Good morning. It's Friday, March 27th, 2026. Here's what's shaping the world of tech and space today.

**Anthropic wins its court fight with the Pentagon.** A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to back off. Judge Rita Lin of the Northern District of California issued a preliminary injunction Thursday, ruling that the Defense Department must rescind its "supply chain risk" designation of Anthropic — a label typically reserved for foreign adversaries. Judge Lin called the ban, quote, "an attempt to cripple Anthropic," and found it likely violated First Amendment protections. The background here: the Pentagon had ordered federal agencies to cut ties with Anthropic after the AI company refused to remove safety guardrails — specifically limits on using Claude for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called the actions "retaliatory and punitive." The White House had characterized Anthropic as a "radical-left, woke company." Yesterday, the court disagreed. Anthropic said in a statement they're "pleased the court agrees we're likely to succeed on the merits." The preliminary injunction stands while litigation continues — but this is a major win for the principle that AI safety commitments don't make you a national security threat.

**David Sacks is out as America's AI czar.** The longtime tech entrepreneur and podcaster confirmed Thursday that his 130-day stint as Donald Trump's special government AI and crypto adviser is over. He's moving to co-chair PCAST — the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — alongside senior White House tech adviser Michael Kratsios. The council's member list reads like a tech billionaire's reunion: Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Marc Andreessen, Lisa Su, and Michael Dell. On paper, it sounds powerful. In practice, PCAST is advisory — it produces reports and recommendations but doesn't set policy. Sacks will be considerably further from the levers of power than he was as czar. The timing is notable. Earlier this month, Sacks went public on his "All In" podcast calling for an exit from the U.S.-backed war with Iran, sketching out worsening scenarios including nuclear risks. Trump responded by telling reporters Sacks hadn't spoken with him about Iran. Draw your own conclusions about the timing of this transition. PCAST will focus on AI, advanced semiconductors, quantum computing, and nuclear power — and Sacks says near-term attention will go to implementing Trump's national AI legislative framework.

**NASA's commercial space station pivot is causing chaos in the industry.** At its "Ignition" event this week, NASA floated a major change to its commercial low-Earth-orbit destination program. Instead of fully independent commercial stations, NASA is now proposing to attach a core module to the existing International Space Station, let commercial operators build out from there, and eventually detach when they're ready. The rationale: NASA says the market for commercial stations isn't developing fast enough and companies lack operational experience. The industry response: not great. Dave Cavossa, head of the Commercial Space Federation — which represents the companies actually building these stations — testified before the House Science Committee Thursday calling NASA's rationale "flawed." He pointed to recent investment and the fact that Starlab Space has fully booked its commercial payload racks. The deeper issue is that companies have been building toward specific milestones and funding models — changing the rules mid-game creates serious uncertainty. NASA's acting associate administrator pushed back, arguing a single-provider model under the current program is "very risky." The fight over what comes after the ISS is very much not settled.

**Congress wants to know exactly how much power AI is burning.** Senators Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren sent a letter Thursday to the U.S. Energy Information Administration asking for mandatory annual reporting from data centers — including a breakdown of energy use between AI computing tasks and general cloud services. They want hourly and peak consumption data, not just annual totals. This follows a separate move Wednesday, where Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed legislation that would halt new data center construction entirely until Congress can agree on regulation. The backdrop: Google's data center energy use doubled between 2020 and 2024. By 2035, planned new data centers could nearly triple the sector's total energy demand. Whether any of this becomes law is another question, but the political pressure on AI's energy footprint is building fast from both sides of the aisle.

**Y Combinator's Winter 2026 Demo Day wrapped this week, and a few standouts are worth noting.** Nearly 190 startups presented — overwhelmingly AI-focused — but a couple caught the eye. Asimov is collecting human movement video from around the world to build training datasets for humanoid robots, betting that humanoids need to learn the actual flow and elegance of human motion to be useful beyond warehouses. Button Computer, from two former Apple engineers, is a wearable AI device that connects to your email, Slack, and Salesforce and operates them via voice — positioned as the thing everyone's waiting for OpenAI's Jony Ive hardware to deliver, but available now. And ARC Prize Foundation — a nonprofit in a YC batch, which is unusual — is building the benchmarking infrastructure to measure real progress toward AGI, serving as a kind of independent referee for claims that we've already arrived. With Jensen Huang publicly saying AGI is here, having a credible scoreboard matters more than ever.

That's your Friday morning brief. Have a good one.