Latest / Connor with Honor: AI, Real Estate and Real Life / They Fired The AI While It Was Bombing Iran: What Every Business Owner Needs To Know in 2026
Transcript
- 0:00SPEAKER_00: Welcome, you're at the daily download.
- 0:01SPEAKER_00: Let's get into what's going on here in AI with Honor.
- 0:05SPEAKER_00: And this is Sunday, March 15th, 2026.
- 0:08SPEAKER_00: So the Pentagon fired the company that makes the AI I use to build businesses and do some other things while that same AI was actively running bombing missions in Iran.
- 0:18SPEAKER_00: Now I'm not editorializing, that's the documented sequence of events, and when regular people found out what happened, over a million of them signed up for artificial intelligence every single day for a week straight.
- 0:31SPEAKER_00: That's a lot of people.
- 0:32SPEAKER_00: And there's something inside this story about power principle and who actually decides how this technology gets used.
- 0:40SPEAKER_00: We're going to get into all of it.
- 0:41SPEAKER_00: That's AI with honor.
- 0:42SPEAKER_00: We're at the Sunday show.
- 0:44SPEAKER_00: Let's get with it.
- 0:45SPEAKER_00: Now, the biggest AI story of the year, and most people missed it.
- 0:50SPEAKER_00: So back in July of 2025, Anthropic signed a contract with the Pentagon.
- 0:55SPEAKER_00: Claude became the first frontier model ever cleared for classified military networks.
- 1:00SPEAKER_00: It's a historic deal, the most sensitive work the U.S.
- 1:03SPEAKER_00: government does.
- 1:04SPEAKER_00: Military loved it.
- 1:05SPEAKER_00: Claude was running inside Palantir's Maven Smart System.
- 1:09SPEAKER_00: They used it to help capture Nicholas Maduro.
- 1:12SPEAKER_00: When the Iranian operation started, Claude was striking over a thousand targets in the first 24 hours.
- 1:18SPEAKER_00: That's real missions, real consequences.
- 1:21SPEAKER_00: Then the Pentagon came back and wanted more.
- 1:23SPEAKER_00: They wanted Claude available for, as their exact language said, all lawful purposes.
- 1:30SPEAKER_00: What could go wrong?
- 1:31SPEAKER_00: No restrictions, no carve outs.
- 1:33SPEAKER_00: Anthropic says, no.
- 1:35SPEAKER_00: Two things are off the table, they said.
- 1:37SPEAKER_00: Full autonomous weapons, no human in the targeting or firing chain.
- 1:42SPEAKER_00: It's not going to work.
- 1:43SPEAKER_00: The mass domestic surveillance of American citizens, also a problem.
- 1:47SPEAKER_00: The Pentagon set a deadline.
- 1:49SPEAKER_00: February 27th, 5.01 p.m., 1701 hours.
- 1:53SPEAKER_00: Anthropic didn't move.
- 1:55SPEAKER_00: Trump went on Truth Social.
- 1:56SPEAKER_00: He said he was directing every federal agency to immediately cease all use of anthropic.
- 2:01SPEAKER_00: Pink Hegseth, Pete Heggseth, I should say, now calling DOD the Department of War, which actually pretty scary, designed Anthropic, designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk.
- 2:14SPEAKER_00: Effective immediately.
- 2:15SPEAKER_00: That label was one historical use before.
- 2:19SPEAKER_00: Foreign adversaries, Hawaii, Chinese state-linked companies trying to infiltrate American infrastructure.
- 2:26SPEAKER_00: They applied it to a company founded in San Francisco.
- 2:29SPEAKER_00: Anthropic is now suing the Trump administration.
- 2:32SPEAKER_00: Who doesn't?
- 2:33SPEAKER_00: The court fight could last until Christmas or beyond.
- 2:36SPEAKER_00: And the Pentagon's own people admitted off the record, untangling Claude from active military operations right now is going to be a massive problem because it's already everywhere.
- 2:46SPEAKER_00: Here's part of the headlines buried hours after the Pentagon made the announcement.
- 2:58SPEAKER_00: Within hours, all lawful purposes.
- 3:00SPEAKER_00: No restrictions asked, no restrictions given.
- 3:03SPEAKER_00: A senior member of OpenAI's robotics team resigned the same day on principle.
- 3:08SPEAKER_00: So the two biggest AI companies in the world are now on opposite sides of the most consequential AI policy moment this country has ever seen.
- 3:16SPEAKER_00: One took the deal, one went to court.
- 3:19SPEAKER_00: And I'll ask you to form your own opinion or not.
- 3:22SPEAKER_00: That's about that.
- 3:23SPEAKER_00: I think you should.
- 3:25SPEAKER_00: The customer reaction, I think, told me everything.
- 3:28SPEAKER_00: You decide.
- 3:29SPEAKER_00: Over a million people signed up for Claude every single day for a week after the story broke.
- 3:34SPEAKER_00: Claude became the top AI app in over 20 countries on Apple's App Store, jumped past ChatGPT, jumped past Gemini.
- 3:43SPEAKER_00: People sided with the company that said, no, that's not a press release, that's a market signal.
- 3:48SPEAKER_00: Or none of it can be true.
- 3:50SPEAKER_00: It could have been done on purpose.
- 3:52SPEAKER_00: That's something else.
- 3:53SPEAKER_00: That we should always look at everything.
- 3:54SPEAKER_00: We don't know the reason.
- 3:56SPEAKER_00: The story breaks, where's the story coming from?
- 3:58SPEAKER_00: Who's talking about the story?
- 4:00SPEAKER_00: It might have made all the big news networks and people are talking about it, but maybe those aren't really the reasons, it is.
- 4:07SPEAKER_00: Again, something to explore.
- 4:09SPEAKER_00: As somebody who works with companies trying to figure out how to position themselves instead of the AI landscape, this signal matters more than any benchmark score because trust at scale is the rarest thing in the industry right now.
- 4:20SPEAKER_00: And Anthropic just accidentally manufactured more of it than any ad campaign can buy.
- 4:26SPEAKER_00: Here's another one.
- 4:27SPEAKER_00: Here's a deep dive tech story.
- 4:30SPEAKER_00: Gemini just moved into your office and didn't knock.
- 4:33SPEAKER_00: Google wrote out a major update this week.
- 4:35SPEAKER_00: Gemini is now natively embedded inside every Google Workspace tool.
- 4:40SPEAKER_00: Docs, sheets, slides, Google Drive, not as a side panel.
- 4:44SPEAKER_00: You have to remember to open, but as a default intelligence layer, it's running the whole suite.
- 4:49SPEAKER_00: Here's what that actually means in practice.
- 4:52SPEAKER_00: You open up a doc and say draft a proposal using the meeting notes from my last three client calls on the budget spreadsheet from Q quarter four.
- 5:00SPEAKER_00: And it does it.
- 5:01SPEAKER_00: It uses your actual files, your actual numbers, your actual context.
- 5:06SPEAKER_00: It's not a demo anymore, it's live.
- 5:08SPEAKER_00: For Google's AI Ultra and Pro subscribers right now.
- 5:12SPEAKER_00: And here's the things agents and business owners need to understand about this.
- 5:16SPEAKER_00: Your clients are going to start using this inside tools they already pay for.
- 5:20SPEAKER_00: They won't think of it as adopting AI.
- 5:22SPEAKER_00: They think of it as docs just getting smarter.
- 5:24SPEAKER_00: Remember Clippy?
- 5:26SPEAKER_00: This is a good Clippy.
- 5:28SPEAKER_00: And they're going to come to you and ask you, well, should I be doing something with this for my business?
- 5:34SPEAKER_00: The question is an opportunity for you.
- 5:36SPEAKER_00: So if you know the answer, you become the person they rely on.
- 5:39SPEAKER_00: If you don't, they're going to find somebody else who does.
- 5:42SPEAKER_00: The pro-human AI Declaration just dropped.
- 5:45SPEAKER_00: A bipartisan group of researchers led by MIT physicist Max Tegmark, look him up, has just released something that the government has declined to produce on its own.
- 5:55SPEAKER_00: A real framework for responsible AI development.
- 5:58SPEAKER_00: The key number first is polling shows 95% of Americans, that's a bunch, now say they oppose an unregulated race to superintelligence.
- 6:07SPEAKER_00: That shift happened in four months.
- 6:09SPEAKER_00: Do we already have it?
- 6:10SPEAKER_00: Hard to say.
- 6:12SPEAKER_00: The declaration calls for keeping humans in charge, banning fully autonomous self-replicating systems, mandatory off-switches on powerful AI.
- 6:21SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that's going to work.
- 6:23SPEAKER_00: I don't know if they can put AI back in the box or even shut AI down.
- 6:27SPEAKER_00: Anyway, I digress.
- 6:29SPEAKER_00: An outright prohibition on building superintelligence until there's a scientific consensus.
- 6:34SPEAKER_00: With a democratic buy-in, it can be done safely.
- 6:37SPEAKER_00: The declaration was finalized before the Pentagon anthropic standoff.
- 6:42SPEAKER_00: The collision of those two events was not lost on anyone involved.
- 6:46SPEAKER_00: Here's how I want you to think about where AI pricing is right now.
- 6:49SPEAKER_00: And I know I talk about this, but with everything coming down, I mean energy, everything, maybe not fuel, and maybe not yet, but give me a chance.
- 6:58SPEAKER_00: Six months ago, running a serious AI system for your business cost what it used to hire a part-time employee.
- 7:05SPEAKER_00: It was very expensive.
- 7:07SPEAKER_00: Now it costs what it costs to buy them lunch.
- 7:09SPEAKER_00: This isn't a metaphor, this is actual compression that's happened.
- 7:13SPEAKER_00: And most people have no idea because the people selling AI tools have every incentive to make it sound complicated and expensive.
- 7:21SPEAKER_00: Complicated and expensive is how you justify a monthly retainer.
- 7:25SPEAKER_00: So let me give you the real world version.
- 7:27SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to use the conversations I actually have because agents come to me, mortgage companies come to me, brokerages come to me, and other business owners come to me, and the question is always the same version of the same thing.
- 7:40SPEAKER_00: Where do I even start?
- 7:42SPEAKER_00: Here's where I start with all of them.
- 7:43SPEAKER_00: Think about a mortgage officer, been doing it for 22 years, good at his job, knows his products, knows his clients, follows up, sends birthday cars, knows their kids' names on when their dog last time had some kind of an ailment.
- 7:56SPEAKER_00: They close deals.
- 7:57SPEAKER_00: Right now, today you can build an AI voice agent that handles the first 15 minutes of every inbound inquiry he gets.
- 8:04SPEAKER_00: Qualify the borrower, captures the scenario, asks the right questions, categorizes the lead, routes him into a complete intake and summary before said lender, busy, ever picks up the phone.
- 8:16SPEAKER_00: The agent runs around the clock, doesn't have a bad day, doesn't put somebody on hold to take another call.
- 8:21SPEAKER_00: It doesn't forget to follow up on a Friday afternoon because there's a game on, and it costs less per month than he spends on coffee.
- 8:28SPEAKER_00: It's not a pitch.
- 8:29SPEAKER_00: That's what I've already built for mortgage operations through hireaivoice.com.
- 8:33SPEAKER_00: It's operational today.
- 8:34SPEAKER_00: Here's where it gets interesting and maybe a little uncomfortable.
- 8:38SPEAKER_00: The cost keeps dropping.
- 8:41SPEAKER_00: Every quarter, models get faster, smarter, better, cheaper.
- 8:44SPEAKER_00: What costs a dollar today might cost a dime in 18 months.
- 8:49SPEAKER_00: It probably will cost a dime in 18 months.
- 8:52SPEAKER_00: What costs a dime will cost then a fraction of a cent after that.
- 8:57SPEAKER_00: So the committed competitive advantage isn't in having access to the technology.
- 9:02SPEAKER_00: Access is becoming nearly free.
- 9:04SPEAKER_00: The advantage is in the architecture, in knowing which tool solves which problem.
- 9:09SPEAKER_00: Where do you get it?
- 9:10SPEAKER_00: How much should you be paying?
- 9:11SPEAKER_00: What does it look like?
- 9:12SPEAKER_00: How does it work?
- 9:13SPEAKER_00: And understanding where AI breaks down in your specific workflow and how do you build around it.
- 9:18SPEAKER_00: In knowing what to automate and what to keep human because what's wrong, getting what's wrong, that's wrong, is very expensive in ways that don't show up on a spreadsheet until a client seeks business from somebody elsewhere.
- 9:31SPEAKER_00: When a brokerage brings me in or an agent asks me where to start, or a company wants to know how to pivot their entire operation around AI, that's the conversation.
- 9:39SPEAKER_00: Not which tool is the shiniest, which system actually fits how your business makes money and how you do it, how you do it and build it so it compounds instead of creates chaos.
- 9:51SPEAKER_00: So I've done this in real estate and mortgage and invoice AI, lead generation content systems, the meta-ads, campaigns, open AI sales, and the pattern is always the same.
- 10:00SPEAKER_00: The people who win aren't the ones who bought the most tools or spent the most money.
- 10:05SPEAKER_00: They're the ones who built the right infrastructure first and let everything else get plugged into it.
- 10:10SPEAKER_00: Now here's the full picture: the good, the bad, and of course, the ugly.
- 10:15SPEAKER_00: One of my favorite Clint Eastwood movies.
- 10:17SPEAKER_00: The good, if you're watching this show, you're already ahead of 90% of the people in your market.
- 10:21SPEAKER_00: Most of them are still using AI to write Instagram captions.
- 10:24SPEAKER_00: You're thinking about systems.
- 10:26SPEAKER_00: The gap is real and worth the money.
- 10:28SPEAKER_00: The bad, the window on that advantage is not permanent.
- 10:32SPEAKER_00: It democratizes democratizes fast.
- 10:37SPEAKER_00: The people who build it in the next 12 months will have a lead that takes years to close.
- 10:41SPEAKER_00: The people who wait are going to be running catch-up at full speed against people who have already had the infrastructure homing.
- 10:47SPEAKER_00: The ugly.
- 10:48SPEAKER_00: Some of the jobs that feel secure right now are going to be because AI is smarter than experienced professionals.
- 10:53SPEAKER_00: It's not.
- 10:55SPEAKER_00: But because an experienced person with the right AI architecture around them can produce what a senior person produces without it.
- 11:03SPEAKER_00: Faster, cheaper, and at scale.
- 11:05SPEAKER_00: I've watched it already happen in real estate, in mortgage origination, in marketing, in operations.
- 11:11SPEAKER_00: That's not a threat if you're building.
- 11:13SPEAKER_00: It's just a threat if you're watching.
- 11:15SPEAKER_00: So if you want to have that conversation about your business, your team, your market, your positioning, you can look me up at Connor with Honor.
- 11:22SPEAKER_00: And that's where it starts.
- 11:24SPEAKER_00: Token cost, that's the real number.
- 11:26SPEAKER_00: An anthropic story has a direct business lesson in it.
- 11:31SPEAKER_00: Dario Omade, the head of Anthropic, said something to his memo in his memo last week.
- 11:37SPEAKER_00: I want to sit with us and talk about for a minute.
- 11:40SPEAKER_00: He said the administration doesn't like Anthropic because the company hasn't donated money or offered.
- 11:46SPEAKER_00: His words, dictator style, praise to Trump.
- 11:50SPEAKER_00: This is a CEO of a$19 billion company writing that an internal memo.
- 11:54SPEAKER_00: The memo leaked, the whole world read it, and a million people a day had signed up since.
- 11:59SPEAKER_00: Here's the business principle.
- 12:01SPEAKER_00: Positioning based on principle is a marketing strategy that cannot be bought.
- 12:06SPEAKER_00: When you stake out a clear line, this is what we do, this is what we don't do, and we'll go to court before we cross it.
- 12:13SPEAKER_00: People feel that.
- 12:15SPEAKER_00: Not everybody responds, but the ones who do become your most loyal customers, your best referral sources, the people who defend you publicly without being asked.
- 12:25SPEAKER_00: I built my entire real estate practice on the same thing.
- 12:27SPEAKER_00: Sellers only, no buyers, never.
- 12:30SPEAKER_00: People ask me or tell me and ask, find out, does that limit me?
- 12:34SPEAKER_00: I tell them it's a reason.
- 12:35SPEAKER_00: Serious sellers call me first because when somebody calls a seller's only agent, they already know you're not going to split your attention between their interest and somebody else's.
- 12:43SPEAKER_00: Clarity of position is not a constraint, it's a calling card.
- 12:46SPEAKER_00: And right now, in an industry drowning in AI tools and AI noise, and everybody claiming to be an AI expert, the businesses that win are the ones that can say clearly, here's what we do, here's what we don't do, and here is exactly who we are for.
- 13:01SPEAKER_00: The agentic unicorn is already here.
- 13:04SPEAKER_00: While everybody's watching the anthropic drama, a company called Basis just hit a 1.15 billion valuation.
- 13:12SPEAKER_00: They build agentic accounting systems.
- 13:15SPEAKER_00: AI handles audits and tax preparation autonomously, end to end.
- 13:20SPEAKER_00: Not a chatbot, not an assistant, an agent that does the work.
- 13:24SPEAKER_00: The model is playing out right now, across every professional vertical right now.
- 13:28SPEAKER_00: Legal, healthcare, finance, real estate, and mortgage.
- 13:31SPEAKER_00: The question is not whether agents are coming for these workflows.
- 13:35SPEAKER_00: They're already here.
- 13:36SPEAKER_00: The question is whether you're the one deploying them or the one being displaced by them.
- 13:42SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow morning, Jensen Huang, Huang Huang takes the stage.
- 13:46SPEAKER_00: GTC 2026 starts tomorrow.
- 13:50SPEAKER_00: NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference, the SAP Center in San Jose, 11 a.m.
- 13:56SPEAKER_00: Pacific.
- 13:57SPEAKER_00: Streams free at NVIDIA.com.
- 13:59SPEAKER_00: And I'll be watching.
- 14:01SPEAKER_00: And if you have a couple extra tickets, please send them my way.
- 14:04SPEAKER_00: 30,000 people from 190 countries in the room.
- 14:08SPEAKER_00: God, can you imagine?
- 14:10SPEAKER_00: Jensen had said publicly they've prepared a chip that will surprise the world.
- 14:14SPEAKER_00: There are reports of a new open source enterprise AI agent platform called NemoClaw, the Ruben-generated GPU, and the Vera CPU.
- 14:25SPEAKER_00: And Jensen's current thesis, what he's calling the five-layer cake, talked about it yesterday.
- 14:31SPEAKER_00: Energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications.
- 14:35SPEAKER_00: All five have to scale together, and NVIDIA is the only company that touches every single layer simultaneously.
- 14:41SPEAKER_00: This isn't a product pitch, this is a structural argument for why NVIDIA is the most in company, most important company in the world right now.
- 14:49SPEAKER_00: Watch that keynote tomorrow, 11 a.m.
- 14:51SPEAKER_00: Pacific Standard Time.
- 14:52SPEAKER_00: Monday's show is going to have the real-time breakdown.
- 14:55SPEAKER_00: Now, AI is in a power grid problem.
- 15:00SPEAKER_00: Morgan Stanley published projections this week.
- 15:02SPEAKER_00: The U.S.
- 15:03SPEAKER_00: is facing a net power shortfall of 9 to 10 gigawatts through 2028 just to run the AA build-off that's already been committed to.
- 15:11SPEAKER_00: That's 12 to 25% deficit.
- 15:14SPEAKER_00: Think about what that actually means.
- 15:15SPEAKER_00: We build the internet on existing power infrastructure.
- 15:18SPEAKER_00: Nobody had to construct new power plants to send email.
- 15:21SPEAKER_00: AI is so server hungry that it's forcing entirely an entirely new power generation to be built from scratch just to keep the models running.
- 15:29SPEAKER_00: That's a different scale of disruption than anything that came before it, and the money is already moving into that space.
- 15:35SPEAKER_00: Energy infrastructure, data center construction, power generation.
- 15:38SPEAKER_00: The people who understood that six months ago, well, they're already positioned.
- 15:42SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the thing.
- 15:43SPEAKER_00: I get fossil fuel, I get oil, get gas, natural gas, coal, all wonderful, lovely.
- 15:49SPEAKER_00: But if we built enough solar, stuck it in some place that wouldn't bother anybody in the middle of nowhere where there's a lot of hot sunlight, we could actually power this entire country pretty well.
- 16:00SPEAKER_00: Something that they're not doing, and there's plenty of money to do it with when it comes from having to maybe cut certain budgets in the government.
- 16:07SPEAKER_00: Maybe we look at the politicians and all the money they raise to get elected.
- 16:11SPEAKER_00: Maybe there's a different system that can use there, and we take that money and we build out a power infrastructure in the United States that would just boggle anybody's mind.
- 16:20SPEAKER_00: The Pentagon situation just rewrote the rule book.
- 16:22SPEAKER_00: What happened to Anthropic is genuinely unprecedented.
- 16:25SPEAKER_00: Supply chain risk designation exists to protect the United States and foreign adversaries.
- 16:33SPEAKER_00: Hawaii companies, who with ties to hostile governments trying to compromise critical infrastructure, they applied it to an American company by refusing to help build weapons that fire without a human and tools to surveil American citizens.
- 16:47SPEAKER_00: Dean Ball, a formal Trump, former Trump White House AI advisor, called it a death rattle of the American public.
- 16:55SPEAKER_00: Said the government abandoned strategic clarity and was treating domestic innovators worse than foreign adversaries.
- 17:02SPEAKER_00: Senator Kirsten Gillibrand called it a dangerous misuse of a tool meant to address adversarially controlled technology.
- 17:10SPEAKER_00: The lawsuit's going to play out over months, and while it does, the only AI lab with classified ready systems is being replaced by a computer that took the deal without any conditions.
- 17:20SPEAKER_00: What does that mean?
- 17:21SPEAKER_00: What that means for how AI gets used inside the military, nobody really has a clean answer yet.
- 17:26SPEAKER_00: But 95% of Americans say they don't want an unregulated race to the end.
- 17:31SPEAKER_00: The public sees it, even if Washington might be ignoring it.
- 17:35SPEAKER_00: Now I spent years working corrections in New Mexico, then I put on the LEPD badge, and in corrections you learn something fast.
- 17:42SPEAKER_00: The institution doesn't reward the guy who speaks up, it rewards the guy who gives in and who complies until it doesn't.
- 17:49SPEAKER_00: Until the thing that was tolerated for years comes the thing that broke everything.
- 17:53SPEAKER_00: Dario Omade sat across from the Pentagon and said, We're not going to let you use our technology to build weapons that fire without a human pulling the trigger or a human being in the loop in some way approving it.
- 18:05SPEAKER_00: We're not going to let you use our technology to surveil American systems at mass scale.
- 18:10SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that's happening already, but again, he said no.
- 18:14SPEAKER_00: So maybe there's some pause in that.
- 18:16SPEAKER_00: He said that knowing it would cost them a$200 million government contract.
- 18:22SPEAKER_00: Knowing the president would fire them publicly on social media, knowing they'd be in federal court for the rest of the year, a million people a day signed up anyway, because people can feel the difference between a company who has a line and a company who will cross any line if the price is right.
- 18:38SPEAKER_00: This isn't a business lesson.
- 18:40SPEAKER_00: This is a character lesson.
- 18:42SPEAKER_00: In 27 years of selling real estate out here in Santa Clara and everything I've built around AI since, the clients who stay, the relationships that compounded, the reputation that opens doors before I even walk in, all of it traces back to one thing.
- 18:55SPEAKER_00: People knew where I stood before they even called me.
- 18:58SPEAKER_00: Know your line, say it out loud.
- 19:00SPEAKER_00: Hold it.
- 19:01SPEAKER_00: Everything that matters in this industry and in this life gets built from there.
- 19:06SPEAKER_00: ConnorWithHonor.com.
- 19:08SPEAKER_00: I'll see you tomorrow when Jensen drops what he says that he says will surprise the world.
- 19:13SPEAKER_00: This has been your daily download, and I'm Connor with Honor.
- 19:16SPEAKER_00: We will see you in the next one.
- 19:18SPEAKER_00: Thanks for watching.