Tuesday, March 10, 2026 · 134 newsletters

Anthropic Sues the Pentagon

anthropic · dod · iran-war · oil-shock · softbank · openai · ai-agents · antitrust · stablecoins · politics · nyc · fintech

Published on Tuesday, March 10, 2026.

Pulled from 146 newsletters sent to read@madho.net over the weekend and Monday. Here's the signal cut from the noise, organized by trend.

The Big AI Story: Anthropic Sues the Pentagon

This was the dominant tech storyline of the day, and it cut across every business newsletter. Techmeme led with Reuters reporting that Anthropic has sued to block the DOD from designating it a supply chain risk, calling the designation unlawful and a violation of its free speech and due process rights. The reporting from Wired noted that more than 30 staffers from OpenAI and Google, including DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, filed an amicus brief in support of Anthropic. Axios separately reported the White House is preparing an executive order formally instructing federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's AI tools. Anthropic's filing said it had $5B+ in all-time revenue since 2023 and could lose billions after clients paused deal talks due to the supply chain designation.

The Information AM picked up the next-order consequence: OpenAI's robotics head Caitlin Kalinowski resigned over OpenAI's own Defense Department negotiations, writing that "surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got." Meanwhile, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon said they'll keep selling Anthropic models to customers other than the Pentagon. A frontier lab is now in open litigation against the executive branch. That's new.

The Macro Pile-On: Iran, Oil, Inflation, Recession Talk

The economic backdrop turned ugly fast. Matt at WTF Just Happened Today opened Day 1875 with the US economy losing 92,000 jobs in February, the third loss in five months, and unemployment ticking up to 4.4%. Trump simultaneously claimed the Iran fight was "very complete, pretty much" while threatening to strike "at a much, much harder level" if Tehran disrupted oil supplies. Bloomberg headlined "Trump's second thoughts", noting Trump and Putin spoke about the war in their first call of the year.

The pain hit the pump first. Chartr ran the state-by-state gas price map: crude past $110, gasoline up nearly 50 cents in eight days, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas hit hardest because of their Gulf Coast refinery exposure. Matt at Crooked Media had the most pointed framing: the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, gas prices rose 14 percent in a week, and a former San Francisco Fed economist told the New York Times he is "very concerned this could tip us into a recession if it persists."

SoftBank is the pressure point. Om Malik wrote the day's most consequential single piece, The Debt Beneath the Dream. SoftBank shares dropped as much as 12.5 percent. OpenAI and Oracle scrapped plans to expand a flagship Texas data center over financing difficulties and softer demand. Credit default swaps widened. S&P cut SoftBank's outlook to negative. The FT reported SoftBank's bet on OpenAI is starting to weigh and Bloomberg said SoftBank is seeking a record loan of up to $40 billion for its OpenAI stake. Om has been calling this "the announcement economy" for weeks, and the announcement is starting to meet the balance sheet.

AI: The Agent Productivity Hangover

A surprisingly cohesive set of pieces all pointing in the same direction: agents make you want to do more work, not less, and the labor market is bifurcating on who has actually used them.

The productivity paradox. Every ran Katie Parrott's "AI Was Supposed to Free My Time. It Consumed It.", a piece about staying up until 1 a.m. with her OpenClaw assistant, Margot. Nikunj Kothari at Balancing Act made the same argument from the other side in "10x is the new floor": Block cut 4,000 people (40% of the company) and the stock jumped 24%. Two realities at the same dinner: founders maxing out token limits before lunch, and Fortune 500 VPs of engineering who still haven't opened Cursor.

The skeptics are louder. Alex Wilhelm at Cautious Optimism flagged that "the public isn't a big fan of AI", citing an NBC poll that 26% rate it positively and 46% negatively. Hiten Shah wrote a particularly bracing roundup, including Noah Smith on AI agents and bioweapons and "The Engineer Who Ships Fast Gets Nothing" on why nobody gets promoted for simplicity.

The product-strategy crowd is adapting. Aakash Gupta published a long Claude Code product-strategy keynote, framing it around Boris Cherny's "everyone becomes a product manager" thesis. Lenny's Newsletter put out a Midjourney workflow episode on consistent brand imagery. Linas published "Turn Claude in Excel Into Your Senior Financial Analyst". ByteByteGo ran Top AI GitHub Repositories in 2026, with OpenClaw at 210,000+ stars now firmly the breakout project. James Murray at Behind the CMO wrote about Meta's $2B Manus AI ad tool already hallucinating in production, with media buyers refusing to send its outputs to clients.

Politics & War: The Chaos Doctrine

The political writers are converging on a single thesis: this is not a normal political crisis.

The civil-cold-war frame. JVL at The Bulwark made the cleanest case in "Warning: The Chaos President THRIVES on Chaos". His read: yes, Trump's Iran execution has been incompetent (he cites Iran's Mosaic Defense doctrine as a thing Trump's team appears not to understand), but if we're already partway through a post-democratic transition, chaos becomes useful. Lincoln Square ran two episodes hitting similar notes, including Dean Obeidallah on Trump being played by Netanyahu and Andra Watkins on the white Christian nationalist Armageddon plan.

The voting-rights front is still moving. Democracy Docket led with the FBI subpoenaing records from the discredited Arizona 2020 audit, part of what they call Trump's effort to "lay the groundwork for undermining fair elections going forward." Marc Elias wrote that "The SAVE America Act won't save Trump", the bill Trump posted about at 1 a.m. demanding Congress pass it. Will Sommer at The Bulwark had the day's most entertaining political story: leaked texts from the James Fishback groyper campaign, with staffers wishing he'd return his luxury watch already.

The longer view. Foreign Affairs published Robert Pape on Why Escalation Favors Iran and Michael Carpenter's "The Postliberal Superpower" on what abandoning democratic allies will cost America. George Bounacos at Gov Brief Today reported in What Happened Today #402 that fighting has now reached Baghdad, Oslo (an explosion at the US embassy), and a sidewalk outside the New York City mayor's home, where an IED was thrown into a crowd during Ramadan. NPR published video showing what weapons experts identified as an American Tomahawk hitting the Minab school compound where 175 students and staff died on day one.

Antitrust: Ticketmaster Pulls a Settlement Out of a Trial

Matt Stoller at The Big Newsletter wrote the standout antitrust piece of the day: "Trump Just Pardoned Ticketmaster When No One Was Looking." Mid-trial, the Antitrust Division abruptly announced a deal with Live Nation/Ticketmaster, the stock spiked, and then the state AG plaintiffs said they would not be sandbagged and pledged to continue. Stoller called it "one of the wilder courtroom spectacles we've seen." Gothamist covered the NY/NJ angle on the states pushing forward. Broadly, this would be the third Ticketmaster consent decree since 2010, and the first two delivered no competition.

Fintech & Stablecoins: The Three-Way Split

Charlie Liu at Fintechnize published the most useful taxonomy piece of the day, "The 2026 Coordinates of Stablecoins": the category has split into agentic commerce, RWA plus on-chain credit, and on-chain FX. Circle reported year-end 2025 USDC circulation of $75.3 billion (up 72%) and Q4 transaction volume of $11.9 trillion (up 247%). The Breakdown at Blockworks ran a Byron Gilliam piece on a Bitcoin Policy Institute study finding AI agents prefer bitcoin and digital-native money over fiat in 91% of experiments. Tearsheet wrote up Affirm's full-stack push beyond consumer finance into rent payments, a bank charter, debit-embedded BNPL, and QuickBooks invoices. FT Partners flagged Stash's $425M sale to Grab and PicPay's $434M IPO. Sacra estimates Oura hit $1B in revenue in 2025, doubling YoY, with 70% female users and the MAHA tailwind.

VC & Operators: The Industrial Base and the Lean Team

Newcomer had an exclusive that ex-a16z partner Michelle Volz launched Pax Ventures with a $50M first fund, focused on reinventing America's industrial base (lithium, rockets, government cyber). Monday Morning Meeting wrote "If You Starve the Team, They Build a Farm" on Agentio: 35 people, hundreds of thousands burned in all of 2025, hadn't touched their $12M Series A before raising a $40M Series B. The lean-team-with-AI thesis keeps getting case studies.

Supply Chain & Trade

FreightWaves Daily flagged Mexico's crackdown on 350 steel importers through its IMMEX program, the framework that makes nearshoring economics work. Steel runs through every nearshoring industry: automotive, appliances, construction, heavy equipment. Worst possible timing.

NYC: Mamdani Goes After Bad Landlords

Gothamist led with Mamdani backing a Council bill to seize buildings from bad landlords through a revived "third-party transfer" program, plus the terror charges for the Gracie Mansion IED teens. A separate Gothamist piece covered bike lanes and bigger plazas planned for 14th Street. Emily Sundberg and J Lee at Feed Me ran J Lee's Noma reflection after the Times exposé about a kitchen filled with "blood, sweat, and abuse," plus notes on Goop Kitchen's second NYC location.

Lifestyle & Culture

Casey Lewis at After School had the most-cited trend piece, "Brontë Blush and Buzzballz Barbells": Bank of America data shows Gen Z alcohol spending at a 40-year low while UK gym membership hit an all-time high and Planet Fitness redesigned its floor space to be nearly half strength training. Stuart Winchester at The Storm Skiing Journal released his 2026-27 ski pass toolkit covering Epic, Ikon, Indy, and Mountain Collective across 399 ski areas. Mark Manson wrote that "Your distractions aren't random". David Burkus had a quiet, useful piece on what Mr. Rogers knew about leadership pauses, drawn from Daniel Coyle's new book Flourish. Elephant Room had this morning's offbeat-but-good China piece on Northeasterners migrating to Xishuangbanna and remaking its commercial culture.

Three Takeaways for You

The Anthropic lawsuit changes the AI policy landscape. Until today, the standard model was that frontier labs lobbied government from the inside. Now one is in federal court arguing the executive branch is violating its constitutional rights, while staffers at its competitors file amicus briefs in its defense. Combine that with OpenAI's robotics head resigning over DOD work and the Pentagon trying to lock Anthropic out, and you have an industry that is no longer politically monolithic on national-security questions.

Watch SoftBank, not OpenAI. The cleanest single signal in the financial press today is SoftBank's credit default swaps widening while it seeks a record $40 billion loan to fund its OpenAI commitment. The Texas data-center expansion that just got scrapped was a load-bearing assumption for Stargate. If the financing breaks here, it breaks for the whole 2025-vintage AI capex cycle, not just one company. Om Malik has been the most consistent voice on this, and today's piece is worth your morning.

If you only read three pieces, I'd suggest: Om Malik's The Debt Beneath the Dream for the macro frame, Every's AI Was Supposed to Free My Time. It Consumed It. for the lived experience of agent work in 2026, and JVL's Warning: The Chaos President THRIVES on Chaos for the political stakes underneath the Iran headlines.