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Meet the Pentagon’s AI bro squad
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The Pentagon’s private-sector A-Team
This morning, in advance of a meeting between Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, my colleague Hayden Field and I published a story about the Pentagon’s hardball contract renegotiations with Anthropic. The stakes are higher than it should reasonably be, with the Pentagon continuing to designate Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” if the company doesn’t comply with their demands about their acceptable use policy.
In a post-meeting readout, Axios reported that Hegseth brought several other senior Defense officials to the meeting in an attempt to show that the Pentagon was taking the dispute “seriously.” But in a post-DOGE Trump administration run by broligarchs, it’s always worthwhile to check the attendees’ bios. Some of them were normal senior officials who’d spent their careers in government and military work, but the others have somewhat unusual backgrounds:
- Pentagon CTO Emil Michael, who we reported has been spearheading negotiations with Anthropic. Michael may be familiar to longtime Verge readers and followers of Silicon Valley corporate drama as the former second-in-command at Uber when Travis Kalanick was CEO. Michael was pushed out in 2017 after an investigation found that he, and several other top executives that called themselves the “A-Team,” perpetuated a culture of sexual harassment at the company.
- For anyone curious about his history on surveillance: During a 2014 dinner with several journalists, Michael suggested that Uber hire opposition researchers to gather personal “dirt” on reporters publishing unfavorable news, suggesting that he’d wanted to target one female reporter who had recently criticized the company for its culture of misogyny. This was also around the time that Uber drew controversy for an internal tool known as “God Mode,” which employees used to track the movements of its users, including one BuzzFeed journalist who was writing about an Uber executive.
- Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg, the founder of the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, which manages roughly $65 billion in assets and specializes in “distressed properties.” Feinberg, who’s widely blamed for the death of the auto manufacturer Chrysler, was also an early supporter of Donald Trump, donating to his 2016 presidential campaign and serving on the president’s intelligence advisory board in 2018. During his 2025 Senate confirmation hearing, Feinberg touted Cerberus’ investments in several companies involved in national security, saying he had “significant experience with the Pentagon as a contractor and understand[s] how it functions and is organized.”
- At the time, Democrats raised concerns that Feinberg would have conflicts of interest due to Cerberus’ numerous investments in defense companies such as DynCorp. (That year, DynCorp settled a lawsuit with the Department of Justice over allegations that it had “knowingly inflated subcontractor charges under a State Department contract to train Iraqi police forces.”)
- In 2023, while Feinberg was still at Cerberus, the firm launched Cerberus Ventures, a venture capital arm that invests in early-stage companies that address national security issues in critical infrastructure.
- Hegseth’s chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell, an Army veteran who, in 2021, attempted to run for an open Senate seat in Pennsylvania. While he won Trump’s endorsement in the heated Republican primary, he was forced to drop out in November after his ex-wife made several allegations of serious physical and psychological abuse during a custody hearing. She was afforded full legal custody. (Dr. Mehmet Oz, now serving in the Trump administration, subsequently won the nomination.)
Feinberg and Michael’s presence should draw eyeballs. Yes, they both have some amount of defense industry experience: Michael was a White House fellow during the Obama administration, and spent two years as a special assistant to Defense Secretary Robert Gates at the Pentagon, which isn’t nothing. Feinberg has clearly spent time with defense contracts. But one must fully appreciate the rapacious business mindset that private sector types love to bring into the government — especially with high-stakes negotiations such as this. Parnell’s presence, meanwhile, makes sense within the context of “being the spokesman for Pete Hegseth.”
The single-supplier shuffle
One topic Hayden and I didn’t get to explore more was the “single-supplier vulnerability” issue, but it’s turning into a crucial factor in negotiations.
In 2024, the Biden administration released a national security memorandum on the use of artificial intelligence, which laid out several directives regarding the protection of the supply chain. Among them was a directive for the Department of Defense to maintain contracts with at least two frontier AI labs that were cleared to handle classified information, in order to prevent a scenario where one compromised vendor could take down an entire IT system. But as early as the summer of 2025, I’m told, the Trump administration was trying to address that vulnerability. While they had signed separate contracts with Anthropic, Google, xAI, and OpenAI, only Anthropic’s model was cleared for classified use when Hegseth published his memo outlining his new AI policy in January.
This has placed the Pentagon in a tight situation: Even if they successfully cut out Anthropic and go through the arduous process of making every defense contractor remove Claude from their workflows, they would risk being out of compliance with the Department’s own guidelines, to say nothing of common sense. (Avoiding single-supplier vulnerability is a very basic practice in the tech industry.)
It certainly provides more context to the Pentagon’s decision last night to suddenly grant xAI’s Grok access to classified systems, even though Grok is widely considered the least capable of the available models. While The New York Times reported that Google is also close to signing a deal allowing the Pentagon to use Gemini for classified work, defense insiders view Gemini as a quality rival to Claude, while xAi’s Grok “is not considered as advanced or as reliable as Anthropic’s.” OpenAI is not close to a deal, as the company reportedly believes that it must improve ChatGPT’s safety features before deploying it on classified networks.
So let’s do the math. You have four AI models, and you’re required to work with two of them. Your choices are:
1) A company with a pretty good AI model and increasingly flexible morals
2) A company with the best AI model, but which refuses to let you use it for autonomously killing people without human input
3) A company whose AI model isn’t secure enough to deploy yet
4) A company whose AI has racist hallucinations and generates child porn, and that you don’t consider “advanced [or] reliable”
If you can’t contract with companies 2 and 3, you’re stuck with companies 1 and 4, which even Defense officials admit is not optimal from a national security perspective. “The only reason we’re still talking to these people [Anthropic] is we need them and we need them now. The problem for these guys is they are that good,” a Defense official told Axios ahead of the meeting.
The latest Clarity Act negotiations between finance and crypto last week inadvertently turned into the latest episode of recurring segment I’m now calling: “Why is Laura Loomer tweeting about obscure deep-cut tech issues as if they are MAGA loyalty tests?”
Last Thursday, a small group of powerful crypto and finance players met at the White House to continue hashing out draft language over stablecoin yields. Coinbase, which sparked these negotiations after it withdrew support from Clarity over stablecoin yields, was in attendance. Prior to the meeting, however, Loomer tweeted a classic banger that demonstrated the tactics she uses to wield influence over Trump: Cast the target as someone who once supported Trump’s enemies and is therefore disloyal.
Ironically, Coinbase has turned into one of the biggest branded boosters of the Trump administration, donating money to his pet initiatives and even having their logo splashed all over last year’s military parade.
Though Loomer tweeted a similar sentiment about Coinbase last June, it seems to have had no impact on whether Coinbase has access to Trump, and likely won’t for a while: I’m told that CEO Brian Armstrong was at Mar-a-Lago the day before Loomer tweeted, attending a World Liberty Financial event.
A wild Trumpworld character has appeared!
If you followed the saga of Logan Paul auctioning off his Pokémon card collection, you may be aware that one of those cards sold for a record-setting $16.5 million last week. But who’s that Pokémon purchaser? It’s AJ Scaramucci, the son of the one and only Anthony Scaramucci, the New York financier and former Trump ally who famously served as Trump’s White House Communications Director in 2017 for 10 days.
AJ is the founder of Solari Capital, which invested $100 million in a Bitcoin mining platform run by Eric Trump. He also now owns the Pikachu Illustrator card, one of only 39 cards in existence and in Grade 10 condition, as well as the diamond chain and carrying case that Paul wore to display the card when he appeared at WrestleMania 38. Scaramucci told reporters that he purchased the card as part of his upcoming “planetary treasure hunt,” adding that he also hoped to purchase a T. rex skull and the Declaration of Independence. (He later posted on X that he hoped to place the card in the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto and cement it as “the ‘Mona Lisa’ of the Pokemon franchise.”)
We can’t believe that a court has to tell you this, much less the Southern District of New York: If you put correspondence between you and your lawyer into a publicly available AI platform, it is no longer protected by attorney-client privilege and becomes subject to discovery!!!!
In any case, have a pleasant State of the Union watch party (if anyone does that anymore) and see you next week.
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Xiaomi has just given a global launch to two of its latest flagship phones, the Xiaomi 17 and 17 Ultra, along with a Leica-branded Leitzphone edition of the Ultra. There’s no sign, however, of the 17 Pro, which launched in China with an additional display mounted next to the rear cameras.
The 17 and 17 Ultra will apparently be available soon in the UK, Europe, and select other markets. The 17 — pitched as a rival to the likes of the iPhone 17 and Samsung Galaxy S26 — will cost £899 / €999 (about $1,200), while the larger and more capable Ultra starts from £1,299 / €1,499 ($1,750). The limited-edition Leitzphone will be substantially more expensive at £1,699 / €1,999 ($2,300), though it includes 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, along with a few extra accessories.
The 17 is an extremely capable small-ish flagship, with a 6.3-inch OLED display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, and large 6,330mAh silicon-carbon battery (though sadly smaller than the 7,000mAh version launched in China). I won’t be writing a full review of the 17, but did spend a week using it as my main phone, and found that the battery cruised past the full-day mark, though wasn’t quite enough for two full days of my typical usage. That’s far better battery life than you’d find in similarly sized phones from Apple, Samsung, or Google.
The cameras impress too, with 50-megapixel sensors behind each of the four lenses, selfie included. Pound for pound, you won’t find many better camera systems in any phone this size.
1/10
The Ultra, unsurprisingly, takes things to another level. It’s much larger, with a 6.9-inch display, and weighs a hefty 218g. Despite that, the 6,000mAh is actually smaller, though I found it delivered pretty similar longevity.
The enormous camera is, as ever for Xiaomi’s Ultra phones, the highlight. There are 50-megapixel sensors for each of the main, ultrawide, and selfie cameras, with a large 1-inch-type sensor behind the primary lens. The periscope telephoto is even more impressive: 200-megapixel resolution, a large 1/1.4-inch sensor, and continuous optical zoom from 3.2x to 4.3x, the equivalent of 75-100mm. Xiaomi isn’t the first to pull off a true zoom phone — Sony’s Xperia 1 IV got there first in 2022 — but the telephoto camera here is far more capable than that phone’s, with natural bokeh and impressive performance even in low light.
The camera capabilities are supported by Xiaomi’s ongoing photography partner Leica, but it’s the pair’s Leitzphone that really emphasizes that. Slightly redesigned from the 17 Ultra Leica Edition that was released in China last December, this includes Leica branding across the hardware and software, a range of Leica filters and shooting styles, and a rotatable rear camera ring that can be used to control the zoom. It’s the first Leica Leitzphone produced by Xiaomi — after a trio of Japan-only Sharp models — and comes with additional branded accessories, including a case with a lens cap and a microfiber cleaning cloth.
Xiaomi has plenty of other announcements alongside the 17 series phones at MWC this year, including a super-slim magnetic power bank, the Pad 8 and Pad 8 Pro tablets, and a smart tag that supports both Google and Apple’s tech-tracking networks.
Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge
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Free apps are supposed to cost you nothing but storage space. But in this case, they may have cost millions of people control over their own internet connections.
Google says it has disrupted what it believes was the world’s largest residential proxy network, one that secretly hijacked around 9 million Android devices, along with computers and smart home gadgets. Most people had no idea their devices were being used since the apps worked normally, and nothing looked broken.
But behind the scenes, those devices were quietly routing traffic for strangers, including cybercriminals.
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STOP GOOGLE FROM FOLLOWING YOUR EVERY MOVE
Google says it disrupted a massive residential proxy network that secretly hijacked about 9 million Android and smart devices. (AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)
How your device became part of a proxy network
According to Google’s Threat Intelligence Group, the network was tied to a company known as IPIDEA. Instead of spreading through obvious malware, it relied on hidden software development kits, or SDKs, that were embedded inside more than 600 apps. These apps ranged from simple utilities to VPN tools and other free downloads. When you installed one, the app performed its advertised function. But it also enrolled your device into a residential proxy network.
That means your phone, computer or smart device could be used as a relay point for someone else’s internet traffic. That traffic might include scraping websites, launching automated login attempts or masking the identity of someone conducting shady online activity. From the outside, it looked like that activity came from your home IP address. You wouldn’t see it happening, and in many cases, you wouldn’t notice any major performance issues.
Google says in a single seven-day period earlier this year, more than 550 separate threat groups were observed using IP addresses linked to this infrastructure. That includes cybercrime operations and state-linked actors. Residential proxy networks are attractive because they make malicious traffic look like normal consumer activity. Instead of coming from a suspicious data center, it appears to come from someone’s living room.
What Google did to shut it down
Google says it took legal action in a U.S. federal court to seize domains used to control the infected devices and route proxy traffic. It also worked with companies like Cloudflare and other security firms to disrupt the network’s command-and-control systems. Google claims it also updated Play Protect, the built-in Android security system, so that certified devices would automatically detect and remove apps known to include the malicious SDKs.
However, Google also warned that many of these apps were distributed outside the official Play Store. That matters because Play Protect can only scan and block threats tied to apps installed through Google Play. Third-party app stores, unofficial downloads and uncertified Android devices carry far greater risk.
IPIDEA has claimed its service was meant for legitimate business use, such as web research and data collection. But Google’s research suggests the network was heavily abused by criminals. Even if some users knowingly installed bandwidth-sharing apps in exchange for rewards, many did not receive clear disclosure about how their devices were being used.
Google’s investigation also found significant overlap between different proxy brands and SDK names. What looked like separate services were often tied to the same infrastructure. That makes it harder for consumers to know which apps are safe and which are quietly monetizing their connection.
300,000 CHROME USERS HIT BY FAKE AI EXTENSIONS
Hidden software inside more than 600 apps allegedly turned phones and computers into internet relays for cybercriminals. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
7 ways you can protect yourself from Android proxy attacks
If millions of devices can be quietly turned into internet relay points, the big question is, how do you make sure yours isn’t one of them? These steps reduce the risk that your phone, TV box or smart device gets pulled into a proxy network without you realizing it.
1) Stick to official app stores
Only download apps from the Google Play Store or other trusted app marketplaces. Some apps hide small pieces of code that can secretly use your internet connection. These are often spread through third-party app stores or direct app files called “APKs,” which are Android app files installed manually instead of through the Play Store. When you sideload apps this way, you bypass Google’s built-in security checks. Sticking to official stores helps keep those hidden threats off your device.
2) Avoid “earn money by sharing bandwidth” apps
If an app promises rewards for sharing your unused internet bandwidth, that’s a major red flag. In many cases, that is exactly how residential proxy networks recruit devices. Even if it sounds legitimate, you are effectively renting out your IP address. That can expose you to abuse, blacklisting or deeper network vulnerabilities.
3) Review app permissions carefully
Before installing any app, check what permissions it requests. A simple wallpaper app should not need full network control or background execution privileges. After installation, go into your phone’s settings and audit which apps have constant internet access, background activity rights or special device permissions.
4) Install strong antivirus software
Today’s mobile security tools can detect suspicious app behavior, unusual internet activity and hidden background services. Strong antivirus software adds an extra layer of protection beyond what’s built into your device, especially if you’ve installed apps in the past that you’re unsure about. Get my picks for the best 2026 antivirus protection winners for your Windows, Mac, Android and iOS devices at Cyberguy.com.
5) Keep your devices updated
Android security updates patch vulnerabilities that proxy operators may exploit. If you’re using an older phone, tablet or Android TV box that no longer receives updates, it may be time to upgrade. Unpatched devices are easier targets for hidden SDK abuse and botnet enrollment.
6) Use a strong password manager
If your device ever becomes part of a proxy network or is otherwise compromised, attackers often try to pivot into your accounts next. That’s why you should never reuse passwords. A password manager generates long, unique passwords for every account and stores them securely, so one breach does not unlock your email, banking or social media. Many password managers also include breach monitoring tools that alert you if your credentials appear in leaked databases, giving you a chance to act before real damage is done. Check out the best expert-reviewed password managers of 2026 at Cyberguy.com.
7) Remove apps you don’t fully trust
Go through your installed apps and delete or uninstall anything you don’t recognize or haven’t used in months. The fewer apps running on your device, the fewer opportunities there are for hidden SDKs to operate. If you suspect your device has been compromised, consider a full reset and reinstall only essential apps from trusted sources.
ANDROID MALWARE HIDDEN IN FAKE ANTIVIRUS APP
Threat groups and state-linked actors allegedly used compromised devices to mask online activity and automate attacks. (Photo Illustration by Serene Lee/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Kurt’s key takeaway
Residential proxy networks operate in a gray area that sounds harmless on paper but can quickly become a shield for cybercrime. In this case, millions of everyday devices were quietly enrolled into a system that attackers used to hide their tracks. Google’s takedown is a major move, but the broader market for residential proxies is still growing. That means you need to be cautious about what you install and what permissions you grant. Free apps are rarely truly free. Sometimes, the product being sold is you and your internet connection.
Have you ever installed an app that promised rewards for sharing bandwidth, or used a free VPN without thinking twice about it? Let us know your thoughts by writing to us at Cyberguy.com.
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Related Article
This week, Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon.
Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic.
Instead, @AnthropicAI and its CEO @DarioAmodei, have chosen duplicity. Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission – a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.
The Terms of Service of Anthropic’s defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield.
Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable.
As President Trump stated on Truth Social, the Commander-in-Chief and the American people alone will determine the destiny of our armed forces, not unelected tech executives.
Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles. Their relationship with the United States Armed Forces and the Federal Government has therefore been permanently altered.
In conjunction with the President’s directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic’s technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.
America’s warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final.
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