Smith’s report, writing that its release would “plainly offend” her original dismissal order and the “substantial discovery” held under a protective order.

Releasing the report “would cause irreparable damage to former defendants from disclosure of non-public discovery material implicating still-contested grand jury and privilege concerns; and it would contravene basic notions of fairness and justice in the process, where no adjudication of guilt has been reached following initiation of criminal charges,” she wrote.

One motion to block the release of Volume II came from Trump, and the other came from Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, two former Mar-a-Lago employees who were accused of helping Trump hide boxes of classified documents at his Florida estate from federal investigators and trying to delete security footage that showed them moving boxes. Trump also asked Nauta to lie on his behalf to the FBI and promised him a pardon if he faced any charges.

In July 2024, Cannon made the unprecedented decision to toss out the felony classified documents case against Trump by ruling Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. Her move has been criticized by legal scholars but repeatedly celebrated by Trump.

Cannon accused Smith of violating her order to dismiss the case by compiling a final report ahead of Trump’s inauguration in order to “circumvent” her ruling. “The Court need not countenance this brazen stratagem or effectively perpetuate the Special Counsel’s breach of this Court’s own order,” she wrote.

Cannon also repeatedly insisted that the motions to bury Volume II were unopposed, but in fact the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and American Oversight to Intervene had both filed for the report to be available to FOIA requests. Cannon had denied the request.

This story has been updated.