Don't Worry About the Vase

Last night, Anthropic was given its preliminary injunction, with a stay of seven days.

Emil Michael is a very angry person right now. So is the Honorable Judge Lin.

We were worried we would draw a judge that had no idea how any of this worked and would give the government absurd deference or buy into nonsense arguments.

That is not how it played out. Judge Lin very much understood the issues in play, as they did not require a technical background. She hammered the government in the hearing, and she wrote one of the most forceful, devastating judge opinions I have ever seen. It was an honor and sparked joy to be able to read it.

The major technical advances this week were in agentic coding, as covered yesterday.

The major non-DoW political and alignment developments will be covered tomorrow.

The DoW vs. Anthropic trial continues. Judge Lin was very not happy with the government’s case, which makes sense since the government has no case and was arguing a variety of Obvious Nonsense. The question now is how much preliminary relief Anthropic is entitled to. Assuming we find that out this week, I plan to cover that on Monday.

Beyond that, we have new iterations of questions we’ve dealt with time and again. The debate on jobs gets another cycle. Anthropic asked over 80,000 people what they think about AI, and has published those findings, nothing shocking but interesting throughout.

Whatever else you think about Anthropic’s agentic coding department, they ship.

The highlights of this edition are three related big upgrades.

You can use Dispatch to command Claude Code and Claude Cowork from your phone, or use channels to do it via places such as Telegram or Discord.

Claude Cowork now can outright use your keyboard and mouse, giving it access to actual everything one can do with a computer if it is competent to do so.

Claude Code now has auto mode, where a classifier checks commands and you only get asked for permission when something seems genuinely risky.

A lot happened, but by today’s standards this felt like a quiet week.

I was happy for the break, and I hope that we get to continue relatively relaxing.

The Anthropic PBC vs. Department of War case is working its way through the system. The government responded on Tuesday, and the preliminary hearing is next week. I covered that here.

Once that is out of the way, I plan to cover Anthropic’s RSP v3, both the fact that it went back on previous promises and an analysis of its new more flexible contents, including a reading of the full risk report.

The news has thankfully quieted down on this front, and is mostly about the lawsuit as we build towards a hearing next week, after which we will find out if a temporary restraining order or an injunction is on the table.

The government arguments were going to be terrible no matter what, given the terrible set of facts and who was directing the argument, and their decision not to narrow their scope or compromise. But Anthropic has an uphill battle to try and get a random court to give them advance relief, so it could go either way.

See You In Court

There are two big questions in the case Anthropic vs. Department of War.