What the Anthropic-Pentagon confrontation exposed is an institutional gap that the entire industry had papered over: usage policies are written to satisfy public communications, not to survive a sophisticated government client with operational requirements. Anthropic's terms prohibit autonomous lethal decision-making — but that prohibition only became legible as a real constraint when the Pentagon tested it directly. The Pentagon's total war posture toward Anthropic following the dispute illustrates that the military did not treat this as a good-faith policy difference but as a commercial obstacle to be overcome. That posture…