3 Before 9: March 4, 2026

The biggest AI story of the year so far. Anthropic refused to let the Pentagon use Claude for fully autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance of Americans. The Trump administration responded by labelling the company a "supply-chain risk to national security," effectively banning any government contractor from working with Anthropic. OpenAI moved in within hours to fill the gap, though Sam Altman later admitted it "looked opportunistic and sloppy." Tech workers across Google, OpenAI and the wider industry are now circulating open letters demanding clearer limits on military AI use. Meanwhile, consumers voted with their downloads: Claude hit number one on the Apple App Store.

Apple is holding its "Special Experience" media events in New York, London and Shanghai this morning, with the star of the show expected to be its first budget MacBook, powered by an A18 Pro chip rather than the M-series. Pricing is expected to land well below the $999 MacBook Air, potentially as low as $799, with colourful finishes aimed squarely at students and Chromebook switchers.

Jensen Huang has put $2 billion each into photonics companies Lumentum and Coherent, securing multi-year purchase commitments and manufacturing capacity for silicon photonics: the technology that moves data using light rather than copper. At the scale of gigawatt AI factories, the interconnects between chips become the constraint, and NVIDIA is locking down the supply chain before scarcity becomes a growth limiter.