It feels like Sam's playing chess against an opponent who's playing dodge ball. He's leveraged this situation to get OpenAI in with the DoD in a way that's going to be extremely lucrative for the company and hurt his biggest rival in the process, but I think he's still seeing DoD as Just Another Customer, albeit a big government one. This administration just held a gun to the head of Anthropic and (if the "supply chain risk" designation holds and does as much damage as they're hoping) pulled the trigger, because Anthropic had the gall to tell them no. One thing this administration's shown is you cannot hold lines when you're working with them - at some point the DoD's going to cross his "red lines" and he's going to have to choose whether he's going to risk his entire consumer business and accede to being a private wing of the government like Palantir or if he wants to make a genuine tech giant. There's no third choice here.

I do not see this as any mastermind play, but fully compromising principles. Which is a play.

"Donations" to a corrupt regime + signing a deal that says DoD can do whatever they want is not out maneuvering so much as rolling in the pig stye.

Everyone already knows what he is going to do when it comes to that.

It also doesn't matter because Claude 4.6 is so much better at writing code that nobody cares what OpenAI is doing.