Silicon valley courts trump at hill & valley while anthropic battles the pentagon
The same morning Anthropic lawyers walk into a federal courthouse to sue the Pentagon for labeling it a supply-chain risk, 200 tech barons will sip coffee three miles away at the Hill & Valley Forum, praying the Administration forgets the lawsuit and remembers their checks.
Jamie dimon, shyam sankar and brad lightcap headline the 2026 edition
JP Morgan’s CEO, Palantir’s CTO and OpenAI’s COO share the stage today in an auditorium packed with venture partners, three-star generals and Trump donors who paid $15,000 per plate. Organizer Christian Garrett frames the gathering as “a bridge between innovation and national security,” but the subtext is simpler: keep Beijing behind, keep regulators tame, keep the subsidies flowing.
Trump’s first 100 days have turned AI acceleration into a doctrinal pillar. A leaked draft of the forthcoming executive order demands federal pre-emption over state privacy laws, streamlines environmental permits for 500 MW data-center campuses, and tasks the Department of Energy with guaranteeing cut-rate power to hyperscalers. The quid pro quo is explicit: cloud giants must source “a significant share” of that electricity from domestic natural gas and small-modular reactors, a gift to the fossil lobby wrapped in the language of energy independence.
Silicon Valley has learned to speak that dialect fast. Microsoft and Google executives left the Oval Office last week pledging to self-fund on-site reactors; Friday’s dinner at the White House residence saw Elon Musk hand the President a Starlink terminal painted gold. The optics feel like 2020 in reverse—big tech once recoiled from Trump; now it rents him.
Anthropic’s courtroom clash threatens the lovefest
The Pentagon’s January memo classified Anthropic as “high risk” because its constitutional AI guardrails could slow battlefield deployments. The clause is tiny—one paragraph on page 47—but it weaponizes procurement rules against any contractor that refuses to waive safety reviews. If upheld, the precedent would push Defense projects toward less cautious vendors, a chilling signal to the rest of the valley.
Investors are already skittish. Wall Street poured $198 billion into AI infra last year; this quarter’s capex guidance dropped 11 % as analysts question when the revenue catches up. Add rising public anger over soaring utility bills—Georgia residents face a 17 % surcharge to subsidize Meta’s new campus—and the mood inside the conference veers from triumphalist to survivalist.
Garrett insists Hill & Valley is “policy-agnostic,” yet the agenda omits panel titles like ethics, bias or labor displacement. Instead, sessions promise “Scaling to AGI without Regulatory Friction” and “Export Controls as Competitive Advantage.” Translation: how to keep chips at home and eyes elsewhere.
Trump will not attend; he dispatches surrogates Larry Kudlow and newly confirmed AI czar Lynne Parker to collect the applause. But the President’s shadow hovers in every hallway conversation about the mid-terms. Eighteen months from now 33 Senate seats flip, and tech money wants insurance early.
By dusk the lobby will reek of Cabernet and paranoia. Anthropic’s general counsel will either have a temporary restraining order in his briefcase or a contingency plan to offshore its frontier model training. Either way, the valley’s gold keeps flowing uphill toward Washington, one donor dinner at a time.