This is not a friendly meeting. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has summoned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to the Pentagon on Tuesday—and the ultimatum is blunt: allow Claude for all lawful military purposes, or face a formal supply chain risk designation. That’s the label usually reserved for foreign adversaries. We broke down why the company that built the deepest military AI integration in America is about to get treated like one. The $200 million contract is under threat. The $380 billion valuation is at stake. And the crisis started because Anthropic asked a question about the Maduro raid.
While the Pentagon fights over who controls military AI, the models keep getting cheaper. Google shipped Gemini 3.1 Pro at $2/$12 per million tokens—roughly 60% cheaper than Claude Opus—and it topped multiple major reasoning benchmarks. That pricing pressure is already killing business models downstream. Google VP Darren Mowry warned this week that AI wrapper startups and model aggregators face extinction as Big Tech absorbs their capabilities with each new model release.
But not everyone thinks better LLMs are the answer. AlphaGo creator David Silver just launched Ineffable Intelligence and is raising up to $1 billion to prove reinforcement learning can beat language models at complex reasoning—the biggest RL bet since DeepMind. And the agentic infrastructure layer is catching up: Temporal raised $300 million at a $5 billion valuation to make AI agents reliable enough for production. The models are getting cheaper. The question is whether they’re getting smarter—or just more available.
Latest from PulseMark
 |
Pentagon Threatens to Blacklist Anthropic Over Military AI Terms
Claude is the only frontier AI on classified networks. The Pentagon wants unrestricted access. Anthropic wants two red lines. Only one side blinks Tuesday. |
 |
Gemini 3.1 Pro Tops AI Rankings at Half the Price of Claude
Google’s new flagship tops multiple reasoning benchmarks at $2/$12 per million tokens. We ran the numbers on what this means for the pricing war. |
 |
David Silver’s $1B Bet That Reinforcement Learning Beats LLMs
The AlphaGo creator left DeepMind to build Ineffable Intelligence. His thesis: RL will solve problems LLMs fundamentally cannot. |
That’s Monday. Five stories, zero fluff.
— The PulseMark Team
Get the Daily Pulse
Sharp analysis on what's actually moving in AI. No hype, no filler, no weekly digest.