In late February, the White House ordered every federal agency to drop Anthropic’s AI models within six months after the company insisted on safety guardrails—no autonomous weapons or mass surveillance—in its $200 million Pentagon contract. Sam Altman seized the moment, cutting a deal to put OpenAI’s models on the Pentagon’s classified network with similar “red lines” embedded. Within days, State, Treasury and HHS migrated from Anthropic’s Claude to OpenAI’s GPT-4.1, and the Pentagon labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk.” Anthropic sued the administration for retaliation, and a federal court halted further punishments. Meanwhile, Iran launched drone strikes on AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, claiming U.S. forces were using AI for intelligence and targeting. Two out of three availability zones failed, marking the first direct attack on commercial cloud infrastructure and turning data centers into battlefields. While geopolitics rattled data centers, Anthropic’s revenue exploded—from a $14 billion annualized run rate in mid-February to over $30 billion by early March. Its 1,000+ enterprise clients each spend at least $1 million a year, and Claude Code and Claude Cowork have become must-have tools. Anthropic reports gross revenue from cloud partnerships, inflating top-line figures, whereas OpenAI nets out the 20 percent share it pays Microsoft. OpenAI counters with deep alliances: a new $50 billion deal with AWS (including $15 billion up front) and a $100 billion commitment over eight years. Microsoft remains OpenAI’s exclusive hyperscaler for Frontier, and the company claims Amazon’s Trainium chips deliver 30–40 percent better performance per dollar than GPUs. By late February, OpenAI ran at a $25 billion annualized revenue pace with forecasts aiming at $280 billion by 2030.