Let's Know Things

This week we talk about BYD, Tesla, and the Blade Battery 2.0.
We also discuss EVs, internal-combustion engines, and autonomous vehicles.
Recommended Book: Blank Space by W. David Marx
Transcript
Petroleum-powered vehicles, cars and trucks and SUVs of the kind that have become the standard since the mid-20th century, work by mixing fuel that you put in the tank when you fill up at the gas station with air, in the engine, and then creating a controlled explosion—in modern vehicles using what’s called a four-stroke combustion cycle of intake, compression, combustion, then exhaust—in order to move pistons which, in turn generate mechanical power by transferring that movement to the vehicle’s wheels.
An electric vehicle, in contrast, functions by using electricity from a battery pack to power an electric motor. So rather than needing fuel to combust, which then moves pistons which then moves the wheels, EVs are a straighter-shot with less conversion of energy necessary, electricity powering the motor which powers the wheels.
That simpler setup comes with many advantages, and that difference in the conversion of energy is a big one. Because most of the energy injected into the EV’s system is converted into mechanical movement for the wheels, this type of vehicle only loses about 11% of the energy you put into it to that conversion of electricity to mechanical energy process—around 31-35% is initially lost while charging, converting electricity to motion, and so on, but about 22% is recaptured by the vehicle’s brakes during operation, leading to that 11% average loss.
A gas-powered vehicle, in contrast, because of the inefficiencies inherent in converting fuel to combustion to movement, loses somewhere between 75-84% of the energy you put into it at the gas station, much of that loss in the form of heat that is emitted as a result of that conversion process; this is an inevitable consequence of the thermodynamics of burning fuel to create motion, and one that means operating a gas-powered vehicle is inherently lossier, in the sense that you can’t help but lose the majority of what you put into it as waste, compared to an electric vehicle, which is less lossy to begin with, but even more efficient when you include that in-operation energy recovery.
That baseline reality of energy usage means that modern electric vehicles will typically be cheaper to fuel, to power, because it requires less energy input to get the same amount of travel. This cost-benefit comparison shifts even further in favor of EVs when gas prices are high, though, and though currently the cost of EVs tend to be higher than gas-powered vehicles in most countries, EVs also offer substantially lower lifetime maintenance costs—an average of 40% lower than gas-powered vehicles, due largely to the dramatically reduced number of moving parts in EVs, and the lack of regular, recurring engine-related maintenance tasks, like oil changes and replacing spark plugs.
Not even considering the externalities-related savings of owning and operating an EV, then, like the environmental costs of fuel emissions, such vehicles can save owners tens of thousands of dollars in costs over the span of their ownership—though gas-powered vehicles are still more popular in most markets in part because they’re just more common on car lots, their infrastructure—gas stations versus charging stations—are also more common, and because there are numerous convenience issues, like it being quite a bit faster to pump a tank full of gas than to charge EVs, which is more efficient, but also a piece-of-mind sort of benefit.
What I’d like to talk about today are some recent innovations in the EV and especially EV-scale battery space, and what it might mean for this market in the coming years.
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After a relatively boom-y period in which EV sales saw a significant uptick, that uptick the consequence of friendly policies and subsidies from successive federal administrations and the rapid-fire innovations arriving in each new generation of EV model being pumped out by US makers, especially Tesla, the US car industry has in recent years pulled back from electric vehicles substantially—the most recent evidence of this being Honda’s recent announcement that three EV models they were planning to manufacture in the US will no longer see production.
This was mostly a money decision, the raw and partially manufactured components necessary for US-based car companies to produce EVs are now burdened with new, Trump-era tariffs, that make producing finished products of this kind in the US all but impossible; simply too expensive to make.
This is also an acknowledgment, though, that Chinese EVs have just gotten so good and so inexpensive for what you get, that it’s simply not possible to compete, not within the current economic and regulatory climate, but also not in the immediate future, even lacking those tariffs, because of how much of a lead Chinese car companies have earned for themselves in this space.
New impositions by the second Trump administration, including those tariffs, but also the killing of EV incentives, and a recent decision to cease enforcing emissions and fuel economy standards, basically telling the industry to make vehicles that pollute more, if they like, have absolutely influenced this state of affairs.
But the quality of new Chinese EVs, the speed at which a large quantity of them can be produced, and the affordability of these vehicles is simply too much for even the world’s most otherwise competitive and industry-owning companies, the most renowned car brands, to match.
There are a few serious EV players in other parts of Asia, and some US companies, like Lucid Motors, are still trying to carve out a space for themselves, pivoting toward skateboard-style platforms that will allow them to use fewer scarce products, like expensive wiring, by using essentially the same base for all of their models, allowing them to ramp-up efficiencies of scale faster, and Rivian, which is trying to claim the outdoorsy, Jeep-esque facet of the US EV market; and Tesla of course continues to own a lot of mindshare in this industry, despite seeming to be pivoting toward AI, autonomous vehicles, and political concerns in recent years.
But this is increasingly China’s domain, and that dominance is the result of a multi-decade push to own basically all the infrastructure and technologies required to electrify their economy, from the ground-up.
As a consequence of that dominance, and all the renewables and battery-making facilities and investments in the relevant companies made by the government for the past few decades, we’re now seeing impressive technological feats coming out of China, like the recently successfully test-flown Sky Dragon electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, which looks something like a drone combined with a helicopter, and which can reportedly carry either 10 passengers or a ton of cargo up to 155 miles, which is about 250 kilometers, on a single charge, taking off and landing from helipads, so no runway necessary.
But the already on-the-market, everyday applications of this tech are arguably even more impressive, considering that car-markers in other countries cannot accomplish anywhere near the same, and maybe won’t be able to do so for years.
Chinese carmaker BYD is the top entrant in this space right now, in China and globally, by many metrics, and in early March of 2026 they announced a new battery, called the Blade Battery 2.0, which allows the vehicles it powers to be driven more than 621 miles on a single charge.
That’s compared to the around 400 mile range most large-tanked gas-powered cars can claim. Though even as batteries have gotten larger and more efficient, in terms of their energy storage and expenditure, charging them up has still taken quite a bit longer than filling a tank with gas, often requiring a wait of 30 minutes, though that’s usually just for a small top-up, and only if you have access to a fast-charger. A full-charge sometimes requires as much as 24 hours, if you’re using a small, non-fast public or a home charger.
This differs quite a lot depending where in the world you are, the nature of your EV, and the capacity of the charger you’re using. In general, Tesla superchargers can take a Tesla’s battery from 20% to 89% in around 15-30 minutes, which on average provides another 200 miles of travel; topping it up to 100% usually takes about an hour.
This new battery from BYD, though, which has that 621 mile capacity, can be charged from 10% to 80% in just 6 and a half minutes—and that’s not theory, that exact feat was shown in a public, onstage demonstration.
This isn’t a claim about a technology that will soon arrive, in other words, this is a technology that’s already here, for BYD vehicles, at least. And at six and a half minutes for around 300 miles of range, that brings EVs into the same convenience range as gas vehicles, just a minute or so longer than the average stop at a gas station.
This of course will require specialized charging stations, and those stations will take a while to roll out. The company has said they’ll have 15,000 of their so-called megawatt charging stations available across China by the end of 2026, building 4000 of them, themselves, and the rest through joint ventures. They’re also planning to have about 3000 of these chargers built across European by the end of the year.
All of which will likely further reinforce and lock-in BYD’s advantages over its local and foreign competition, at least for the next several years.
Now, it’s worth mentioning that China’s ’s EV industry is currently a bit tumultuous, the stock prices of companies like BYD tumbling due to wild competition on the Chinese market that until recently has been encouraged by the government, which favors a brutal sort of evolutionary business environment for its favored industries, most of the entrants eventually dying off and leaving fewer, but very strong and internationally competitive companies once the melee has died down.
It’s generally assumed that companies like BYD will cope with this crisis of too-low prices and vehicle overproduction—they and their Chinese competitors are making a lot more EVs than their existing markets can bear—they’ll cope by becoming more aggressive with their international expansion, dropping gobs of these incredibly competitive vehicles in more markets, hoping to offload all that stock, but also to suffocate inferior but more expensive local offerings and, consequently, create more lock-in with international customers through those superior products.
There’s a parallel push for autonomous EVs in many of these markets, which is several years behind the evolution of EV tech, but is also evolving rapidly within China, using that same ultra-brutal competition tactic. These companies are thus quite a bit further along than most of their global competitors, and it seems likely that the semi-autonomous tech built into these newly exported vehicles will help give Chinese companies a leg-up when it comes to exporting autonomous tech to the world, in the next few years.
All of which demonstrates the Chinese market’s major head-start in this and connected technologies, and which points at a serious concern, not just for the US, but for pretty much everyone, as most of these technologies, like better batteries, are relevant not just for the consumer car industry, but also basically every other field, including future military technologies, and tech related to the AI and broader semiconductor industries, which could lead to still-more, and more varied advantages in the near-future.
Show Notes
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/01/electric-vehicles-use-half-the-energy-of-gas-powered-vehicles/
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/electric-vs-gas-cars-it-cheaper-drive-ev#lifetime-costs
https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/how-do-all-electric-cars-work
https://www.energy.gov/cmei/vehicles/articles/fotw-1360-sept-16-2024-typical-ev-87-91-efficient-compared-30-conventional
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/03/facing-heavy-losses-honda-cancels-its-three-us-made-electric-vehicles/
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/03/rivian-reveals-pricing-and-trim-details-for-its-r2-suv/
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/03/lucid-announces-midsize-ev-platform-says-profitability-lies-with-suvs/
https://www.livescience.com/technology/electric-vehicles/giant-10-person-flying-taxi-passes-first-flight-test-in-china
https://www.fastcompany.com/91503415/byd-ev-battery-competes-with-gas-engines
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/03/byds-latest-evs-can-get-close-to-full-charge-in-just-12-minutes/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/business/china-electric-vehicle-troubles.html
https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/how-long-charge-tesla/


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This week we talk about Khamenei, Trump, and Netanyahu.
We also discuss Venezuela, Cuba, and cartels.
Recommended Book: Plagues upon the Earth by Kyle Harper
Transcript
Ali Hosseini Khamenei was an opposition politician in the lead-up to the Iranian Revolution that, in 1979, resulted in the overthrow of the Shah—the country’s generally Western government-approved royal leader—and installed the Islamic Republic, an extremely conservative Shia government that took the reins of Iran following the Shah’s toppling.
Khamenei was Iran’s third president, post-Shah, and he was president during the Iran-Iraq War from 1981-1989, during which the Supreme Leader of Iran, the head of the country, Ruhollah Khomeini sought the overthrow of then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Khomeini died the same year the war ended, 1989, and Khamenei was elected to the role of Supreme Leader by the country’s Assembly of Experts, which is responsible for determining such roles.
The new Supreme Leader Khamenei was reportedly initially concerned that he wasn’t suitable for the role, as his predecessor was a Grand Ayatollah of the faith, while he was just a mid-rank cleric, but the constitution of Iran was amended so that higher religious office was no longer required in a Supreme Leader, and in short order Khamenei moved to expound upon Iran’s non-military nuclear program, to expand the use and reach of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in-country and throughout the region, and he doubled-down on supporting regional proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza, incorporating them into the so-called Axis of Resistance that stands against Western interests in the region—the specifics of which have varied over the decades, but which currently includes the aforementioned Hezbollah and Houthis, alongside smaller groups in neighboring countries, like Shiite militias in Bahrain, and forces that operate in other regional spheres of influence, like North Korea, Venezuela, and at times, portions of the Syrian government.
Khamenei also reinforced the Iranian government’s power over pretty much every aspect of state function, disempowering political opponents, cracking down on anyone who doesn’t toe a very conservative extremist line—women showing their hair in public, for instance, have been black-bagged and sometimes killed while in custody—and thoroughly entangled the functions of state with the Iranian military, consolidating essentially all power under his office, Supreme Leader, while violently cracking down on anyone who opposed his doing whatever he pleased, as was the case with a wave of late-2025, early 2026 protests across the country, during which Iranian government forces massacred civilians, killing somewhere between 3,000 and 35,000 people, depending on whose numbers you believe.
What I’d like to talk about today is a new war with Iran, kicked off by attacks on the country from Israel and the United States that led with the killing of Khamenei and a bunch of his higher-up officers, how this conflict is spreading across the region and concerns about that spreading, and what might happen next.
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On February 28, 2026, the US and Israel launched a wave of joint air attacks against Iran, hitting mostly military and government sites across the country. One of the targets was Khamenei’s compound, and his presence there, above-ground, which was unusual for him, as he spent most of his time deep underground in difficult-to-hit bunkers, alongside a bunch of government and military higher-ups, may have been the rationale for launching all of these attacks on that day, as the attackers were able to kill him and five other top-level Iranian leaders, who he was meeting with, at the same time.
This wave of attacks followed the largest military buildup of US forces in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq back in 2003, and while military and government targets were prioritized, that initial wave also demolished a lot of civilian structures, including schools, hospitals, and the Grand Bazaar in Tehran, leading to a whole lot of civilian casualties and fatalities, as well.
In response, Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, and at US bases throughout the region—these bases located in otherwise uninvolved countries, including Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Iranian missiles and drones also hit non-military targets, and in some cases maybe accidentally hit civilian infrastructure, in Azerbaijan, and Oman, alongside a British military base on the island of Cyprus.
The Iranian president apologized in early March for his country’s lashing out at pretty much everyone, saying that there were miscommunications within the Iranian military, and that Iran wouldn’t hit anyone else, including countries with US bases, so long as US attacks didn’t originate from those bases.
Despite that apology, though, Iranian missiles and drones continued to land in many of those neighboring countries following his remarks, raising questions about communications and control within the now-decapitated Iranian military.
This new conflict follows long-simmering tensions between Iran and Israel—the former of which has said it will someday wipe the latter from the face of the Earth, considering its existence an abomination—and long-simmering tensions related to Iran’s nuclear program, which the government has continuously said is just for civilian, energy purposes, but which pretty much everyone suspects, with a fair bit of evidence, is, in parallel, also a weapons program.
Iran’s influence throughout the region has been truncated in recent years, due to a sequence of successes by the Israeli military and intelligence services, which allowed them to hobble or nearly wipe out traditional Iranian proxy forces like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, which have collectively surrounded and menaced Israel for decades.
Those menacing forces more or less handled, Israel has become more aggressive in its confrontations with Iran, exchanging large air attacks several times over the past handful of years, and the US under Trump’s second term continues to see Iran as the main opposition to their efforts to build a US-aligned counterbalance against Russian and Chinese influence in the Middle East, with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and increasingly entities like Qatar and the UAE playing ball with the West, while Iran and its allies stand firm against the West.
Trump has regularly threatened to act in Iran, usually waiting for the Iranian government to do something really bad, like that recent massacre of civilians following those large anti-government protests in late-2025, early 2026, and that to some degree has served as justification for the massing of US military assets in the region, leading up to this attack.
Now that the attack has launched, a new war triggered, the question is how big it will get and how long it will last.
For the moment, it looks like Iran’s government and military is very much on the back foot, a lot of their assets taken out in that initial wave, and they’re still scrambling to put someone in charge to replace Khamenei and those other higher-ups who were assassinated at the outset of this war—that’ll likely change soon, maybe even before this episode goes live. But whomever takes the reins will have quite the task ahead of them, probably—according to many analysts, at least—aiming to just hold out until the US runs out of ammunition, which is expected to happen within a week or so, at which point Iran can launch surgical attacks, aiming to make this war too expensive, in terms of money and US lives, for the Trump administration to continue investing in, as money and lives are especially expensive in an election year, which 2026 is. So the idea is to grind the US down until it makes more political sense for Trump to just declare victory and leave, rather than allowing this to become a Vietnam or Afghanistan situation for his administration.
It’s also generally expected that when the US pulls out, Israel probably will too, as they’ve already made their point, tallied a bunch of victories, and set Iran back in a lot of ways; they could walk away whenever they like and say they won. And Iran would probably be incentivized to, at that point, avoid doing anything that would lead to more punishment, though they would almost certainly immediately begin rebuilding the same exact centralized, militarized infrastructure that was damaged, the only difference being they would have someone else on top, as the Supreme Leader. Relations could be even worse moving forward, but it would probably be at least a few years before Iran could do anything too significant to their regional enemies, which I guess if you’re Israel does, in fact, represent a win.
But considering the unlikelihood of permanent change in Iran, the big question here, in the minds of many, is what this war, this attack, is even for.
For Israel, the main purpose of any attack against Iran is to weaken or destroy an enemy that has made no secret about wanting to weaken and destroy them. For the US, though, and the Trump administration more specifically, the point of all this isn’t as clear.
Some contend that this is another effort to steal attention and headlines from the increasingly horrifying revelations coming out of the investigation into the Epstein files, which seem to indicate Trump himself was involved in all sorts of horrible, pedophilic sexual assault activities with the late human-trafficker.
Some suspect that the apparent victory in grabbing former Venezuelan president Maduro from his own country and whisking him away to the US without suffering any US casualties has emboldened Trump, and that he’s going to use the time he’s got to take out anyone he doesn’t like, and may even specifically target authoritarian leaders who will not be missed—who oppress and kill their own people—because then it’s difficult for his political opponents to call him out on these efforts.
Most Venezuelans are happy to see Maduro gone, and many Iranians celebrated when Khamenei was assassinated. Trump has publicly stated that he intends to go after Cuba, next, and continues to suggest he wants a war of sorts with Mexican and south and central American cartels, which follows this same pattern of demonstrating a muscular, aggressive, militarized United States doing whatever it wants, even to the point of kidnapping or assassinating foreign leaders, but doing so in a way that is difficult to argue against, because the leaders and other forces being taken out are so horrible, at times to the point of being monstrous, that these acts, as illegal as they are according to internal laws, can still seem very justified, through some lenses.
Still others have said they believe this is purely an Israeli op, and the US under Trump is just helping out one of Trump’s buddies, Israel’s Netanyahu, who wants to keep his country embroiled in war in order to avoid being charged for corruption.
The real rationale could be a combination of these and other considerations, but the threat here, regionally, is real, especially if Iran continues to lash out at its neighbors.
This part of the world is renowned for its fuel reserves and exports, and every time there’s a Middle Eastern conflict, energy prices rise, globally, and other nations that produce such exports, like Russia, benefit financially because they can charge more for their oil and gas for a while—gas prices in the US have already increased by 14% over the past week as a result of the conflict—and those increases also then the raises the price of all sorts of other goods, spiking inflation.
Another huge concern here, though, is that this part of the world is highly reliant on the desalination of water just to survive; massive desalination plants, most located along the coast, where they are very exposed to military threats, are at risk if Iran and Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait, or Oman start firing at each other in earnest.
About 90% of Kuwait’s drinking water comes from these sorts of plants, and about 86% of Oman’s and 70% of Saudi Arabia’s do, as well.
Earlier in this war, a US strike damaged an Iranian desalination plant, and the Iranian foreign minister made a not-so-veiled threat against such plants in neighboring countries, saying the US set the precedent of attacking such infrastructure, not them.
Worth noting here, too, is that many desalination plants are attached to power stations, located within the same facility, so attacks on power infrastructure, which are already common in any conflict, could also lead to more damaged desalination plants, all of which could in turn create massive humanitarian crises, as people living in some of the hottest, driest parts of the world find themselves, in the millions, without drinkable water.
The potential for a spiraling humanitarian disaster increases with each passing day, then, which would seem to increase the likelihood that someone will stop, declare victory, and move on to the next conflict. But there’s always the chance the one or more of the involved forces will clamp down and decide that it’s in their best interest to keep things going as long as possible, instead—and in this case, it would likely be Iran playing that role, locking the US and Israel and their allies into a grinding, long-term conflict that no one would actually win.
Show Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_Resistance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_state_funeral_of_Ruhollah_Khomeini
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khamenei
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Ali_Khamenei
https://www.eurasiareview.com/08032026-strikes-continue-despite-iranian-presidents-apology/
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-rejects-settling-iran-war-raises-prospect-killing-all-its-potential-2026-03-08/
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/irans-retaliation-began-us-officials-scrambled-arrange-evacuations-2026-03-07/
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/mapping-crisis-iran-visual-explainer-2026-03-06/
https://apnews.com/live/iran-war-israel-trump-03-08-2026
https://apnews.com/article/iran-israel-us-march-8-2026-f0b20dbffaea9351ae1e54183ffe53ff
https://apnews.com/article/iran-war-desalination-water-oil-middle-east-12b23f2fa26ed5c4a10f80c4077e61ce
https://apnews.com/video/trump-says-us-will-turn-attention-to-cuba-after-war-with-iran-91c3f239c18349fdb409f901c50b7e71
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03/08/world/iran-war-trump-israel-lebanon
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/08/us/politics/trump-russia-ukraine-iran-war.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/us/politics/iran-war-first-week.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/03/08/opinion/iran-war-ayatollah.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_war


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

This week we talk about Anthropic, the Department of Defense, and OpenAI.
We also discuss red lines, contracts, and lethal autonomous systems.
Recommended Book: Empire of AI by Karen Hao
Transcript
Lethal autonomous weapons, often called lethal autonomous systems, autonomous weapons systems, or just ‘killer robots,’ are military hardware that can operate independent of human control, searching for and engaging with targets based on their programming and thus not needing a human being to point it at things or pull the trigger.
The specific nature and capabilities of these devices vary substantially from context to content, and even between scholars writing on the subject, but in general these are systems—be they aerial drones, heavy gun emplacements, some kind of mobile rocket launcher, or a human- or dog-shaped robot—that are capable of carrying out tasks and achieving goals without needing constant attention from a human operator.
That’s a stark contrast with drones that require either a human controlled or what’s called a human-in-the-loop in order to make decisions. Some drones and other robots and weapons require full hands-on control, with a human steering them, pointing their weapons, and pulling the trigger, while others are semi-autonomous in that they can be told to patrol a given area and look for specific things, but then they reach out to a human-in-the-loop to make final decisions about whatever they want to do, including and especially weapon-related things; a human has to be the one to drop the bomb or fire the gun in most cases, today.
Fully autonomous weapon systems, without a human in the loop, are far less common at this point, in part because it’s difficult to create a system so capable that it doesn’t require human intervention at times, but also because it’s truly dangerous to create such a device.
Modern artificial intelligence systems are incredibly powerful, but they still make mistakes, and just as an LLM-based chatbot might muddle its words or add extra fingers to a made-up person in an image it generates, or a step further, might fabricate research referenced in a paper it produces, an AI-controlled weapon system might see targets where there are no targets, or might flag a friendly, someone on its side, or a peaceful, noncombatant human, as a target. And if there’s no human-in-the-loop to check the AI’s understanding and correct it, that could mean a lot of non-targets being treated like targets, their lives ended by killer robots that gun them down or launch a missile at their home.
On a larger scale, AI systems controlling arrays of weapons, or even entire militaries, becoming strategic commanders, could wipe out all human life by sparking a nuclear war.
A recent study conducted at King’s College London found that in simulated crises, across 21 scenarios, AI systems which thought they had control of nation-state-scale militaries opted for nuclear signaling, escalation, and tactical nuclear weapon use 95% of the time, never once across all simulations choosing to use one of the eight de-escalatory options that were made available to them.
All of which suggests to the researchers behind this study that the norm, approaching the level of taboo, associated with nuclear weapons use globally since WWII, among humans at least, may not have carried over to these AI systems, and full-blown nuclear conflict may thus become more likely under AI-driven military conditions.
What I’d like to talk about today is a recent confrontation between one AI company—Anthropic—and its client, the US Department of Defense, and the seeming implications of both this conflict, and what happened as a result.
—
In late-2024, the US Department of Defense—which by the way is still the official title, despite the President calling it the Department of War, since only Congress can change its name—the US DoD partnered with Anthropic to get a version of its Claude LLM-based AI model that could be used by the Pentagon.
Anthropic worked with Palantir, which is a data-aggregation and surveillance company, basically, run by Peter Thiel and very favored by this administration, and Amazon Web Services, to make that Claude-for-the-US-military relationship happen, those interconnections allowing this version of the model to be used for classified missions.
Anthropic received a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense in mid-2025, as did a slew of other US-based AI companies, including Google, xAI, and OpenAI. But while the Pentagon has been funding a bunch of US-based AI companies for this utility, only Claude was reportedly used during the early 2026 raid on Venezuela, during which now-former Venezuelan President Maduro was taken by US forces.
Word on the street is that Claude is the only model that the Pentagon has found truly useful for these sorts of operations, though publicly they’re saying that investments in all of these models have borne fruit, at least to some degree.
So Anthropic’s Claude model is being used for classified, military and intelligence purposes by the US government. Anthropic has been happy about this, by all accounts, because that’s a fair bit of money, but also being used for these purposes by a government is a pretty big deal—if it’s good enough for the US military, after all, many CEOs will see that as a strong indication that Claude is definitely good enough for their intended business purposes.
On February 24 of 2026, though, the US Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, threatened to remove Anthropic from the DoD’s stable of AI systems that they use unless the company allowed the DoD to use Claude for any and all legal purposes—unrestricted use of the model, basically.
This threat came with a timeline—accede to these demands by February 27 or be cut from the DoD’s supply chain—and the day before that deadline, the 26th, Anthropic’s CEO released a statement indicating that the company would not get rid of its red lines that delineated what Claude could and could not be used for, and on the 27th, US President Trump ordered that all US agencies stop using Anthropic tools, and said that he would declare the company a supply chain risk, which would make it illegal for any company doing business with the US government at any level and in any fashion to use Anthropic products or services—a label that’s rarely used, and which was previously used by the Trump administration against Chinese tech giant Huawei on the basis that the company might insert spy equipment in communications hardware installed across the US if they were allowed to continue operating in the country.
Those red lines that Anthropic’s CEO said he wouldn’t get rid of, not even for a client as big and important as the US government, and not even in the face of threats by Hegseth, including that he might invoke the Defense Production Act, which would allow him to force the company to allow the Pentagon to use Claude however they like, or Trumps threat that the company be blacklisted from not just the government, but from working with a significant chunk of Fortune 500 companies, those red lines include not allowing Claude to be used for controlling autonomous weapon systems, killer robots, basically, and not allowing Claude to be used for surveilling US citizens.
The Pentagon signed a contract with Anthropic in which they agreed to these terms, but Hegseth’s new demand was that Anthropic sign a new version of the contract in which they allow the US government to use Claude and their other offerings for ‘all legal purposes,’ which apparently includes, at least in some cases and contexts, killer robots and mass surveillance.
So the Pentagon tried to strong-arm a US-based AI company into allowing them to use their product for purposes the company doesn’t consider to be moral, and that led to this situation in which Anthropic is now being phased out from US government use—it’ll apparently take about 6 months to do this, and some analysts speculate that timeline is meant to serve as a period in which further negotiation can occur—but either way, it’s being phased out and it may even have trouble getting major clients in the future as a result of being blackballed.
As all this was happening, OpenAI stepped in and offered its products and services to fill the void left by Anthropic in the US government.
OpenAI’s CEO has been cozying up to Trump a lot since he regained office, and has positioned the company as a major US asset, too big to fail because then China will win the AI race, basically, so this makes sense. Its CEO released several statements and press releases in the wake of this further cozying, saying that they believe the same things Anthropic does, and that they’re not giving up any credibility for doing this because they have the same red lines, no killer robots, no mass surveillance of US citizens.
But this is generally assumed to be bunk, because why would the Pentagon agree to the same terms all over again, and with a company that provides, for their purposes and right now, anyway, inferior services instead of the one they just chased out and blackballed, and which was helping them do purposeful, effective things, like kidnapping a foreign leader from a secure facility, today?
Instead, what it sounds like is OpenAI is trying to have its cake and eat it too, saying publicly that they don’t want their offerings used to control autonomous weapons systems or mass surveil Americans, but instead of writing that into the contract, they’ve got some basic guardrails baked into their systems, and they are assuming those guardrails will keep any funny business from happening. So it’s a sort of gentleman’s agreement with their clients that OpenAI products won’t be used for mass surveillance or killer robots, rather than something legally binding, as was the case with Anthropic.
The response to all this within the tech world has been illustrative of what we might expect in the coming years. Many people, including folks working on these technologies, are halting their use of OpenAI tech in protest, and in some (at this point at least) fewer cases, people are quitting their OpenAI jobs, because they are strongly opposed to these use-cases and would prefer to support a company that takes a strong stand on these sorts of moral issues.
Some analysts also wonder if this will ensure the Pentagon only ever has access to inferior AI models because they intentionally threatened and disempowered a key AI industry CEO in public, saying that they had final say over how these tools are used, and many such CEOs are both unaccustomed to such stripping down, but are also doing the work they’re doing for ideological reasons—they have beliefs about what the future, as enabled by AI technologies, will look like, and they believe they will play a vital role in making that future happen.
The idea, then, is why would they want to work with the Pentagon, or the US government more broadly, if that means no longer being in charge of the destiny of these tools they’re putting so much time, effort, and resources into building? Why would they take on a client, even a big, important one, if that means no longer having any grain of control over the future of the world as shaped by the systems they’re building?
We’ll know a bit more about how all this plays out within the next handful of months, as this could serve as a moral differentiator between otherwise near-match products in the AI category, allowing companies like Anthropic to compete, both in terms of clients and in terms of employees, with the likes of OpenAI and xAI by saying, look, we don’t want killer robots or mass surveillance and we gave up a LOT, put our money where our mouths are, in support of that moral stance.
That could prove to be a serious feather in their cap, despite the initial cost, though it could also be that the pressure the US government is willing and able to apply to them instead serves as a warning to others, and the likes of OpenAI and Google and so on just get better at speaking out of both sides of their mouths on this issue, creating sneakier contracts that allow them to say the same on paper, seeming to take the same moral stance Anthropic did, while behind closed doors allowing their clients to do basically whatever they want with their products, including using them to control killer robots and to mass surveil US citizens.
Show Notes
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/artificial-intelligence-under-nuclear-pressure-first-large-scale-kings-study-reveals-how-ai-models-reason-and-escalate-under-crisis
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/26/ai-nuclear-weapons-war-pentagon-scenarios
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/technology/openai-agreement-pentagon-ai.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_autonomous_weapon
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/885963/anthropic-dod-pentagon-tech-workers-ai-labs-react
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/886816/openai-reached-a-new-agreement-with-the-pentagon
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/trump-moves-to-ban-anthropic-from-the-us-government/
https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-pentagon-ai-dario-amodei-hegseth-0c464a054359b9fdc80cf18b0d4f690c
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/whats-really-at-stake-in-the-fight-between-anthropic-and-the-pentagon-d450c1a1
https://openai.com/index/our-agreement-with-the-department-of-war/
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/artificial-intelligence-under-nuclear-pressure-first-large-scale-kings-study-reveals-how-ai-models-reason-and-escalate-under-crisis
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/26/ai-nuclear-weapons-war-pentagon-scenarios


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This week we talk about Trump’s tariffs, the Supreme Court, and negotiating leverage.
We also discuss trade wars, Greenland, and the IEEPA.
Recommended Book: Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh
Transcript
I’ve spoken on this show before about tariffs and about US President Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs as an underpinning of his trade policy. Last October, back in 2025 I did an episode on tariff leverage and why the concept of an ongoing trade war is so appealing to Trump—it basically gives him a large whammy on anyone he enters negotiations with, because the US market is massive and everyone wants access to it, and tariffs allow him to bring the hammer down on anyone he doesn’t like, or who doesn’t kowtow in what he deems to be an appropriate manner.
So he can slap a large tariff on steel or pharmaceuticals or cars from whichever country he likes just before he enters negotiations with that country, and then those negotiations open with him in an advantageous spot: they have to give him things just to get those tariffs to go away—they have to negotiate just to get things back to square one.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. What we talked about a bit back in October is TACO theory, TACO standing for Trump Always Chickens Out—the idea is that other world leaders had gotten wise to Trump’s strategy, which hasn’t changed since his first administration, and he has mostly been a doubling-down on that one, primary approach, to the point that they can step into these negotiations, come up with something to give him that allows him to claim that he’s won, to make it look like he negotiated well, and then they get things back down to a more reasonable level; maybe not square one, but not anything world-ending, and not anything they weren’t prepared and happy to give up.
In some cases, though, instead of kowtowing in this way so that Trump can claim a victory, whether or not a victory was actually tallied, some countries and industries and the businesses that make up those industries have simply packed up their ball and gone home.
China has long served as a counterbalance to the US in terms of being a desirable market and a hugely influential player across basically every aspect of geopolitics and the global economy, and this oppositional, antagonistic approach to trade has made the US less appealing as a trade partner, and China more appealing in comparison.
So some of these entities have negotiated to a level where they could still ship their stuff to the US and US citizens would still be willing to pay what amounts to an extra tax on all these goods, because that’s how tariffs work, that fee is paid by the consumers, not by the businesses or the origin countries, but others have given up and redirected their goods to other places. And while that’s a big lift sometimes, the persistence of this aggression and antagonism has made it a worthwhile investment for many of these entities, because the US has become so unpredictable and unreliable that it’s just not worth the headache anymore.
What I’d like to talk about today is a recent Supreme Court decision related to Trump’s tariffs, and what looks likely to happen next, in the wake of that ruling.
—
Ever since Trump stepped back into office for his second term, in January of 2025, he has aggressively instilled new and ever-growing tariffs on basically everyone, but on some of the US’s most important trade partners, like Mexico and Canada, in particular.
These tariffs have varied and compounded, and they’ve applied to strategic goods that many US presidents have tried to hobble in various ways, favoring US-made versions of steel and microchips, for instance, so that local makers of these things have an advantage over their foreign-made alternatives, or have a more balanced shot against alternatives made in parts of the world where labor is cheaper and standards are different.
But this new wave of tariffs were broad based, hitting everyone to some degree, and that pain was often taken away, at least a little, after leaders kowtowed, at times even giving him literal gold-plated gifts in order to curry favor, and/or funneling money into his family’s private companies and other interests, allowing him to use these tariffs as leverage for personal gain, not just national advantage, in other cases giving him what at least looked outwardly to be a negotiating win.
Things spiraled pretty quickly by mid-2025, when China pushed back against these tariffs, adding their own reciprocal tariffs on US goods, and at one point extra duties on Chinese imports coming into the US hit 145%.
Shortly thereafter, though, and here we see that TACO acronym proving true, once again, Trump agreed to slash these tariffs for 90 days, and around the same time, in May of 2025, a federal appeals court temporarily reinstated some of Trump’s largest-scale tariffs after a lower court ruled that they couldn’t persist.
The remainder of 2025 was a story of Trump trying to strike individual deals with a bunch of trade partners, like South Korea, Indonesia, and India, in some cases via direct negotiation, in others with a bunch of threats that eventually led to a sort of mutual standoff that no one was particularly happy about.
2026 was greeted with a threat by Trump to impose a huge wave of new tariffs on eight major European allies, those tariffs sticking around until these nations agreed to allow the US to buy Greenland, which was an obsession of Trump’s at that point, but a lot of Trump’s tariff posturing was derailed by a Supreme Court decision that landed in mid-February, in which the justices decided, 6 to 3, that Trump’s reciprocal tariffs are unconstitutional, as setting and changing tariffs is a Congressional power, not a Presidential one.
This was a serious blow to Trump and his stated policies, as pretty much all of his economic plans oriented around the idea—which most economists have said is bunk and based on fantasy, not reality, but still—that putting a bunch of tariffs on everything will allow the US to earn so much additional revenue that the deficit can be paid down.
It’s worth noting here that, just as those economists predicted, the deficit has only gotten larger under both Trump administrations, and in fact the growth of the US debt has sped up, not declined, despite the additional billions being pulled into government coffers by these tariffs, because the Trump administration’s spending is massive, and because the losses related to tariffs are also significant. But tariffs remain center to his policy nonetheless, so this was a major blow.
This ruling also seemed likely to defang a lot of Trump’s threats and drain his leverage at the negotiating table, as he could no longer threaten everyone with more tariffs, practically booting them from or weakening them on the US market.
So Trump was pissed, and as he tends to do, he publicly raged about the decision, which was made by a Supreme Court that is heavily stacked in his favor; which gives an indication of just how unpopular and unconstitutional all of this has been.
But immediately after that decision landed, he announced that, using alternative authorities—different powers—he would be imposing a blanket 10% tariff on everything coming into the US, and the following day announced that it would be a 15% tariff on everything, instead.
This does seem to be something Trump has the power to do, but he can only do it under the auspices of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, and these tariffs will only last for 150 days, max, and might also be challenged in court.
Also notably, some entities, like Britain and Australia, will face higher rates than they faced under the previous tariff setup, because of how they are applied and compound with other trade barriers, or the nature of what they export to the US market, while others, including China, will see their tariffs substantially drop.
Which could make things tricky, as that implies some of the previously negotiated deals have changed post-deal, or in some cases mid-negotiation; which means a lot more work to get things where everyone wants them, but also a loss of legitimacy and credibility for this administration, as they seem to be negotiating using powers they don’t actually have and making promises they can’t keep.
All of which, rather than simplifying and clarifying things for the US market and our international trade partners, actually further complicates them, at least for now, until the dust settles.
It does seem likely Trump’s administration will continue to try to leverage whatever power they can in this matter, grabbing at levers that haven’t been previously used, or used in this way, and those attempts will almost certainly be legally challenged, which could lead to more court cases, and a lot more uncertainty in the meantime, until those cases are figured it.
It’s also created new rifts within the Republican party, as Trump seems to be going after those who voted against his tariffs, or in any other way supported their removal, and he’s raged against the Supreme Court justices, even those he put into place and who are ideologically aligned with the Republican party almost always, which could also lead to more fracturing within his base, leading up to the November 2026 Congressional elections.
One more thing that’s worth noting here is that Trump’s usual tactic of trying to distract from things he doesn’t want people to pay attention to is in full operation following this court case: as all this has been happening, and against the backdrop of increasingly serious allegations related to his abundant presence in the Epstein files, he’s been talking more about potentially attacking Iran and releasing files on aliens, on extraterrestrials on Earth and in the US.
So we’re likely to see a lot more of that sort of thing in the coming months, especially if things continue to not go his way in regards to these tariffs and the hubbub surrounding them, but this story will shape global and US economics for years to come, not to mention on-the-ground realities for many people today, which should substantially impact Trump’s popularity and voter behavior come November.
Show Notes
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/supreme-court-trump-energy-tariffs
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/trump-tariff-plan-section-122-trade-act
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/trump-scotus-tariff-refund-battle
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/business/economy/trump-tariffs-trade-war.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/22/business/trump-tariffs-japan-indonesia.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/us/politics/supreme-court-trump-tariffs-takeaways.html
https://apnews.com/live/supreme-court-tariff-ruling-updates
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c0l9r67drg7t
https://heatmap.news/economy/clean-energy-tariff-ruling
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/20/us/trump-tariffs-supreme-court
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/supreme-court-blocks-trumps-emergency-tariffs-billions-in-refunds-may-be-owed/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/20/what-will-happen-to-trump-tariffs-after-supreme-court-verdict
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/business/economy/tariffs-supreme-court-global-busines-reaction.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/business/trump-deminimis-loophole-closed.html
https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am-5b34aa80-2020-453a-bef1-8cf648e9b3c3.html
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/trump-tariff-plan-section-122-trade-act
https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/supreme-court-strikes-down-tariffs/
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-supreme-court-tariffs-ieepa-john-roberts-brett-kavanaugh-90daf559
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/us/politics/supreme-court-tariffs-conservatives.html
https://www.wsj.com/economy/u-s-manufacturing-is-in-retreat-and-trumps-tariffs-arent-helping-d2af4316
https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-scotus-ruling-update
https://www.kielinstitut.de/fileadmin/Dateiverwaltung/IfW-Publications/fis-import/92fb3f30-07b8-4dcf-b2bc-fbefb831f1a1-KPB201_EN.pdf
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/02/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-imposes-a-temporary-import-duty-to-address-fundamental-international-payment-problems/
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/tariff-refunds-supreme-court-trump-rcna259968
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/its-the-end-of-the-beginning-of-the-tariff-war-88a08d37
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/21/trump-tariff-supreme-court-increase
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/21/alien-files-conspiracy-theories-usa


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This week we talk about mass surveillance, smart doorbells, and the Patriot Stack.
We also discuss Amazon, Alexa, and the Super Bowl.
Recommended Book: Red Moon by Benjamin Percy
Transcript
In 2002, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the US government created a new agency—the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, operating under the auspices of the US Department of Homeland Security, which was also formed that year for the same general reason, to defend against 9/11-style attacks in the future.
As with a whole lot of what was done in the years following the 9/11 attacks, a lot of what this agency, and its larger department did could be construed as a sort of overcompensation by a government and a people who were reeling from the first real, large-scale attack within their borders from a foreign entity in a very long time. It was a horrific event, everyone felt very vulnerable and scared, and consequently the US government could do a lot of things that typically would not have had the public’s support, like rewiring how airports and flying works in the country, creating all sorts of new hurdles and imposing layers of what’s often called security theater, to make people feel safe.
While the TSA was meant to handle things on the front-lines of air transportation, though, X-raying and patting-down and creating a significant new friction for everyone wanting to get on a plane, ICE was meant to address another purported issue: that of people coming into the US from elsewhere, illegally, and then sticking around long enough to cause trouble. More specifically, ICE was meant to help improve public safety by strictly enforcing at times lax immigration laws, by tracking down and expelling illegal immigrants from the country; the theory being that some would-be terrorists may have snuck into the US and might be getting ready to kill US citizens from within our own borders.
There’s not a lot of evidence to support that assertion—the vast majority of terrorism that happens in the US is conducted by citizens, mostly those adhering to a far-right or other extremist ideologies. But that hasn’t moved the needle on public perception of the issue, which still predominantly leans toward stricter border controls and more assiduous moderation of non-citizens within US borders—for all sorts of reasons, not just security ones.
What I’d like to talk about today is an offshoot of the war on terror and this vigilance about immigrants in the US, and how during the second Trump administration, tech companies have been entangling themselves with immigration-enforcement agencies like ICE to create sophisticated surveillance networks.
—
In mid-July of 2025, the US Department of Defense signed one of its largest contracts in its history with a tech company called Palantir Technologies. Palantir was founded and is run by billionaire Peter Thiel, who among other things is generally considered to be the reason JD Vance was chosen to be Trump’s second-term Vice President. He’s also generally considered to be one of, if not the main figure behind the so-called Patriot Tech movement, which consists of companies like SpaceX, Anduril, and OpenAI, all of which are connected by a web of funding arms and people who have cross-pollinated between major US tech companies and US agencies, in many cases stepping into government positions that put them in charge of the regulatory bodies that set the rules for the industries in which they worked.
As a consequence of this setup and this cross-pollination, the US government now has a bunch of contracts with these entities, which has been good for the companies’ bottom lines and led to reduced government regulations, and in exchange the companies are increasingly cozy with the government and its many agencies, toeing the line more than they would have previously, and offering a lot more cooperation and collaboration with the government, as well.
This is especially true when it comes to data collection and surveillance, and a great deal of that sort of information and media is funneled into entities like Palantir, which aggregate and crunch it for meaning, and then send predictions and assumptions, and make services like facial-recognition technologies predicated on their vast database, available to police and ICE agents, among others such entities.
There has been increasingly stiff pushback against this melding of the tech world with the government—which has always been there to some degree, but which has become even more entwined than usual, of late—and that pushback is international, even long-time allies like Canada and the EU making moves to develop their own replacements for Amazon and Google and OpenAI due to these issues, and the heightened unpredictability and chaos of the US in recent years, but it’s also evident within the US, due in part to Trump’s moves while in office, but also the on-the-ground realities in places like Minneapolis, where ICE agents have been brutalizing and blackbagging people, sometimes illegal immigrants, sometimes US citizens, usually non-white US citizens, and the ICE agents are being rewarded, getting bonuses, for beating up and kidnapping and in some cases murdering people, whether or not any of these people are actually criminals—and it’s illegal to do that kind of thing even if they are criminals, by the way.
All of which sets the scene for what happened following the Super Bowl, this year.
Ring is a home security and smart home device company that is best known for its line of smart doorbells, but which also makes all sorts of security cameras and other alarm system devices.
Even though smart doorbells, complete with cameras and other sorts of functionality, existed before Ring, this company basically created the smart doorbell industry as it exists today back in 2014, when it received a round of equity investment and changed its named from Doorbot to Ring. It was bought by Amazon four years later, in 2018, for a billion dollars.
One of Ring’s premier features is related to its camera: you can use your phone or other smart home device to see who’s at your door when they ring the bell, but it can also be set to record when it detects movement, which makes it easy to check and see who stole your Amazon package from your porch when you weren’t at home, for instance, and resultingly Ring door camera footage has become fundamental to reporting, and on occasion pursuing, some types of crime.
As a direct result of that utility, Ring introduced its Neighbors service in mid-2018, this service serving as a sort of social network that allows Ring device users to discuss local issues, especially those related to safety and security, anonymously, while also allowing them to share photos and videos taken by their devices. This service also created relationships with local law enforcement, and allowed police to jump onto the network and request footage from Ring customers, if they thought these doorbell cams might have photos or video of someone escaping with a stolen car, for instance, which might then help the police catch that crook.
It’s generally assumed that Amazon probably bought Ring, at least in part, to entrench itself as the lord of the internet of things world, as it launched its Amazon Sidewalk platform in 2020, which allowed all Amazon devices, including Ring devices, to share a wireless mesh network, all of them communicating with each other and all using Amazon’s Alexa as an interface.
In 2023, Ring was sued by the FTC for $5.8 million because it allowed its employees and contractors to access private videos by failing to have basic security and privacy features in place—so not only could any Ring employee view their customer’s private video feeds, hackers could easily access all this media and data, as well. Just one example surfaced in that lawsuit shows that a Ring employee viewed thousands of video recordings of at least 81 different female users over the course of a few months in 2017.
So Amazon was building a surveillance network that worked really well, in the sense that it was predicated on popular, at times quite useful devices that people seemed to love, but which was also quite leaky, giving all sorts of people access to these supposedly private feeds, and it was shared with law enforcement via that social network. It’s also been alleged that Ring (and Amazon) have used users’ footage without further permission for things like facial recognition and AI training. Their partnership with police agencies also allegedly created incentives for the police to encourage citizens to buy Ring cams and other security devices for their homes, creating perverse incentives. And again, these devices connect wirelessly to other internet of things devices, expanding their reach and the potential for abuse of collected user data.
In late 2025, Ring announced a new partnership with Flock Safety, a company that’s best known for its security offerings, including automated license plate readers and gunshot detector systems.
These are mass surveillance tools used by some governments and law enforcement entities, and they use cameras and microphones to capture license plates, people’s faces, and sounds that might be gunfire and aggregate that data to be used by police, neighborhood associations, and in some cases private property owners.
This sort of technology is incredibly useful to companies like Palantir, which again, aggregates and crunches it, on scale, and then shares that information with police, ICE, and other such agencies.
These tools can sometimes help flag areas where guns are being fired or where crimes are being committed, but they’re also imperfect and at times biased against some groups of people and areas, and some data show that not only is crime not reduced by the presence of these systems, but there’s a fair bit of evidence that this data often falls into the hands of hackers or is used by employees for nefarious, stalkery purposes, as was the case with Ring’s cameras. So most civil liberties groups, like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are vehemently against them, but governments like the second Trump administration like them, because they create a surveillance mesh they can tap into and use for, for instance, figuring out where to deploy ICE agents, or, in theory at least, spying on your political enemies or ex-spouses for abuse or blackmail purposes.
Ring’s late-2025 announcement wasn’t widely reported, but in early 2026 the company bought a Super Bowl ad to announce a new feature called Search Party, enabled by their partnership with Flock.
The ad showed a neighborhood coming together to find a lost dog, using the web of doorbell cameras on all the homes in the area to track the dog and figure out where it went—all the cameras activated at once to create a surveillance mesh of live footage.
This ad landed with a resounding thud,, as to many people it felt more menacing than heartwarming, the new feature overtly raising the potential that government agencies, including ICE, could tap into it to surveil and track their neighbors. The response was so negative that Ring quickly issued a statement saying that it was no longer moving forward with its Flock partnership, attempting to reassure its customers that “integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever send to Flock Safety.”
This result is notable in part because it’s a rare instance of a major tech company backtracking on a major feature decision due to public backlash, but also because it suggests backlash against ICE is reverberating through other aspects of life and interconnected industries.
Ring device users mostly buy these things for their surveillance capabilities, but the increasing, and increasingly hostile and violent acts committed by members of ICE seem to have nudged the conversation so that folks are more worried about these agents than about the porch pirates and other criminals that these devices and this partnership could ostensibly help them identify.
It’s too early to say what this might mean for the burgeoning patriot stack of tech companies and government agencies, but it does suggest there are limits to what people will put up with, even when those in charge are adhering to a playbook that has typically worked well for them, in the past, and the devices and services they’re using to build their surveillance network are otherwise beloved by those who use them.
Show Notes
https://restofworld.org/2026/big-tech-backlash-alternatives-upscrolled/
https://europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/trumps-power-switch
https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/realestate/smart-home-cameras-nest-ring-privacy.html
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/platforms-bend-over-backward-to-help-dhs-censor-ice-critics-advocates-say/
https://www.theverge.com/report/879320/ring-flock-partnership-breakup-does-not-fix-problems
https://www.theverge.com/news/878447/ring-flock-partnership-canceled
https://www.404media.co/with-ring-american-consumers-built-a-surveillance-dragnet/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/children-of-color-projected-to-be-majority-of-u-s-youth-this-year
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(company)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_Safety
https://www.wired.com/story/ice-expansion-across-us-at-heres-where-its-going-next/
https://www.wired.com/story/social-security-administration-appointment-details-ice/
https://www.wired.com/story/security-news-this-week-ring-kills-flock-safety-deal-after-super-bowl-ad-uproar/
https://www.wired.com/story/ice-crashing-us-court-system-minnesota/
https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-ceo-alex-karp-employee-questions-on-ice/
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-ice-forum-where-agents-complain-about-their-jobs/


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe