The Pentagon's decision to designate Anthropic a national security risk carries a specific irony that institutional coverage mostly avoided: the blacklist was issued in response to a refusal that the military subsequently ignored. Anthropic declined to permit Claude's use for mass civilian surveillance and fully autonomous targeting [28]. The Pentagon responded by threatening to sever ties. Then Operation Epic Fury began, and the sequencing of what followed — ban first, deployment second — makes the blacklist legible as something other than enforcement. It reads as punishment for the public refusal,…