China Reacts to Anthropic-DoW

Anthropic managed to massively piss off both the DoW and China in the same week.

For context: On February 23rd, Anthropic was summoned to the Pentagon by Secretary Hegseth, who demanded Claude’s safety guardrails be stripped for unrestricted military use. That same day, Anthropic published a blog post accusing three Chinese AI labs (DeepSeek, Moonshot/Kimi, and MiniMax) of industrial-scale distillation. A few days later, Trump called them a “RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY,” blacklisted them from all federal contracts. Hegseth then said he would designate them a national security supply chain risk, which was a label previously reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei. The distillation accusations, meanwhile, landed in China as hypocritical politicking, compounding the bad blood from Anthropic’s September 2025 restrictions on Chinese-controlled companies.

Anthropic now occupies an unprecedented political position: regarded in Washington as too woke to be trusted, and in Beijing as the most hawkish AI company.

The Irony

The most palpable emotion on Chinese social media is irony. Given Anthropic’s track record with China — banning Chinese-controlled companies, labeling China an enemy state in internal documents, and pushing hardest in Washington for compute restrictions on Chinese firms — Chinese netizens were not exactly sympathetic when the blacklist dropped.

Anthropic, which has done more than any other Western AI company to frame China as a threat, may now be deemed the same “supply chain risk” designation historically reserved for Chinese companies like Huawei. The mockery lands harder given that just weeks earlier, Anthropic was being called “AI Thanos” (“AI灭霸”) after its February product releases wiped out software stocks (IBM down 13%, CrowdStrike down 6.5%).

But there’s a second level of political irony. The US government, which built its entire AI export control regime around the premise that democracies develop AI differently from autocracies, spent this week threatening a company with criminal prosecution for refusing to enable domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, the exact use cases Washington spent years warning China would pursue. From America’s AI Action Plan, the Trump Administration’s policy roadmap for AI released in July 2025:

“AI systems will play a profound role in how we educate our children, do our jobs, and consume media. It is essential that these systems be built from the ground up with freedom of speech and expression in mind, and that U.S. government policy does not interfere with that objective. … The distribution

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