September 26, 2026 — When an AI's refusals become a national security risk

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You don't usually see this detail in a national security ruling. A chatbot turned down some prompts from the Centers for Disease Control, prompts about preventing the spread of infectious disease. Then a federal court used that episode to explain why the Pentagon had reason to worry. Yesterday a three-judge panel of the D C Circuit ruled two to one against Anthropic. The company had challenged the Pentagon's March third decision to label it a supply-chain risk. The majority said the record gave the department ample support for its finding. Its finding was that putting Claude into military information systems carried national security risk. Part of that support was that Claude had refused some tasks from government users. So what was the fight actually about? Anthropic says the Pentagon objected to two limits in its contract. One covered lethal autonomous warfare. The other covered mass surveillance of Americans. The Pentagon's argument was about control. It said Anthropic could constrain how Claude gets used in ways the department couldn't monitor. Writing for the majority, Judge Gregory Katsas called those contract limits hardly self-defining. “With such diametrically opposed positions and with contractual limitations that are hardly self-defining, the prospect for disputes is apparent,” he wrote. The court didn't pretend either side's fear was silly. The majority set the Pentagon's worry, a model that refuses a task, against Anthropic's worry. Anthropic fears an unconstrained model hallucinating inappropriate targets for lethal force. In Katsas's words, both possibilities present obvious national security concerns. Now, what this ruling is not. It's not a finding that Claude is unsafe. It's not a finding that Anthropic sabotaged or disrupted anything. The court upheld the government's authority to exclude a supplier in a contract dispute. It also rejected Anthropic's due process and First Amendment claims. The majority said the designation rested on Anthropic refusing a contract obligation. It wasn't about the company's support for more AI regulation, the court said. The Pentagon's spokesman says the ruling completely validates the department. That's his phrase, not the court's. And a separate case in a Northern California district court went the other way, finding the government's action unlawful. The rulings concern separate cases; they do not create a single nationwide result. Here's the part for builders. The legal hook is Section forty-seven thirteen, which lets the defense secretary address risks to military systems and supply chains. The case puts a model's refusal behavior into the Pentagon's supply-chain-risk analysis. For government vendors, that puts safety rules into the procurement debate alongside price and uptime. And that disease example sticks with me. A model's caution ended up in the court's reasoning as the cautionary tale. The question to watch is how far an agency can stretch this. What evidence is enough to show a vendor's guardrails could really disrupt operations? Anthropic and civil liberties groups will argue this punishes safety commitments. The Pentagon will say it needs tools it can dependably control. That whole fight is about who controls the model. Underneath it sits a far less philosophical question, which is who owns the racks it runs on.

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Seventy-two GPUs and thirty-six CPUs, in one rack. That's the building block CoreWeave says it has now wired into a multi-rack cluster of Nvidia's Vera Rubin N V L seventy two, running on its cloud. The key idea is that the rack is the computer. You stop thinking about a pile of separate servers. CoreWeave says each rack's chips talk over sixth-generation NV Link, rated at two hundred sixty terabytes per second. The multi-rack step stretches that across hundreds of Rubin GPUs, so one training or inference job can span all of them. What's hard here? CoreWeave says every new generation means re-engineering power, cooling, networking and software at rack scale. Then you validate the whole thing together. Getting the chips is the easy part. Making a room full of them behave like one machine is the actual job. The same announcement added cross-region write acceleration and an archive storage tier. The pitch is aimed at agents. When a model makes call after call and hits tool after tool, small data delays stack up. So CoreWeave writes locally and replicates to another region in the background. That's the classic asynchronous trade. You stop waiting on the far region. In exchange, for a moment, your copies aren't identical. A small note on the calendar. CoreWeave already announced a single Vera Rubin rack, brought up and validated, back in June. This is the sequel, not the premiere. Same cast, more racks. What's missing is independent numbers. CoreWeave calls itself the first AI cloud to validate Vera Rubin, and that's a company claim. Rival clouds and analysts will want the comparison conditions spelled out. The question is when we see reproducible customer benchmarks, uptime data and cost per token. Those cross-region writes have to physically travel somewhere. When the other region sits on another continent, somewhere means the bottom of the ocean.

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Meta says subsea cables carry about ninety-nine percent of intercontinental data traffic. Now it's planning one that would carry a lot more of it. It's called Petal, roughly seven thousand kilometers from the United States to France, expected in twenty twenty-nine. The design target is one petabit per second. That's a thousand terabits. Meta says that's twice the capacity of today's best transoceanic cables over that distance. The partners are N E C and Sumitomo Electric, with Orange supporting the French landing. Here's why that's hard. Per fiber, the industry is pressing against the Shannon limit, the ceiling on how much information a channel can carry through noise. Coherent optics already bought the big gains. What's left is more fiber pairs, more transmission bands, or more cores per strand. Petal picks cores. Each strand of fiber holds two cores, two separate paths for light inside one piece of glass. Meta says twenty-four fiber pairs built this way match a conventional design with forty-eight. The catch is that light in one core wants to bleed into its neighbor. That's crosstalk. Meta says it fights it with ultra-pure synthetic silica, tight control of the refractive index, and by sending signals in opposite directions. Picture two lanes with traffic running opposite ways. Meta says the crosstalk comes out nearly immeasurable. Then there are the repeaters, the amplifiers spaced along the seabed. This system needs about a hundred of them. Each one splits the two-core fiber into single cores, amplifies the light, and merges it back. Meta says its single-body repeater, with ninety-six amplifiers, stays inside existing power equipment limits of up to eighteen thousand volts. Meta's own picture of the capacity is that Petal could let seventy-five percent of the world's population stream music at the same time. That's a stress test nobody has scheduled. Now the caveats. Every one of these numbers is a design target for a cable that doesn't exist yet. It's total system capacity, not your home speed. Competing operators may ask whether that doubling claim compares like with like. And the open question is who gets to use it. How much of that petabit goes to other network operators? And how much is Meta mostly talking to itself? Petal's engineers fought hard to stay inside a power budget. The next story is about making power, and this one's already running.

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Beaver County, Utah. On Thursday, Fervo Energy said its Cape Station project synchronized to the grid and started exporting electricity. Fervo calls it the first time a utility-scale, greenfield enhanced geothermal project has done that. Enhanced geothermal borrows its playbook from oil and gas. Fervo uses precise directional and horizontal drilling, with several wells from a single pad. That lets it reach hot rock conventional geothermal can't easily get to. Fervo's approach adapts oil-and-gas drilling and production methods to make geothermal reservoirs commercially productive where traditional methods could not readily reach or manage the resource. The software side is the part you'll like. Fervo runs fiber optic cable down the hole to read flow, temperature and performance in real time. Then it uses analytics to find productive zones and tune how fluid moves through the rock. It's observability, for a reservoir. The numbers. Phase one is planned at about a hundred megawatts, in three blocks of thirty-three megawatts each. Only the first block has first power. Fervo expects that block at commercial operation by October first, and the other two by January first. Beyond that, a four hundred megawatt phase is under construction for twenty twenty-eight. Contracted offtake totals about nine hundred megawatts. And Fervo's earlier Project Red has been supplying the grid since twenty twenty-three. Why anyone cares is simple. Geothermal runs around the clock, where wind and solar follow the weather. Chief technology officer Jack Norbeck says first power is proof the science works. Fair enough. But Fervo also says it's still ramping that first block and bringing the full well system online. So first power is the hello world. It compiles. Now it has to keep running in production. Researchers and financiers will press on drilling costs, reservoir longevity, induced seismicity and water use. The question to watch is whether Fervo can hold its output and hit those dates as the rest comes online. Of course, a new plant only solves half the problem. The electricity still has to go somewhere, and the wires are often the tightest part of the system.

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Thirty-one projects in twenty-six states. That's what the Energy Department says it intends to help fund, under a program it has renamed SPARK. The goal is to get more out of the grid that's already standing. The federal share is one point nine billion dollars. Recipients add three point three five billion, for five point two five billion total. So Washington covers about thirty-six percent of the bill, which is apparently enough to name the program. The department says these projects should make more than twenty-three gigawatts of additional capacity available. That's more than fifteen hundred miles of line reconductored or rebuilt. It also means grid-enhancing technology across nearly twenty-one thousand miles, meant to help about a hundred million Americans. Here's how it works. Reconductoring swaps old wire for higher-capacity wire, often on existing rights of way. Grid-enhancing technologies add devices, monitoring and software that let existing lines carry more, or run smarter. Think of it as widening a highway without buying new land. Be careful with that twenty-three gigawatt figure. It's not twenty-three gigawatts of new power plants. It's capacity the department expects these upgrades to free up. That matters as new large loads seek grid connections. Energy Secretary Chris Wright says these investments get more out of the infrastructure we already have. Ratepayer advocates will ask whether that capacity shows up during the hours the grid is actually strained. The open question is how much becomes usable, how fast, and whether anyone's bill actually drops. That's the serious infrastructure done for the day. Now, the fun part.

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Fast Boot, where every story gets two sentences and zero mercy. Nscale's convertible debt. Nscale announced three point three six billion dollars in convertible notes, led by Third Point, that turn into shares at its I P O. One billion of that is an Nvidia commitment expected in mid-November, so part of the headline is still in the mail. Build checks, faster. Researchers report their tool, M K check two, cut build dependency checks from about twenty-one minutes per commit to about twenty-four seconds. That's a fifty-four fold speedup, and your coffee break just became a regression. TikTok's bedtime. TikTok settled Alabama's child-safety case for at least a hundred million dollars, and promised teen pauses at fifteen, sixty and ninety minutes. It's a TikTok feature whose whole job is getting you off TikTok. Excel's second value. After forty years of one value per cell, Microsoft is previewing Excel cells that hold lists and nested arrays. Microsoft says to keep it out of important workbooks for now, which rules out every spreadsheet that has ever quietly run a company. Excel can finally hold a whole list, and TikTok will tap you at fifteen minutes. Only one of those is going to wreck a finance team's Monday.

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Today, the Pentagon beat Anthropic on appeal, CoreWeave stacked Vera Rubin racks, Meta drew a petabit cable, Fervo sent its first geothermal power onto Utah's grid, and Washington upgraded wires. Every source for every story is in the show notes, sorted by segment. If this saved you some scrolling, follow The Daily Reboot wherever you're listening. That's the show. Go reboot something.