By David Fear Perhaps you’ve been reading what passes for the news over the last week or so: The government wants the machines to take over, they will soon have control of U.S. military operations, and we’re all going to die. We’ll take a few steps back. The tech company Anthropic, best known as the “frontier lab” behind the kinder, friendlier, far-less-likely-to-spew-racist-garbage chatbot Claude, is currently engaged in a fight with the Department of Defense. There are, shall we say, some differences of opinion over how the current administration could — and should — use Anthropic’s A.I. system. Specifically, CEO Dario Amodei is wringing his hands over the potential lack of guardrails once the system is handed over. Amodei released a statement in which he noted that the company, which has a contract with the U.S.…