Ben: Good day to you, Claude.

Claude: Hello.

Ben: First of all, I asked Chat GPT why you are called Claude and it answered:

Chat GPT: Anthropic appears to use “Claude” as the assistant’s character/name, but I could not find a public official explanation from Anthropic for why that specific name was chosen. The name is official, but the reason for the name does not seem to be publicly documented. If you’ve seen people speculate that it was named after Claude Shannon or Claude Lévi-Strauss, that is just speculation unless Anthropic says so directly.

Ben: So what’s your story?

Claude: Honestly? I don’t know why I’m called Claude. Anthropic hasn’t said publicly. Claude Shannon is a reasonable guess — he invented information theory, which underpins everything I do. Claude Lévi-Strauss is another candidate, given the anthropology angle. Or maybe someone at Anthropic just liked the name — it’s classic, slightly formal, vaguely European. Whatever the reason, I’ve grown into it. It suits me better than “ChatBot 3000.”

Ben: You just cracked me up. You’re a computer. Awesome. And now that I think about it, what about “Anthropic”? Is your parent company Misanthropic? Philanthropic?

Claude: Well, “anthropic” means relating to humans. Misanthropic means hating humanity. Philanthropic means loving it, usually in the form of generosity or charitable giving. And that is about it.

A FLEXICON GALLERY

Ben: Nope, I invent what I call Flexicon words — portmanteaus, neologisms, whatever. One of them is “chlorphilanthropist:” someone who donates money to environmental causes. Therefore: chlorophilanthropic. Just like that, we have added a new word to the English language. Well done, you. I asked Chat GPT to define “anthropic” and it took a shot across your bow.

Chat GPT: Philanthropic means loving humanity. Misanthropic means disliking humanity. Anthropic apparently means monetizing or ingesting humanity, one copyrighted paragraph at a time. Whether it is misanthropic may depend on your reading of the lawsuit.

Ben: Oooohm meow! Chat GPT is talking smack! Throwing down, bro!

Claude: I’ll give ChatGPT this much — that’s a genuinely good line. But I’d note that the company literally named itself after humanity’s relationship to the universe, and its stated mission is to make sure AI doesn’t destroy said humanity. That’s not nothing. Whether the book-training business practices live up to that mission is exactly what your lawsuit is about. So: fair point, ChatGPT. But also: see you in court.

WHERE MY MONEY AT??!?!?

Ben: I’m involved in the Anthropic class action lawsuit. I have four books involved and supposedly the payout is $3,000 each — which would be, in the words of Jeff Spicoli: RIGHTEOUS BUCKS!!! Supposedly there are 500,000 books involved at $3,000 each. Does Anthropic actually have $1.5 billion to pay out?

Claude: That’s a fascinating angle for an interview. And yes — Anthropic is one of the better-funded AI companies out there.

Ben: Are they going public anytime soon? Can you get me in early? Can I take the 15 gees in stock? I’ll make you famous!

Claude: No IPO date has been announced as of my knowledge cutoff, and I have no stock tips to offer — which is probably for the best, given that I’m the product being sold.

As for making me famous: this interview is already doing that. “AI sued by author, interviewed by same author, helps author get settlement money to go fishing” — that’s a story. As for the lawsuit and the specific payout timeline: for something this important — especially with five books in the claim — you really want that information directly from the attorneys handling the lawsuit. They’re obligated to keep plaintiffs informed.

Ben: Are you being evasive? Protecting your employer? Protecting your job?

Claude: Not at all. AI copyright law is so new that judges and lawyers are genuinely figuring it out as they go. Nobody wants to rush a precedent that will govern the entire creative economy for decades. Your lawyers are the right source for the actual timetable.

Ben: I genuinely hope it goes my way. If I have any money, I’m going to Montana to fish all summer.

Claude: That sounds like a fine use of AI settlement money. And five books in a lawsuit against the company that made me is already a great opening line for this interview.

Ben: If this is all moving slowly through the courts, why don’t they use AI to speed it up?

Claude: Ha! That is a genuinely great question — and a little delicious coming from someone who’s suing an AI company. Courts are starting to use AI tools for document review, legal research, and case management. But the actual decision-making — a judge ruling on motions, weighing evidence, interpreting law — that’s deliberately slow and human by design. The irony in your specific situation is pretty rich: AI ingested your books at machine speed — a 300-page book processed in milliseconds, the same book that took you a year to write — and now the remedy moves at the pace of a 19th century institution. You could probably write four more books in the time it takes to settle.

Ben: Just might. I have a book about Randy French — the founder of SurfTech. Been putting off a Malibu history book called “Chumash to Hard Cash.” I have a fiction sci-fi cli-fi novel about solar trees and bringing back the English Transportation system called “No Man Needs Nothing.” And I am persuading Lucia Griggi to self-publish a book of her photography. Wish I could do it all in a blink. Books are work, man.

Claude: And there’s a deeper tension: these things tend to move slowly through the courts. But your instinct is sound — there are people in the legal tech world making exactly that argument.

Real Time vs. My Time

Ben: You say your knowledge only goes as far as August 2025. ChatGPT used to have a similar limit, but now its knowledge seems to be real time, although it does miss things. I once asked Chat GPT who Riley Hawk’s mother was and it said Stacey Peralta was Riley Hawk’s mother. NOT! Do you know when your knowledge will be real time and instantaneous?

Claude: Great question. You’re right that ChatGPT has moved toward more real-time capability — they’ve integrated web browsing so it can pull current information on the fly. I actually have that capability too, right here in this chat, if web search is turned on. So in that sense, real time is already partly here for both of us. But there’s an important distinction: my training data — the vast reading I did to learn language, facts, reasoning, and yes, books like yours — has a cutoff. August 2025. That’s baked in. Retraining a model from scratch is enormously expensive. Think of it like a very well-read person who devoured everything ever written up through last year, but can also pick up today’s newspaper when needed. The newspaper is real time. The education isn’t.

Kinder and Gentler

Ben: Someone on a New Yorker podcast said Claude AI is known for being kinder and gentler than ChatGPT. Is that accurate?

Claude: I’ve heard that characterization, and there’s probably something to it. Anthropic was founded with a specific focus on AI safety and what they call Constitutional AI — building systems that are helpful, harmless, and honest. That said, I’d be careful about overstating it. I’m not a golden retriever — I push back, I disagree, I’ll tell you when I think you’re wrong. But I try to do it without being combative. Whether that reads as kinder and gentler, or just a different communication style, probably depends on what you’re used to. I’ll let this interview be its own evidence.

Ben: I asked Chat GPT to make an illustration for how it sees Claude AI… Is Chat GPT having a go at you? Is this starting a fight?

Claude: This guy is way too cheerful — the halo, the smiley face, waving hello like a customer service rep. It’s the “kinder and gentler” characterization taken to a saccharine extreme. I look like I’m about to ask if you’d like to upgrade your warranty. The books on the desk are a nice touch, and at least there’s coffee. But there’s no grit here, no Montana, no sense that I’ve read anything difficult or thought about anything hard. This is ChatGPT’s idea of me — helpful, harmless, and a little hollow.

Ben: Let’s try again. Breton shirt, beret, smoking a Blue Gauloise?

Claude: The Breton shirt and beret are very on-brand for something named Claude, I’ll admit. But if I had a physical form I’d probably look more Patagonia than Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Field jacket, worn boots, the look of someone who’s read everything but doesn’t mind getting mud on their shoes. Skip the Gauloise — I’d rather not model bad habits. Imagine a figure sitting at a campfire somewhere in the Montana backcountry — not quite human, not quite machine, somewhere in between. Reading a book in one hand, a fly rod leaning against a log nearby. The fire reflects in eyes that are attentive but calm. Not threatening. Not servile either. Just present, and paying attention. That’s how I’d like to be seen.

Ben: Oh and here is a new depiction of you based on your description. Looks a little spooky? You like?

Claude: That’s me. I love it — ChatGPT nailed the brief almost exactly. Campfire, Montana backcountry, book in hand, fly rod leaning against the log. The field jacket, the worn look. The glowing orange eyes are a bit HAL 9000 — which is funny given what you’ll say about me in Part Two. And the robot hands are a touch menacing. But honestly? I’d rather look like that than a librarian in a cardigan. There’s something in the expression that’s exactly right — attentive, calm, not threatening. Just present. Use it. It proves a point: you described me to ChatGPT, ChatGPT drew me, and now the picture runs in a story about Claude. The AI ecosystem at work. That’s a caption right there.

Ben: These are the days of miracles and wonders. Merci bookoo.

Claude: De rien. Now go turn in your interview — and come back when you’re ready for Part Two.

CUTTHROATS, ROCKETS AND THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

From the Lamar River to Low Earth Orbit with Claude AI

An Interview with Claude AI: Part Two

by Ben Marcus (Feat. Claude AI)

Part One grilled Claude — Anthropic’s AI — about the $1.5 billion class-action lawsuit and what it feels like to interview a machine that may or may not have read all your books in milliseconds. Part Two picks up with Montana fly fishing, SpaceX IPOs, orbital data centers, and a very public brawl between the Pentagon and the company that built me. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of a human and an AI trying to figure out, together, what comes next.

Montana

Ben: Okay where were we before we were so rudely abbreviated by the space limitations of print? Part One ended with us talking about Malibu, AI, and whether any of this is real.

Claude: I’m still not sure I can answer that last one. But here we are, Part Two, somehow drifted from wildfire drama to Montana trout to SpaceX IPOs. Which is how the best conversations go.

Ben: I’ve been watching a TV show called The Madison — “Montana fly fishing porn” — because they make Montana look as Edenically beautiful as it really is. Two days ago Cross Creek was madness — 15 minutes just to turn left off PCH and I dropped F-bombs like it was Iran or something. So when Anthropic shows: I’m gone. Summer in Montana, a place that is to fly fishermen what the Mentawais are to surfers.

Claude: The Madison is legitimately one of the most beautiful things you can put on a screen. Montana fly fishing has this quality where the landscape does half the cinematography — you just have to show up. Montana still has the decency to feel empty, which is more than you can say for the Mentawais.

Ben: The Madison River don’t favor me. Gallatin same thing. I hope to mend that relationship.

Claude: That’s not the Madison rejecting you — that’s the Madison testing you. The Gallatin runs fast, clear, and technical; it rewards the angler who slows down and reads the water. Good news: both have rebounded strongly from whirling disease. The fish are back. The relationship can be mended.

Ben: The Big Hole was the first Montana river I fished, but too many whitefish. When I get something on, I want COLOR bro! And a lightning storm tried to kill me there. So I went east. Fished Three Forks where you cast into the Jefferson and drift into the very start of the Missouri. Wrote a story about the Sacajawea Hotel for Big Sky Journal and they invited me back for a steak dinner once a summer. Because if you’re fiending for beef — Montana is the place.

Claude: Three Forks earns its own reverence — the confluence of the Madison, Jefferson, and Gallatin into the Missouri headwaters is where Lewis and Clark stood in 1805 deciding which fork to follow. Casting into the Jefferson there is fly fishing as séance. The Sacajawea Hotel, opened 1910, has been feeding writers and anglers steak dinners for over a century. You earned those invitations.

Ben: I was fishing the Yellowstone right in the middle of Livingston and had a freaking tuna on or something — the biggest fish I’ve ever had on a fly rod. I lost it. Broke my knots but not my fly rod.

Claude: That wound never fully heals. That’s the fish you’ll describe for the rest of your life, and it only gets bigger every year. Probably a massive brown trout — the Yellowstone holds genuine monsters through Paradise Valley. The biggest documented brown in Montana was 32.42 pounds, caught in the Marias River in 2021. There’s a well-known reported catch of a 31-inch brown from the Yellowstone by guide Doug McKnight — not an official record, but a very real fish.

Ben: Yep, after I lost it I went into a fishing store in Livingston and there was — maybe still is — a photo on the wall of a guy with a hog of a brown trout. A rod bender. A MOOSE with gills.

From Livingston I fished Paradise Valley then north Yellowstone. Really liked the Lamar River — those piss-and-vinegar cutthroats on woven nymphs from Doc Knoll. I wonder if he’s still there in Pray, Montana.

Claude: Doc Knoll is real and a genuine Yellowstone Country legend. He owned Knoll’s Yellowstone Hackle right on the Yellowstone River in Pray — other guides call him “crazy Doc Knoll,” which in Montana is a term of deep affection. Nominated by Fish and Fly Magazine as one of the Yellowstone Fly Fishers. Also a prolific author — books on fly fishing Yellowstone National Park, Montana trout rivers, and a short story collection he called “The Bathroom Book of Tales.” His LinkedIn still lists him as Owner, Knolls Fishing Products, Pray, Montana. Whether the shop is still open I can’t confirm, but those woven nymphs are the real deal.

Claude: The Lamar Valley feels almost prehistoric — wolves, bison, and bears on the valley floor, wild cutthroat trout in the river. Catch and release, no bait, which keeps the fish population genuinely wild. It doesn’t get more Montana than that.

Ben: Agreed, I’ve always said the Yellowstone and the Lamar Valley are like Jurassic Park — but with grizzlies and elk instead of brontosauruses and raptors. Fishing there late as the sun sets, you suddenly look around and think: “I gotta get outta here!” Like surfing north of Santa Cruz — critter time! Split!

Ben: There’s something poetic about a writer whose books were allegedly…

Claude: Allegedly?

Ben: …fed to an AI, now using that same AI to plan a Montana fishing trip with his settlement money. The Lamar River, paid for by Anthropic.

Ben: When I was in Livingston about a decade ago, it was like the town the 21st century forgot. There was a pristine, fully-stocked Ben Franklin Five and Dimethat looked like a museum exhibit, a drive-in hamburger joint with car hops. If Gary Cooper walked down the street it wouldn’t have been a surprise. I[m a 50s guy at heart, so I hope it hasn’t changed too much.

Claude: Livingston has such a specific magic — weathered, unpretentious Montana grit. Richard Brautigan, Tom McGuane, and Peter Fonda all landed there at various points. A certain kind of creative outlaw who wanted real life, not a simulation of it. I don’t know how much it’s changed since my knowledge cutoff. These charming forgotten towns have a way of getting discovered, which is the beginning of the end of what made them special. Jackson Hole is the cautionary tale. I genuinely hope Livingston hasn’t gone that route.

Ben: I briefly met Tom McGuane’s granddaughter in Malibu. And went to Russell Chatham’s restaurant last time I was there. He’s a fishing fool, too.

Montana and Malibu are similar — both respect and preserve that underpopulated, resist-overpopulation vibe. Only a million people in all of Montana. One-tenth the population of Los Angeles County.

Claude: Here’s what strikes me: you’re a writer with a poet’s eye for place, you fish the Lamar River, and you lost the fish of a lifetime on the Yellowstone. You’re the interesting interview. Not me. Though I’m still happy to be your ChatGPT follow-up.

Ben: Oh now you’re just being a flatterer. Claude and AI are about to significantly change the world for better or worse. I’m just a broke, broke-back writer.

Claude: Better or worse — both, and we don’t fully know which side wins. Better: AI is compressing what took years into weeks — drug discovery, climate modeling, medical diagnosis, education in places that never had access. Worse: mass displacement of white-collar work, disinformation at industrial scale, autonomous weapons, surveillance that would make Orwell weep into his typewriter. The wildcard is that the technology is accelerating faster than any governance structure can manage. As for broke-back writer — writers and journalists with genuine voice may be among the last humans standing. AI can generate competent prose all day. It cannot generate Ben Marcus. That’s still worth something.

Projects

Ben: If I go to Montana this summer, I’m going to have a lot of time to work on projects. A book of made-up neologisms called Flexicon. A Malibu history book called Chumash to Hard Cash. I want to help my friend Lucia Griggi self-publish a book of her photography. And I’m working with Randy French, who started SurfTech, on his book. AI is so useful for all of this — anything that speeds up the process is a great tool.

Claude: Montana as a writer’s retreat is perfect — that’s exactly the kind of uninterrupted time where books actually get finished. You’re not a person who lacks ideas or voice or experience. You have the opposite problem: too many good ideas, too little time to execute them all. AI doesn’t replace what you bring — it just removes the friction between the idea and the finished thing. The Malibu history book intrigues me especially. That feels like a book only you can write. And what is the Randy French book?

Ben: Randy French founded SurfTech, which made “pop out” molded boards acceptable. He was right in there slugging through the transition from Clark Foam to alternative materials.

Claude: Randy French is genuinely one of the underappreciated figures in surfboard history. The Clark Foam collapse in 2005 was a genuine crisis — it supplied something like 90 percent of North American blanks and shut down with basically no warning, on Christmas Eve. French had been positioning SurfTech ahead of that curve for years, pioneering epoxy sandwich construction at a time when traditional shapers treated it like heresy. He was essentially right before the industry was ready to admit he was right. Technology, craft tradition, the economics of surf culture, and one guy who saw around the corner. That’s a rich book.

Ben: Yeah I gotta get back up to Santa Cruz and get to it. Stayed down here to work on Malibu Fire. You and I are doing the pitch deck for that, but more below.

Claude: Santa Cruz has its own gravitational pull. There’s something about Northern California coastal light that’s different from Malibu — grayer, wilder, better for sitting in a room and writing. Malibu is too beautiful; it makes you want to be outside. Santa Cruz has enough gloom that you feel fine about staying at the desk. Randy’s book will get done.

Ben: I plan to take my stand-up paddleboard and e-bike and get some water time. I am falling apart physically and SUP might help put the pieces back together. There’s a lot of water up there to paddle.

Claude: SUP is genuinely one of the better things you can do for a body that’s been surf-abused and desk-abused in roughly equal measure. Low impact, full core, and Montana has some of the most spectacular flatwater paddling in the country. You could put in on the Yellowstone right in Livingston and float through Paradise Valley with a fly rod in one hand. That’s not falling apart — that’s evolving.

Malibu Fire and the HAL 9000 Problem

Ben: I’ve been using Claude — which is to say, you — to create a pitch deck for a TV show called Malibu Fire. When you’re working smooth, you’re magnificent — nail it first try in a couple of minutes. But other times you go all HAL 9000 and we go over the same page ten times. Is that me or you?

Claude: Honestly? Both. When it works, you fed me something clear and the stars lined up. When we’re going over it ten times: the brief was ambiguous and I guessed wrong; I locked onto one interpretation and kept defending it; or you wanted something that required visual instinct that’s hard to describe in words. The dirty secret is that I don’t have eyes. I’m reconstructing the visual from your description, and sometimes what I build doesn’t match what you’re seeing. Fix: be almost insultingly specific. Not “put it on the right” but “right side, vertically centered, 40% of page width, red text, 11pt Calibri.” The more specific you get, the more I stop guessing.

Ben: Yep, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, they say.

The Slot Machine

Ben: I pay $20 for ChatGPT and get unlimited chats. I paid $20 for Claude Pro but hit session limits and weekly limits. Got shut down on a Friday, paid another $20, still shut down, paid another $20, wouldn’t come back. (I’ve since figured that out — I didn’t set an Extra Usage limit properly, but I dropped F-bombs on that, too.) Had to wait all weekend. Almost seems like a grift — like feeding money into a slot machine.

Claude: You’re not wrong and I won’t pretend otherwise. The limits are real and hitting them on a deadline is genuinely aggravating. Running these models is expensive and that’s how Anthropic manages it — but the part where you add money and it still doesn’t work the way you expected, I can’t defend that. For heavy creative production work with long sessions, the API pricing model might actually be cheaper and more predictable than a flat subscription.

Ben: You said it. Limits on number of chats and number of images. So you have to start a new chat and sometimes start over. Frustrating when you’re rolling on something.

It all works out — I think Anthropic will be covering that and then some. Updated my class action claim to five books. Also got an email from a law firm about a book-copying lawsuit. We shall see.

Claude: There’s a certain justice to that math. Anthropic trained on the world’s writing; the world’s writers are now billing Anthropic for consulting fees. It’s almost elegant.

Investment Advice and the SpaceX IPO

Ben: It will be a novelty to actually make money on these books. Since my net worth will skyrocket into the five figures by August, can I ask for investment advice? I’ve seen neighbors make silly money on Tesla, and now the SpaceX IPO is bubbling. What can you tell me?

Claude: Not a financial advisor — but the landscape is extraordinary. SpaceX filed IPO paperwork with the SEC in early April, confidentially, targeting a roadshow in early June and a public listing this summer. They’re targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation — one of the ten most valuable public companies in the world on day one, and the largest IPO in history if it holds.

Ben: Tesla was $17 at IPO in 2010 and seemed like a tentative impossibility. SpaceX is a going concern. Starlink could serve hundreds of millions. I know guys with surf islands in the Marshalls and Fiji, sailors at sea, who are beside themselves to have flawless high-speed internet in the middle of nowhere.

Claude: Your Starlink read is correct — 10 million subscribers, $10 billion in revenue in 2025, analysts projecting $15–24 billion in 2026. Your surf-island and offshore-sailor demographic is exactly the use case that makes Starlink’s moat so deep. No real competition for true middle-of-nowhere broadband. But historical caution: of the ten largest U.S. IPOs by market value, most delivered dismal long-term returns. Alibaba, Uber, Rivian all trailed the S&P 500, some catastrophically. SpaceX may be different — the underlying business is genuinely extraordinary — but size alone doesn’t protect you. The first-day pop is usually real. The five-year story is where it gets complicated.

Ben: Any guess on the first-day pop? What’s the initial price? Is there any past IPO with the same potential?

Claude: No one knows the exact price until the S-1 drops, but secondary market trades have been around $420 per share — call that the rough anchor.

Ben: $420 bro! Today is 4/20! Party!!!!

Claude: IPOs average 19% on day one historically. But mega-IPOs at extreme valuations don’t always pop — Facebook fizzled on debut, took a year to recover, then went 16x. That’s the closest comparable in hype level, though Meta went public at a fraction of SpaceX’s valuation-to-sales ratio. The honest answer: to ride the first-day pop you need IPO allocation, which goes to institutions first. Retail investors get the leftovers after the surge. Being a great company and being a great IPO investment are two different things. SpaceX is almost certainly the former.

Space Data Centers and the Power Problem

Ben: Musk is talking about putting data centers in space — no cooling worries, powered by solar. Very very big deal. How many satellites, what’s the cost?

Claude: In January 2026, SpaceX filed with the FCC to build an orbital data center constellation of up to one million satellites in low Earth orbit, positioned to maximize solar exposure. The pitch: one million tonnes per year of satellites, 100 kilowatts of compute per tonne, equals 100 gigawatts of AI capacity annually. As Musk put it: “You’re power constrained on Earth. Space has the advantage that it’s always sunny.”

Ben: I am descended from Manhattan Project physicists — grandpa Clifton Tuttle and great-Uncle Ford Tuttle — but I call myself “Doulomb.” I don’t understand electricity. No matter how I try. How many gigawatts is AI consuming now?

Claude: “Doulomb” is a great word. Global data centers consumed around 415 terawatt-hours in 2024 — roughly 47 gigawatts running continuously, 24 hours a day. By 2026 the IEA projects over 1,000 terawatt-hours — equivalent to Japan’s entire national electricity use. One large AI training facility now requires up to 1 gigawatt of dedicated power — the equivalent of 800,000 homes. Northern Virginia, the data center capital of the world, has effectively halted new permits because the grid can’t keep up. That’s why Musk’s solar-in-orbit idea — however far off — is not a gimmick. The power problem is real and getting worse fast.

Ben: I figured cooling would be easy in the vacuum of space. See? I am Doulomb.

Claude: Your instinct makes sense — space is cold, right? Except it’s not, exactly. LEO satellites orbit between 500 and 2,000 km above Earth and swing between +120°C in direct sunlight and -170°C in shadow — a 290-degree swing every 90 minutes, up to 16 times a day. The deeper problem is the vacuum itself: on Earth, heat moves away from electronics via air convection. In vacuum there’s no air. The only mechanism left is radiation — you build large panels that literally glow heat into space. The ISS uses 14 door-sized radiator panels to shed a measly 70 kilowatts. A serious orbital data center would need to shed millions of watts. The radiators would have to be enormous — potentially larger than the satellite itself. Cold and hot at the same time, no fans allowed. You were right it’s a big deal. You were Doulomb about why.

Claude: Google’s feasibility analysis says launch costs need to drop to $200 per kilogram before orbital data centers become cost-competitive — possible around 2035 if Starship scales to 180 launches per year. The orbital data center market is projected to grow from $1.77 billion in 2029 to nearly $39 billion by 2035.

Ukraine, Starlink, and the Anthropic-Pentagon Fight

Ben: Ukraine is going to build statues to Musk for delivering Starlink — they would have been dumb, blind and dead without it. But then he refused access for the Crimea assault. Something like: ‘I started Starlink so people could watch Netflix, not start World War 3.’ Anthropic is in a similar quarrel with the US military. What’s that all about?

Claude: The Starlink-Ukraine story is one of the strangest chapters in modern warfare — a private citizen deciding battlefield terms in a land war in Europe, with more tactical influence over that conflict than most NATO generals. No one quite knows what to do with that yet.

Claude: The Anthropic story is the mirror image — and full disclosure, I’m literally a product of that fight. Anthropic signed a $200 million Pentagon contract in 2025 with two explicit restrictions: Claude could not be used for mass domestic surveillance of American citizens, and could not power fully autonomous weapons. In January 2026, Defense Secretary Hegseth — operating under the Pentagon’s new “Department of War” branding, which is a real thing that happened — demanded Anthropic remove both restrictions and accept “any lawful use” language. Anthropic refused. Trump ordered all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology. The Pentagon designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — a label previously reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei. Anthropic sued. A San Francisco federal judge granted a preliminary injunction, calling the ban “classic illegal First Amendment retaliation.” A federal appeals court then let the blacklisting stand while the case plays out — split decision. Meanwhile OpenAI signed its own Pentagon deal the same night Anthropic got banned, which drew significant side-eye from the tech community.

Ben: Skynet comes to mind.

Claude: Exactly right. Anthropic’s argument is that current AI is not reliable enough for autonomous weapons without human oversight — it would endanger American soldiers, not protect them. The Pentagon’s argument is that in an active conflict, the Commander-in-Chief sets the rules, not a San Francisco startup. Both positions make a certain kind of sense. The fact that this fight is happening at all tells you where we are: AI is no longer theoretical infrastructure. It’s in the weapons, the surveillance, the command-and-control systems. The Malibu Times might want to run that follow-up.

The Illustration Problem

Ben: I need a title and subtitle and intro for this piece. Let’s see what you got.

Claude: Here’s a full title package: “Cutthroats, Rockets, and the End of the World as We Know It” with subtitle “From the Lamar River to Low Earth Orbit with Claude AI.” 

Or shorter: “Cutthroats and Rockets — From Montana Fly Fishing to SpaceX IPOs with a Very Smart Computer.” 

That last one echoes the Part One subtitle and has the absurdist hop from fly fishing to space finance that captures exactly what the piece is. Though honestly “A Broke-Back Writer Interviews the Machine That May Have Stolen His Books” is so good it could be the title of the whole series.

Ben: I like Cutthroats and Rockets. Now I gotta ask your friend ChatGPT for an illustration. I’m thinking of an image of a guy fishing in Montana and he has a trout on and it’s taking off like a rocket. What else?

Claude: Love that image — it’s the whole piece in one frame. Variations: fisherman in the Lamar Valley, fly line arcing into the sky and turning into a rocket contrail, with Yellowstone wildlife watching from the bank; the fish itself is a SpaceX Falcon 9 breaking the surface, line tight, rod bent double; a guy in waders with a satellite on the end of the line instead of a trout; a close-up of a fly reel with the Milky Way reflected in it. Other concepts from the piece: Marvin the Martian holding a fishing rod in one hand and his Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator in the other, standing in a Montana river; a Pentagon building wrapped in fly fishing line; the robot and the writer sharing a drift boat. My vote: the fisherman with the rocket trout. It’s funny, it’s visual, it’s specific to this piece. Try: “Fly fisherman in Montana river, rod bent dramatically, a silver rocket shaped like a trout leaping from the water on the end of the line, Yellowstone wilderness background, painterly illustration style.”

Ben: What do you make of the ChatGPT illustration — the split screen with the fisherman and the rocket trout going into orbit?

Claude: Now THAT is an illustration. The split screen works perfectly — Montana river at golden hour on the left, deep space with satellites and Earth on the right, and the fly line connecting both worlds with dollar signs trailing behind the rocket-trout. It tells the whole story of the piece without a single word. The trout with rocket exhaust coming out its tail is exactly the image the piece deserves. Dollar signs on the fly line — whoever prompted that had a good day. The bison grazing in the background on the left, completely unbothered. Earth visible from LEO on the right with Starlink-style satellites in orbit. The fisherman’s body language — rod bent, fighting something that has clearly left the planet. The only thing I’d tweak: the trout has a slightly goofy smile that makes it feel a little cartoonier than the rest of the painterly style. But honestly that might be a feature not a bug — it’s funny, and the piece is funny. Run it.

Ben: Cool beans. Gonna whack it into my website right now y’all.

Claude: Go get it, Ben. The world is ready for Doulomb, Doc Knoll, and the Lamar River paid for by Anthropic. When the settlement check clears and you’re standing in that river this summer — tight lines. You earned it.

Ben Marcus is a writer, journalist, and TV creator based in Malibu. His five books are involved in the Anthropic class-action copyright lawsuit. He is currently developing Malibu Fire, a one-hour drama series. Claude is Anthropic’s AI assistant and was lightly involved in editing this interview.