The Uniform Code of Military Justice serves as the criminal-justice framework for America’s armed forces. It covers offenses recognized by civilian law as well as crimes and infractions unique to the military, from insubordination to cowardly conduct. The code contains 158 articles; the Manual for Courts-Martial itself runs nearly 1,000 pages. It is an obvious truth that discipline, morale, and order can be maintained in military formations only if everyone—from four-star generals to the youngest “boot” privates—is held equally accountable for their actions.

A cursory review of recent courts-martial suggests that the enforcers of military discipline don’t miss much. In December, a Marine private first class was convicted of “contempt or disrespect towards a noncommissioned or petty officer, and disrespect towards a superior commissioned officer in command.” The private was held in confinement for five days and was reduced in rank. In September, an Air Force lieutenant was convicted of engaging in conduct “unbecoming an officer” after drinking on duty and cursing superior officers. He was sentenced to 30 days of confinement and received a presumably career-ending reprimand. In November, a senior airman, a medical specialist, was found guilty of failing to “safeguard protected health information from unauthorized disclosure.” She was sentenced to one month of confinement, and received a temporary pay reduction and a reprimand. Also in September, an Army specialist was convicted of disrespecting a superior by “interrupting her when she was speaking and then walking away,” among other charges. A military judge reduced the specialist’s rank and prevented her from leaving her military facility for 14 days.

Many soldiers are punished for infractions related to the handling of their weapons—the unfortunate Louisiana National Guardsman who recently left his rifle in the bathroom of a hotel bar could face a court-martial. And members of the armed forces are also punished for mishandling information. The military is necessarily unforgiving of those who violate operational security—“loose lips sink ships,” in the age-old shorthand. That is why seemingly quotidian bits of information—the dates and times that units are moving from one base to another, for instance—are held so closely. According to the UCMJ’s Article 92, the punishments for the release of unauthorized information vary, but could include two years’ imprisonment. A unit commander, operations-security guidance states, must “protect from unauthorized disclosure any sensitive and/or critical information to which they have personal access.” In October of last year, a retired Army colonel, Kevin Charles Luke, who was at the time a civilian Department of Defense employee, was found guilty of sending a photo of a classified email to a woman he’d met online. The email contained information about an upcoming military operation. In early February, Luke was sentenced to two years in prison for his crime.

[Read: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans]

It has been almost a year since the national-security scandal that came to be known, inevitably, as Signalgate erupted on my iPhone, and I’ve been thinking through its consequences. Michael Waltz, the official who invited me into a Signal chat group whose members included most of America’s national-security leadership, was removed as the president’s national security adviser. But he soon received (what is to my mind, at least) a promotion, and is now serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The Signal Foundation, the nonprofit organization that owns the messaging app, saw a dramatic increase in usage following the scandal. The Atlantic itself saw an unparalleled burst of subscription growth, and I personally managed to avoid prison and extract a brand-new iPhone from my employer. President Trump suffered no negative consequences from Signalgate. In fact, he found it professionally riveting, carefully studying the way in which The Atlantic temporarily dominated the news cycle. (He also suggested to me, in an Oval Office meeting that took place as the scandal was subsiding, that he should receive more credit for The Atlantic’s success than I have granted him.)

As for Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense who shared what were quite obviously military secrets in a discussion, held on a privately run messaging app, that he didn’t even know included a journalist—well, more on him later.

Allow me to recount, as efficiently as possible, the sequence of implausible events here. On March 11 of last year, I was invited to connect on Signal by a user purporting to be Waltz. Soon after, I was invited to a chat called the “Houthi PC small group.” PC refers to principals committee, which included people identified as Vice President J. D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence.

I am suspicious by profession, and so I assumed that this was an entrapment scheme, or a foreign-intelligence-service operation, or a simulation beyond easy comprehension. But I know Waltz (please keep this fact in mind), and I have reported on national-security matters for decades, so the invitation wasn’t entirely outlandish. (A reasonable guess is that my telephone number can be found—or could be found, before Signalgate—in the contact lists of seven or eight members of the 18-person “small group.”)

The chat itself was highly realistic, and fascinating. I watched as a substantive debate was held over whether the U.S. should immediately launch strikes against Houthi-terrorist targets in Yemen. The vice president, quasi-isolationist in outlook, argued against such strikes, noting that Europe—not his favorite continent—would benefit disproportionately. A little while later, the chat participant identified as Hegseth wrote, “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus,” though he added, “We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should.”

The colloquy came to a sudden end when the user “S M,” whom I took to be the Trump confidant Stephen Miller, wrote, “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return.”

That was that. Hegseth wrote, “Agree,” and the dissident vice president said nothing. And then came the day of the Yemen strikes. At 11:44 a.m. on Saturday, March 15, I was at a supermarket—a Safeway in the Chevy Chase neighborhood of Washington, D.C.—when the following alert came in over Signal from Hegseth: “TEAM UPDATE.” What followed was information that, had it been seen by an enemy of the United States, could have been used to kill American military and intelligence personnel. Hegseth promised that Yemen would be attacked within two hours.

I’ve seen strange things in my career, but nothing quite like this. I stayed in my car in the Safeway parking lot and waited. I took screenshots of the chat and searched X and other platforms for news of U.S. military activity. Hegseth had said in the chat that the first detonations would be felt at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. At approximately 1:55 p.m., credible news reports started appearing about an attack.

In the chat, congratulations began to pour in. Waltz posted three emoji: a fist, an American flag, and fire. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s all-purpose, in-over-his-head global-conflict negotiator, responded with five emoji: two praying hands, a flexed bicep, and two American flags. Later, the Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people had been killed in the attack (the number has not been confirmed independently). The Houthis are despicable terrorists, and in my opinion should be fought and defeated, but there was still something disturbing about the proliferation of emoji.

Proof that the chat was authentic forced me (and a growing number of advisers, sworn to secrecy) to make a choice. I was interested in exposing a security breach at the highest reaches of government; I was less interested in being accused of violating the Espionage Act. I would thus exit the chat later that same day. The Signal group would be alerted that I had left, so timing was important. That evening was the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club, at which Washington journalists host senior administration officials and members of Congress and make mainly mild fun of them from the stage. I heard that Waltz might be attending. I didn’t want the FBI raiding the dinner to seize my phone, so I waited until the end of the dinner to leave the chat. I spent the next hours awaiting recognition by the federal government that I was an apostate member of the “Houthi PC small group.”

But, nothing.

As a reporter, I was relieved; as a citizen, I was appalled by the violation of the first commandment of digital hygiene: Thou Shalt Know Who Is in Thy Group Chat.

The next week rushed by as we prepared the story for publication. I decided not to include some of the key operational details shared by Hegseth, Waltz, and Ratcliffe, the CIA director. I wanted to expose their incompetence without releasing information that could hurt American troops. Early on Monday, March 24, I wrote to Waltz and Hegseth on Signal (of course) and then others by email, asking for confirmation and comment. I would learn that my requests set off a scramble in the White House. The National Security Council called an emergency meeting in the Situation Room, where the mood, as participants later described it to me, was one of incredulousness and anger. According to people who participated in the meeting, Alex Wong, who was then the principal deputy national security adviser, briefed officials, but he didn’t have much information. The White House counsel, David Warrington, asked, slowly and repeatedly, “How. Did. This. Happen?”

To their credit, White House officials quickly responded to me and confirmed the authenticity of the chat, and we published our story. These officials publicly argued that nothing secret or sensitive had been disclosed in the chat, which was nonsense, though their argument was helped by my decision to keep actual operational details out of the story. It was my word against theirs.

There were two main worries in the White House that morning. The first: Who would tell the president? It is my understanding that Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, instructed Waltz to tell Trump. (Wiles, we would later learn, disliked Waltz, who treated her poorly.) The second worry was that Hegseth, who was then flying to Hawaii aboard the Pentagon’s “Doomsday” plane, would be unable to muster a mature reaction to the story. Over the course of the day, officials spoke with him and texted him repeatedly while he was in the air, pleading with him to respond to questions by saying only that no classified information had been disclosed.

Temperament is destiny, and Hegseth responded frantically and defensively. “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again,” he told reporters when he landed. He was referring to my reporting, in 2020 and in 2024, that Trump had made various contemptible comments about American troops, including that soldiers who fell in war were “suckers” and “losers,” and that Trump had also said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” (Multiple sources confirmed that Trump had made these comments, including John Kelly, a former White House chief of staff and a retired Marine general.)

Waltz also responded in a juvenile manner, telling Fox News the next day that I am “the bottom scum of journalists. And I know him in the sense that he hates the president, but I don’t text him. He wasn’t on my phone, and we’re going to figure out how this happened.” Waltz went on to say, “Of course I didn’t see this loser in the group.” (I believe this is what is known as “projection.”) And he made a comment that provided material for a week’s worth of late-night comedy. In explaining how I may have been added to the chat, he said, “Well, if you have somebody else’s contact, then somehow it … gets sucked in. It gets sucked in.” (I recently learned that Wiles ordered Waltz to turn his phone over to Elon Musk—at the time a kind of one-man Genius Bar for White House officials—who reported back to Wiles that my phone number did not get “sucked in” to Waltz’s phone.) Waltz also denied ever having met me, which is not true.

The ad hominem campaign by Waltz, Hegseth, Gabbard, the CIA, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, combined with the assertion that no classified information had been included in the chat, presented me with a dilemma. I knew, of course, that the information I’d seen on my phone would ordinarily be judged top secret by the military, and I knew that the White House lies were meant to undercut the credibility of this magazine. I simply could not understand why the administration was goading me into releasing the full message chain, which would show that I was correct in stating that the information was highly secret.

We devised a plan: My colleague Shane Harris, who covers the intelligence community, and I would speak with leaders of the relevant government agencies and ask them if they objected to the publication of the rest of the messages. This written statement, from Leavitt, illustrates the sophistication of the administration’s response: “As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat,” she wrote. “However, as the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation. This was intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed. So for those reason [sic]—yes, we object to the release.”

[Read: Here are the attack plans that Trump’s sdvisers shared on Signal]

We published a follow-up story and included the operational messages from Hegseth and Waltz. Here is the key text from Hegseth: “TIME NOW (1144et): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch.” Centcom, or Central Command, is the military’s combatant command for the Middle East. He continued:

“1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”

“1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME)—also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”

“1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”

“1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”

“1536: F-18 2nd Strike Starts—also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”

“MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline)”

“We are currently clean on OPSEC.”

“Godspeed to our Warriors.”

It would have been more accurate to have written, “We are currently clean on OPSEC, except that I’m sending this information to the editor of The Atlantic.” To honestly believe that this information was not secret would require Hegseth to achieve Olympian levels of self-deception.

As all of this was happening, I was receiving messages from various military officials expressing disdain and anger that Hegseth refused to take responsibility. None of them went public with their outrage, however.

Other people did, including a modest number of Republicans. Senator Roger Wicker, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters, “The information as published recently appears to me to be of such a sensitive nature that, based on my knowledge, I would have wanted it classified.” Wicker and his Democratic counterpart, Senator Jack Reed, asked for a Pentagon investigation. I doubted that this would occur, because the administration was dismantling the inspector-general system across the federal government. But an investigation was soon said to be under way.

Only two administration figures did not seem especially alarmed or defensive during the controversy. The first was the vice president, who, we would later learn, made one final joking addition to the “Houthi PC small group” chain late on the night after my first story appeared: “This chat’s kind of dead,” he wrote. “Anything going on?”

The other was the president himself.

I was worried that the Signal story would complicate already complicated efforts by my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer to get an interview with Trump. But instead—and this was somewhat predictable to those of us who have paid close attention to Trump over the years—he not only granted them an interview, but invited me to participate. He could not resist the temptation to troll us along the way, however. Three hours before our scheduled visit to the Oval Office, he posted the following message on Truth Social:

Later today I will be meeting with, of all people, Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor of The Atlantic, and the person responsible for many fictional stories about me, including the made-up HOAX on “Suckers and Losers” and, SignalGate, something he was somewhat more “successful” with. Jeffrey is bringing with him Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker, not exactly pro-Trump writers, either, to put it mildly! The story they are writing, they have told my representatives, will be entitled, “The Most Consequential President of this Century.” I am doing this interview out of curiosity, and as a competition with myself, just to see if it’s possible for The Atlantic to be “truthful.” Are they capable of writing a fair story on “TRUMP”? The way I look at it, what can be so bad—I WON!

When we entered the Oval Office, Trump said, “This will be very, very interesting. You think Biden would do this? I don’t think so.”

(He was correct.)

“Thanks for announcing the interview on Truth Social,” I said.

“I wanted to put a little extra pressure on you,” he said. “But at the same time, you’ll sell about five times more magazines.”

I asked him, in the course of the interview, what he meant by “I will be meeting with, of all people, Jeffrey Goldberg.”

“Oh, you like that? I had to do that,” he said. “I had to explain to people. That’s my way of explaining to people that you’re up here, because most people would say, ‘Why are you doing that?’ I’m doing that because there is a certain respect.”

“Are you saying that Signalgate was real?” I asked.

“Yeah, it was real. And I was gonna put in something else, but I didn’t have enough time.” This led me to ask, out of sheer curiosity, “How long does it take you to write these?”

“Not long,” he answered. “I go quickly as hell. You’d be amazed. You’d be impressed. And I like doing them myself. Sometimes I dictate them out, but I like doing them myself. What I’m saying is that it became a big story. You were successful, and it became a big story.”

Me: “But you’re not saying that it was successful in the sense that it exposed an operations-security problem that you have to fix?”

Trump: “No. What I’m saying is, it was successful in that you got it out very much to the public. You were able to get something out. It became a very big story.”

I then asked him directly if there were any other possible lessons to be learned from the Signal breach.

The president answered, “I think we learned: Maybe don’t use Signal, okay?”

[From the June 2025 issue: Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer on Donald Trump’s return to the White House]

Months went by. We heard, again and again, that the Defense Department’s inspector general would investigate, but nothing came of it. Finally, in December, the report was released. It found what had seemed obvious from the outset: that Hegseth’s use of Signal to discuss bombing Yemen could have exposed U.S. tactics and endangered troops.

“The Secretary sent information identifying the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory over an unapproved, unsecure network approximately 2 to 4 hours before the execution of those strikes,” the report reads. “If this information had fallen into the hands of U.S. adversaries, Houthi forces might have been able to counter U.S. forces or reposition personnel and assets to avoid planned U.S. strikes. Even though these events did not ultimately occur, the Secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.”

The report concluded, however, that because the secretary of defense possesses “original classification authority”—meaning he has the power to declassify secrets at will—he wasn’t technically in violation of any rules governing secrecy, only rules banning the use of private messaging apps for official Pentagon business.

Hegseth claimed that the report cleared him of all wrongdoing. “No classified information,” he posted on social media. “Total exoneration. Case closed. Houthis bombed into submission. Thank you for your attention to this IG report.”

He had not always been so forgiving when it came to matters of operational security. In 2016, at the height of the furor concerning Hillary Clinton’s email server, Hegseth, then a Fox News host, said, “How damaging is it to your ability to recruit or build allies with others when they are worried that our leaders may be exposing them because of their gross negligence or their recklessness in handling information?”

The U.S. is now engaged in another bombing campaign, larger and more sustained than the strikes on the Houthis. Every day, hundreds of aviators are ordered into the airspace above Iran. Their lives depend on the operational security that the military’s culture of accountability is designed to safeguard.

The Department of Defense employs nearly 3 million people, uniformed and civilian. All are subject to rules and regulations governing many aspects of their behavior. Any one of them would have faced serious consequences for announcing, on an insecure messaging app, that the U.S. was about to send its pilots over enemy territory.

All except one.

*Lead-image sources: Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty; Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call / Getty; Andrew Harnik / AFP / Getty.

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “The Unbearable Lightness of Signalgate.”

In 1825, Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, Written by Himself became the first known fugitive-slave narrative in American history. Although earlier autobiographical accounts of slavery had been published in England, the genre wouldn’t fully flourish in the United States until the antislavery movement of the 1830s to 1860s, when such narratives became powerful tools of moral persuasion, exposing the brutality of bondage while asserting the writer’s humanity, intellect, and will. William Grimes wrote before that moment, introducing a distinctly American voice shaped by the horrors of enslavement in the South and the precariousness of freedom in the North. What he published was more than a memoir—it was an indictment of the contradictions that had been central to the American experiment since the Revolution itself.

For 30 years, I have been researching the life and legacy of Grimes, who was my third great-grandfather. In May 2024, during my final week as a research fellow at Yale’s Beinecke Library, I made a trip to the Boston Athenaeum to see a copy of his book that had been housed there since 1849 and remained unexamined by scholars for 175 years. This copy, I’d learned, had been addressed to President John Quincy Adams. I had no way of knowing whether the sixth president had read Grimes’s narrative. But discovering the fact that Grimes had wanted him to see it moved me in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

Grimes’s story opens with bitter irony:

I was born in the year 1784 in J_____, County of King George, Virginia, in a land boasting its freedom and under a government whose motto is Liberty and Equality. I was yet born a slave.

“In all the Slave States,” Grimes wrote, “the children follow the condition of their mother.” Though his father, Benjamin Grymes Jr., was a wealthy white Virginia planter, William remained enslaved like his mother—legally the property of a man he calls Dr. Stuart, Grymes’s neighbor. He recalled carrying newspapers to his father, who would speak and laugh with him and send him to the kitchen for something to eat. Whatever endearment young William may have felt, Benjamin Grymes neither owned, purchased, nor freed his enslaved son.

[Read: A 168-year-old question still worth asking]

At 10 years old, William was sold by Dr. Stuart to Colonel William Thornton, his brother-in-law, and sent to a distant plantation in what is now Rappahannock County. He grew up, as he later wrote, friendless and motherless, shaped early by violence and hunger. Inside the house, the head servant and seamstress sabotaged him to advance her own child; in the fields, overseers beat him for the slightest offense. When he was 12 or 13, he ran away to escape a brutal overseer, hiding in a hollow log for three days until he gave himself up, deciding that he “might as well be whipped to death as to starve.” Hardened by slavery, he grew up defiant.

He later implied that he could not be governed in the way that slavery was intended, writing that he had “too much sense and feeling to be a slave.” He said that he carried “too much of the blood of my father,” a former “Life Guard” to George Washington, “whose spirit feared nothing.” Over time, Grimes passed through the hands of 10 enslavers—from Dr. Stuart to Colonel Thornton and two of his sons, then to six interconnected businessmen in Savannah, Georgia.

In 1815, opportunity—not planning—opened a path to freedom. Left to hire out his time while his enslaver vacationed in Bermuda, Grimes went to the Savannah harbor seeking work. With discreet help from Black “Yankee” sailors who befriended him, he hid among cotton bales in the hold of a brig called the Casket as it set course for Quarantine Ground, off Staten Island. Evading inspection, the sailors helped him reach a packet boat bound for New York City. From there, Grimes walked some 80 miles to New Haven, Connecticut.  

For nearly a decade, he lived in the shadows—always vigilant, always at risk, yet determined to build a life. He was a servant at Yale College; he cut hair, and eventually established a barbering business in Litchfield; bought property; married Clarissa Caesar; and started a family. Barbering—a Black man’s trade—gave him access to learned men: Yale students, legal minds at Tapping Reeve’s law school in Litchfield, and political leaders, including Connecticut Governor Oliver Wolcott Jr.

Grimes moved regularly through spaces where ideas circulated and power was shaped. All the while, he lived with the knowledge that his freedom could be revoked at any moment. In September 1823, that fear became reality when his former enslaver F. H. Welman, aided by Savannah business partners, located him. Facing the prospect of seizure and return to the South, Grimes offered his small, debt-burdened house—the extent of his property—to remain with his wife and children.

Negotiations stretched across Connecticut, Georgia, New York, and the District of Columbia. Welman valued Grimes at $800 but agreed to accept $500. Yet even that reduced sum was beyond Grimes’s immediate reach.

Letters preserved at the Litchfield Historical Society point to an initial arrangement born of necessity: a down payment, likely from the sale of his home, followed by installments extending nearly a year. The final terms under which Grimes succeeded in purchasing his own body remain unknown, although it is certain that he lost his home in the process. Until the final payment was made, his freedom was provisional; re-enslavement was an ever-present threat.

At the Athenaeum, I was led to a reading table and handed Tracts Volume IV—a bound collection of pamphlets once owned by President John Quincy Adams and donated to the library in 1849 by his son Charles Francis Adams. Inside were sermons, political tracts, and educational booklets. Then I saw it. A small handwritten note lay tucked inside Life of William Grimes, resting directly atop the title page. The penmanship was confident, self-assured; the signature unmistakable: Wm. Grimes. A dark inkblot marked the note—his hand on the page two centuries ago:

Relying on your Excellency’s generosity, the Author presents this pamphlet to the President of the United States, Stamford, CT; May 15, 1826. Wm. Grimes.

To understand the full weight of that ink, I needed to understand what had led up to this moment.

In 1824, the celebrated French aristocrat General Lafayette—a hero of the American Revolution—returned to the United States at President James Monroe’s invitation for a sweeping farewell tour designed to rekindle patriotic devotion in a new generation. Wherever Lafayette traveled, parades and speeches proclaimed the United States the world’s beacon of liberty. On August 12, the general was greeted in New Haven with patriotic fervor. Governor Wolcott was there to welcome him.

Whether or not Grimes, the governor’s barber, attended the festivities himself, he was close enough to the celebrations to feel the pride of liberty collide with his reality as he worked toward purchasing his own freedom. We cannot know precisely when he began writing, but his book’s preface is dated October 1, 1824, less than two months after Lafayette’s visit. By January 1825, Grimes had deposited the completed manuscript with the clerk of the District of Connecticut.  

Two months later, on March 4, 1825, the newly inaugurated President John Quincy Adams made reference to a national “jubilee” to mark the 50th anniversary of the formation of the United States. His speech read like a progress report on the republic’s first half century. Regarding slavery, however, Adams balanced his own antislavery convictions against the proslavery stance of his vice president, John C. Calhoun. The new president trod carefully, acknowledging only obliquely the legal end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808.

[Read: Frederick Douglass, refugee]

Grimes surely would have read Adams’s inaugural speech. He understood well that the written word was power—that books and newspapers shaped public thought and conferred authority. His life reveals how charged literacy was in the world he navigated. As a teenager, he was brutally beaten for carving letters into an outdoor oven while the mortar was still wet. In Savannah, he was hired out to the family of P. D. Woolhopter, a co-founder of Savannah’s Columbian Museum, a Federalist newspaper. As a fugitive in New Haven, he boldly advertised his barbering business in the Connecticut Herald. And in early August 1825, he placed an ad for his book, addressed “To the Public,” in the Connecticut Journal, printing the gripping preface in full. His advertisement ended with a drumbeat: “For sale at the Bookstores in this city.” In 1825, for a formerly enslaved man to publicly claim authorship and sell his book in white-owned bookstores was to plant a flag of freedom in hostile ground. It declared: I am here. I will not be hidden or silenced.

In the context of the approaching national milestone—before parades, fireworks, and soaring speeches saluted the nation’s 50th anniversary—Grimes’s decision to send the book to Adams with a formal note seemed like a carefully aimed stone at the glass of America’s triumphal story. When I returned to the opening line of his narrative, I saw it differently—what once appeared to be a simple beginning now commanded deeper scrutiny: I was born in the year 1784 in J_____.

For years, I’d assumed the J stood for a place. But what if it meant January? On January 14, 1784, the Treaty of Paris was ratified—the nation’s first legal breath of freedom. Grimes later admitted that he could not tell his wife his true age; most enslaved people never knew their birth year, let alone their full date of birth. What if, by tying himself to the historic month of January 1784, he had been deliberately aligning his life with the birth of the republic? Was this part of the message he wanted the president to absorb?

The pages that followed Grimes’s polite presidential dedication—Relying on your Excellency’s generosity—shattered any veneer of civility, exposing the reality of Grimes’s life as an enslaved man from the South and the fragility of survival in the so-called free North. Grimes’s narrative is raw and unsparing, laying bare not only relentless physical violence but also psychological trauma with no time or refuge to heal. He closes his book with a passage that strips jubilee rhetoric of all deception:

If it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave, I would in my will leave my skin as a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment, and then bind the constitution of glorious, happy and free America. Let the skin of an American slave bind the charter of American Liberty!

If Adams read those words in 1826, he would have encountered a direct challenge to his own language of triumph. Adams, a man who believed in moral law but often deferred action, would have been forced to confront slavery not as a distant policy problem but as a constitutional failure written in human flesh. Perhaps, I imagined, Grimes’s words had managed, however fleetingly, to expose the gulf between the nation’s self-congratulation at 50 years and the violence required to sustain its freedom.

[Read: ‘Come out and see the stars’]

Adams would later begin to challenge that contradiction more openly. By the late 1830s, freed from presidential constraint, he was battling the congressional gag rule that sought to silence any mention of slavery, and in 1841 he stood before the Supreme Court to defend the Amistad captives and insist on their right to freedom.

We will likely never know whether Adams read Grimes’s book. But it was not discarded. It was passed on to his son, and it was trimmed and bound, preserved. Something in it had mattered—and still does today.

​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Dear Lord. And the description of Traverse City…

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Earlier this week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sat down with Dario Amodei, the CEO of the leading AI firm Anthropic, for a conversation about ethics. The Pentagon had been using the company’s flagship product, Claude, for months as part of a $200 million contract—the AI had even reportedly played a role in the January mission to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—but Hegseth wasn’t satisfied. There were certain things Claude just wouldn’t do.

That’s because Anthropic had instilled in it certain restrictions. The Pentagon’s version of Claude could not be used to facilitate the mass surveillance of Americans, nor could it be used in fully autonomous weaponry—situations where computers, rather than humans, make the final decision about whom to kill. According to a source familiar with this week’s meeting, Hegseth made clear that if Anthropic did not eliminate those two guardrails by Friday afternoon, two things could happen: The Department of Defense could use the Defense Production Act, a Cold War–era law, to essentially commandeer a more permissive iteration of the AI, or it could label Anthropic a “supply-chain risk,” meaning that anyone doing business with the U.S. military would be forbidden from associating with the company. (This penalty is typically reserved for foreign firms such as China’s Huawei and ZTE.)

This evening, Anthropic said in a public statement that it “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Pentagon’s request. What happens next could mark a crucial moment for the company, and for the American government’s approach to AI regulation more broadly. In refusing to bow to an administration that has been intent on bullying private companies into submission, Amodei and his team are taking a bold stand on ethical grounds, and risking a censure that could erode Anthropic’s long-term viability.

During the first year of Donald Trump’s second term, the White House had a more relaxed attitude toward AI regulation; an AI Action Plan from July stresses that the administration will “continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape” to encourage innovation. Hegseth is now, in effect, threatening to partially nationalize one of the biggest AI players in the private sector—and force the company to go against its own principles. “This is the most aggressive AI regulatory move I have ever seen, by any government anywhere in the world,” Dean Ball, who helped write some of the Trump administration’s AI policies, told me.

The Pentagon has already reportedly been reaching out to other defense contractors to see if they’re connected to Anthropic, a sign that officials are preparing to designate the company a supply-chain risk. Now that Anthropic has defied Hegseth, the contract is likely in peril. The firm doesn’t really need the $200 million—it reportedly pulls in $14 billion a year, and it said it raised $30 billion in venture capital just weeks ago—but being blacklisted could affect its ability to scale up in the future. (“We are not walking away from negotiations,” an Anthropic spokesperson told The Atlantic in a statement. “We continue to engage in good faith with the Department on a way forward.” The Pentagon told CBS on Tuesday that “this has nothing to do with mass surveillance and autonomous weapons being used,” and that ”the Pentagon has only given out lawful orders.”)

As AI firms around the world jockey for dominance, Anthropic has distinguished itself by emphasizing safety. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been criticized for playing up some users’ delusions, leading to cases of “AI psychosis,” and just last month, xAI’s Grok was spinning up nearly nude images of almost anyone without consent. (xAI has said it is restricting Grok from generating these kinds of images, and OpenAI has said it is working to make ChatGPT better support people in distress.) Meanwhile, Anthropic’s consumer-facing chatbot doesn’t generate images at all. By refusing to cave to government pressure, it may have just averted another crisis: a major public backlash from consumers, some of whom see the company as a more principled player in the AI wars. Anthropic recently faced some pushback over changing its policies—Time reported on Tuesday that, in a seemingly unrelated move, the company dropped a core safety pledge concerning its broader approach to AI development.

Weeks before Hegseth issued his ultimatum, Amodei opined on his website about the risks involved with precisely the two guardrails the Pentagon is targeting. “In some cases,” he wrote, “large-scale surveillance with powerful AI, mass propaganda with powerful AI, and certain types of offensive uses of fully autonomous weapons should be considered crimes against humanity.”

The Trump administration doesn’t seem to know what it wants from AI. On one hand, it’s deeply suspicious of certain kinds of models. The White House’s designated AI czar, David Sacks, has criticized Anthropic for “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering,” essentially accusing the firm of pushing for unnecessary, innovation-squashing limitations and jeopardizing the future of American tech. The administration has also criticized AI bots for sometimes spitting out “woke” replies. On the other hand, Claude is apparently valuable enough that it’s on the cusp of being commandeered by the federal government.

Ball told me that the Department of Defense may have a point—that there’s an argument to be made about reining in Silicon Valley’s control over the government’s use of new technologies. Although the concentration of power among the technocratic elite is certainly troubling, Hegseth’s proposed punishments for Anthropic are misguided and plainly contradictory. The Defense Production Act does allow the government to intervene in domestic industries in the interest of national security (the Biden administration invoked it in a 2023 executive order on AI regulation). But is Claude so important for U.S. national security that the government needs to compel Anthropic to create an untethered new version? Or is it so dangerous that it needs to be shunned—not just by the Pentagon, but by any business connected to the military? A third, even-more-bewildering option is also on the table: Hegseth could decide to simultaneously commission a modified Claude and sanction the company that stewards it.

All of this ignores a much simpler solution: Hegseth could just start a partnership with a different firm. It’s a good time for his department to be in business with tech, since the mood of Silicon Valley has lately become much more Pentagon-friendly. Palantir’s Alex Karp has touted that his software is used “to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them”; the technologist and entrepreneur Palmer Luckey is already building autonomous weaponry for the government; and Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism funds are helping funnel the country’s top young minds into defense tech. But rather than look elsewhere, Hegseth is threatening to crush Anthropic—implying that if he can’t control Claude, no one can.

As the defense secretary looks to make an example of the company, he’s taking a cue from Trump, who has used legal and extralegal pressure to effectively force other private businesses, particularly big law firms, banks, and universities, into submission. These acts of coercion have the potential to reshape American capitalism: We are beginning to see a market where winners and losers are decided less by the quality of their products and more by their seeming fealty to the White House. How that will affect the success of businesses and the economy is uncertain.

The Pentagon created this ultimatum precisely because it understands Anthropic’s world-altering potential. The administration just can’t decide if it’s an asset, a liability, or both.

Related:

• The high-stakes fight between Hegseth and Anthropic
• Anthropic is at war with itself.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• The first couple of a dysfunctional DHS
• Trump’s favorite voter-ID bill would probably backfire.
• Adam Serwer: How America chose not to hold the powerful to account

Today’s News

1. A Columbia University student detained this morning by federal immigration agents has been released. The arresting officers reportedly misrepresented themselves as looking for a missing child in order to gain entry to the student’s residential building.
2. Hillary Clinton told the House Oversight Committee that she has no new information about Jeffrey Epstein and maintained that she had no knowledge of his crimes; she criticized congressional Republicans’ handling of the probe as partisan. Bill Clinton is scheduled to give his deposition tomorrow.
3. Cuban forces killed four people and wounded six after firing on a Florida-registered speedboat that Cuban authorities say entered the country’s waters yesterday and opened fire on a patrol vessel. Cuba claims that the U.S.-based passengers were armed and planning a “terrorist” infiltration.

Dispatches

• Time-Travel Thursdays: Misbehaving dogs in the White House have plagued administration after administration, Nicholas Florko writes.

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More From The Atlantic

• Eliot A. Cohen: The degraded State of the Union
• The tariffs loss is paradoxically a win for Trump.
• Well, that didn’t sound like Casey Means.
• Enough with the bros.
• The Democrats who got weird during the State of the Union
• Radio Atlantic: What the Pentagon fears in Iran

Evening Read

This Looks Like an Insider Bet on Aliens

By Ross Andersen

On Monday night, someone placed a peculiar bet on the prediction market Kalshi. At 7:45 p.m. eastern time, a single trader put down nearly $100,000 on the claim that, by the end of December, the Trump administration will confirm that alien life or technology exists elsewhere in our universe. According to The Atlantic’s review of Kalshi’s trading data, about 35 minutes after this bet was executed, it was followed by another that was almost twice as large (possibly from the same person). These were market-moving events: For one brief stretch, the market appeared to think that there was at least a one-in-three chance that the U.S. government will announce the existence of aliens this year. Perhaps this was just some overexcited UFO diehard with a hunch and money to burn. Or maybe, as some observers quickly noted, it was a trader with inside knowledge.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Explore. When did literature get less dirty? A puritan strain is manifesting in realist novels as a marked absence of straight sex, Lily Meyer writes.

Read. Casey Schwartz on two new books that demonstrate how Martha Gellhorn, Janet Flanner, and other female reporters took journalism in directions that men could not.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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As an aging man, one has experiences. However, there are some things that man should not know and one of them is three feet of snow in front of your house.

I went to bed last night about 11. It was snowing a little bit. As of 1 PM, the Providence airport (and I live about 2 miles from there so it’s always going to be very close to accurate for me) had 32.8 inches of snow. The old record, in the infamous Blizzard of 78, was 28.6 inches. That’s just shattering the record. We’ve definitely had a couple of inches since then so the final total is going to be right around 3 feet. It’s a hell of a thing.

I guess I’ve adjusted to being a New Englander because my wife and I went out and dug the whole thing out already too.

Anyway, hope your snow experiences have been less extreme!

The post Snowocalypse appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.