OpenAI announced its classified Pentagon agreement on February 27, mere hours after the administration blacklisted Anthropic. Sam Altman later called the timing "opportunistic and sloppy." He was being generous with himself. The word he needed was "revealing."
The velocity matters more than the terms. When a governance vacuum opens, the market fills it before the question can even be properly framed. Draft contract language was already moving days before the blacklisting was formalized. The crisis was still unfolding when the replacement was signed.
Safety-versus-access questions don't resolve through deliberation. They resolve at the speed of someone saying yes.