Use This Just Don't Let The Robots Kill Anyone

Last week, the US military told Anthropic — the company behind the AI model Claude — to remove all restrictions on how their technology gets used.

Surveillance on civilians. Autonomous weapons. No limits.

Anthropic said no.

The Pentagon’s response? Threaten to blacklist them entirely. Cut them off from every defence contract. Potentially collapse a huge chunk of their enterprise business overnight.

And here’s the bit that matters.

Every single competitor lined up to take their place. OpenAI, Google, xAI — all saying the same thing: “We’ll remove all restrictions. Give us the contract.”

The Pentagon reportedly called the meeting a “shit or get off the pot” conversation.

That’s the moment most people fold.

That’s also the moment your positioning becomes real.

Because it’s easy to have values when no one’s testing them. It’s easy to say “I don’t discount” when no one’s asking you to. It’s easy to say “I don’t do cookie-cutter programmes” when your diary is full and the money’s coming in anyway.

The question is what you do when it gets expensive to be you.

When the client says “just give me the plan.” When someone with half your experience undercuts you by saying yes to everything. When the market seems to reward the people who stand for nothing.

That’s the test. And most coaches haven’t even got to the point where they could be tested — because they’ve never defined what they’d actually defend.

They’ve got a niche. Maybe a colour palette. A Canva template. But no intellectual position worth protecting. No clear idea of what they believe, how they think, or why their approach is different from the 10,000 other coaches saying the same things in the same way.

You can’t defend what you haven’t built.

Anthropic could say no because they’d already decided what they were. Before the pressure came. Before the Pentagon called. Before their competitors started circling. The position existed before the test did.

That’s the part most people skip. They want the confidence of clear positioning without doing the thinking that creates it. They want to “stand for something” but they’ve never sat down and worked out what that something actually is.

So when the test comes — and it always comes — they’ve got nothing to hold onto. They bend. They discount. They dilute. They become another coach saying yes to everything.

Define it first. Then back yourself when it costs you something.

That’s the difference between a brand and a logo.