Nonprofit AI: We have agency, Anthropic-Pentagon news updates

In this Nonprofit AI Podcast midweek check-in, Carolyn explores what it means to have agency in the age of AI. With so much pressure to adopt new tools, it can feel like nonprofits have no choice — but Carolyn makes the case that you and your organization have more power than you think, both in the tools you choose and the advocacy you pursue.

The conversation covers the environmental and community impacts of AI infrastructure, and what nonprofits can actually do about it. Carolyn discusses:

• Why individual AI use matter less than local and collective advocacy around data center regulation.
• Advocacy looks different in different locations where data centers are going in at a furious pace. Water issues? Electricity costs? Sites? Your advocacy should be local too. 
• The community impacts of data center siting are complex — Carolyn gave just one example of institutional racism and the displacement over time of historic Black landowners in Northern Virginia.
• Creative policy models from Europe that nonprofits can advocate for in their own communities.
• You can align your AI tool choices with your organization's values — and why that matters.
• An update on Anthropic's lawsuit against the Department of Defense over its supply chain risk designation.

As AI infrastructure expands so quickly, Carolyn encourages nonprofits to stay engaged — using AI intentionally while advocating for the communities and values they serve.

Resources Mentioned:

• Webinar: AI Reluctance for Nonprofits, Josh Peskay and Kim Snyder, Meet the Moment: https://www.roundtabletechnology.com/news-and-events/webinar-library/thank-you/ai-resistance-for-nonprofits
• TechSoup AI Training: https://techsoup.course.tc/catalog/exploring-ai-with-microsoft-tools
• Anthropic vs the Pentagon to date: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/09/anthropic-sues-defense-department-over-supply-chain-risk-designation/
• https://www.npr.org/2026/03/09/nx-s1-5742548/anthropic-pentagon-lawsuit-amodai-hegseth

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• Register to attend a webinar in real time, and find all past transcripts at https://communityit.com/webinars/
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• on LinkedIn 
• on reddit/r/nonprofitITmanagement
• on the Community IT website

Thanks for listening. 

Transcript

Carolyn Woodard 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Community IT Innovators Nonprofit AI podcast midweek Check-in. I am Carolyn Woodard, your host, and I'm going to start again as I always do with I'm not an AI expert, but I am very curious and interested in AI, and I have worked in nonprofits for a very long time. So I wanted to uh keep sharing stories and questions and answers and um concerns and maybe some advice and tips with the nonprofit community. So

Carolyn Woodard 0:34

Today I wanted to talk a little bit about agency. And um I have been at,

Carolyn Woodard 0:40

I feel like I always start out these uh podcasts with, I went to this webinar last week, but I did go to this very interesting webinar last week. And that's kind of what nonprofits do, right? Is we have a lot of webinars, we share knowledge a lot. If there's something new that's not even just trendy, but just a huge big thing that's happening, there'll be a lot of nonprofit webinars about it with people talking about it, uh thinking about it, sharing their thoughts, sharing tips and advice and uh, you know, legal information and historical information and all kinds of different takes on whatever the hot take is. So uh I don't feel bad about reporting back to you on uh webinars that I've gone to. I go to them, so you don't have to, but um,

Carolyn Woodard 1:26

I was at this webinar that was led by uh Josh Peskay and Kim Snyder, who is the team that does the AI training for TechSoup. So if you've gone through that training, you know them. Uh they have a company that they formed called Meet the Moment, which is about AI consulting right now for nonprofits. They both have long nonprofit IT history and contributions and real thought leaders. Uh they're definitely uh AI proponents. They're early adopters, they are not, I wouldn't say full-on cheerleaders, but they are definitely um pro using AI and learning about how to use AI, uh, obviously. And

Carolyn Woodard 2:10

This webinar last week was on AI reluctance and barriers. And they went through 12 different hesitations that you, your organization, your staff, individuals might feel about AI and the ways to answer those concerns. And

Carolyn Woodard 2:29

I also went to an event last week where the same questions were coming up about the environmental impact, particularly, uh, and otherwise, that nonprofits that are working on in certain sectors may feel kind of additional queasiness about using these tools that may be causing harm to a community that they feel strongly about. And so the woman who worked for an environmental organization said, you know, how can we feel good about using this tool that has such an environmental impact when we are supposed to be working to advocate for the environment and for protecting the environment, which is a very, you know, core question. So

Carolyn Woodard 3:14

I just wanted to kind of revisit that and um and convey to you that one of the things that someone said at that webinar that I just thought was very impactful was that you have agency. There are a lot of questions coming at you. There's a lot of issues with AI as a tool that are coming at you. It can feel like you're being swept away in the flood and you just have to use it. Um, but that's not always true. But

Carolyn Woodard 3:43

It is something that, you know, being in nonprofits, we give a lot of thought to. And

Carolyn Woodard 3:48

One of the things you can think about is your individual agency. And so someone pointed out in this webinar that if you vote for and get involved in your local politics, the zoning board, the board of supervisors, your county-elected officials, your state-elected officials, the people who are regulating the data centers, even a single vote, but definitely advocacy around this important issue to you at that level will have a lot more impact than deciding not to use AI a couple of times a day. Because it has a more direct impact, right?

Carolyn Woodard 4:28

Your people, a lot of other people are using AI, the companies are invested in it, they're building these data centers. And right now is the moment where communities can make a difference in those regulations and can, you know, argue for more community involvement, more protection of the environment, understanding the impact of the energy use and even where they are sited and how they are built. So

Carolyn Woodard 4:58

Your individual choice to use or not use a chat bot is not as impactful as a collective work to engage with those kinds of regulations. Um

Carolyn Woodard 5:11

I can talk a little bit about Northern Virginia, as I have mentioned before, this is where I live. And it's interesting to me that the environmental impacts come out the most commonly, and it is certainly fine that people have concerns about the environment. And just

Carolyn Woodard 5:32

Going back a little bit to taking action and doing advocacy, one thing is that you're the issues that are most relevant and most important to you in the data centers that are the backbone of this tool that we're using are going to be so different from location to location. So your water concerns might be huge in areas that are experiencing droughts and might not be as important for places where there is a lot of water. And maybe where the electricity lines are going, if they can bury, be buried, or their overhead lines, or the amount that the electricity bills are going up and the impact that has on low-income people, that might be really relevant and important to your nonprofit or to you yourself, where it might not have as strong an impact in other communities. So that's what I'm saying. Like your advocacy will be different in different places.

Carolyn Woodard 6:28

But for me in Northern Virginia, we are the data center alley right now. We have, I think it's something that over 70% of the data centers in the United States. We are the largest data center corridor in the world right now. I mean, I'm sure that'll change, but at the moment, that's what we're looking at. And it does have environmental impacts. But

Carolyn Woodard 6:49

I just want to kind of walk you through the community impacts that it has as well that you can think about in your own situation. Northern rural Virginia, after the Civil War, a little bit before the Civil War, but it's certainly after the Civil War, freed, previously enslaved people were able to purchase land. They had to be paid for their labor, they could save money and they could buy land, build houses, have farms, uh, all that sort of thing.

Carolyn Woodard 7:18

You can imagine in the structure, the power structure at that time, most of the land that they were allowed to purchase was the less desirable land. It needed to be close to cities, close to the large estates. Um, and in some cases, people bought, you know, hundreds of acres, and that was fine, but usually it was more, you know, less desirable planting land. So it might have been woods that were hard to clear, it might be swampy. Um, and a lot of that land,

Carolyn Woodard 7:46

there are still places in Northern Virginia where there are communities and homes that are owned now by the great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren of the original purchasers. So these are very strong communities, even if they were kept in these um less desirable places, and they couldn't sell that land for very much over the years. And then

Carolyn Woodard 8:10

fast forward to the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, a lot of highways came through these rural areas and they needed to go around the villages, around the cities. And a lot of times they would take land by eminent domain in these black communities or in these areas that were owned largely by people that were more on the margin. And that was partially because the power structure made sure that their estates weren't impacted by these uh highways, and the people in these um black communities often had less power to resist uh the highways coming through in the eminent domain.

Carolyn Woodard 8:53

So fast forward again, and there's still a lot of strong, vibrant communities next to highway interchanges, and now in 2025, 2026, that's where it makes sense in a lot of ways to cite these data centers. And so the landowners, you know, sometimes they're looking at millions of dollars an acre, which is great, but it is again having this impact of displacing people who are already displaced uh several times. So it's complicated. I'm not saying that you know the landowners don't want to sell because of course they do, often they do.

Carolyn Woodard 9:28

It's very difficult and complicated because it does make sense. You already have the electric lines running along the highways for the most part. This land was, you know, it's right next to clover leafs and interchanges. People don't want to build townhouses there. So it does make sense in some ways to put the data centers there. It's just a complicated uh question. In some cases, in Northern Virginia, we have, you know, unmarked graves and graveyards that need to be moved so that the data center can be built. So I just

Carolyn Woodard 9:58

I'm urging everyone to think about the um the community impacts in terms of the community, in addition to thinking about the environmental impacts.

Carolyn Woodard 10:08

And all of this is to say it's not a done deal. Like there, if we have input into these decisions, in Europe, I read an article a couple weeks ago about requiring data centers to be built underground because they have the natural cooling. It's more expensive to put them in caves or build uh underground, but they have that natural cooling ability from the geothermal. So it makes a lot of sense. It saves electricity needed to cool them. Uh, they also,

Carolyn Woodard 10:40

I think in some places, I think I read in Holland they require that they have solar panels on top of where the data centers are. Uh I don't know that the that the solar power can run the data center because of their energy needs, but maybe they're using that solar power for the community around them to offset the energy increases from the electricity that's being used for the data center.

Carolyn Woodard 11:02

So there's lots of creative, uh, exciting ideas out there. Uh so we know that nonprofits are great at coming up with these amazing alternatives and seeing the opportunities and advocating for the issues that are important to us.

Carolyn Woodard 11:16

So I would say it may be a both and situation that you can use the AI tools to get these productivity gains, to maybe do your mission of your nonprofit in a new and interesting way, a more effective way, a way that wasn't open to you before because you didn't have the manpower, but now you can crunch these numbers really quickly and you know, maybe work in neighborhoods that uh show up in your research that you do with an AI tool that you didn't have the personnel to do the research before. So it's just there's a lot of opportunity out there from using AI. Um,

Carolyn Woodard 11:53

and maybe you can use AI to help you write the grant to get the money to advocate for the environment to stop the data center that's going into your community that's going to take up too much water. You know, there's there's all kinds of, I guess that's circular, um, circular reasoning or or circular planning, but there's there's a lot of opportunity.

Carolyn Woodard 12:14

We talk a lot about making sure that your policies on AI use align with your values as an organization. And that's something to just keep talking, keep iterating, um, keep doing the advocacy that you do, applying it internally as well, and maybe seeing where those opportunities are.

Carolyn Woodard 12:33

This isn't an IT issue, right? AI use, AI tools, these giant AI companies, they are land use, equity, civil rights, environment, health, all of these different um aspects that we know nonprofits are really clued into and are thinking about a lot. So

Carolyn Woodard 12:54

don't let that paralyze your AI use. Um, but you know, keep in mind this bigger picture, which nonprofits are good at doing, and maybe take some individual or local actions that will have a lot more impact uh on the issues that you're involved in and care about.

Carolyn Woodard 13:11

All right, I have a quick other update, which is the news story that I talked about last week about the Anthropic Pentagon standoff. So last week I talked about the red line that Anthropic had drawn regarding uh the Pentagon, wanted to require Claude, the AI tools, other AI tools from Anthropic as well, uh, to be okay with being used for mass surveillance of American citizens and autonomous weapons, fully autonomous weapons. And Anthropic said no. Uh,

Carolyn Woodard 13:46

the recent developments, if you haven't been following it, uh include some links so you can find out more online. Uh Anthropic has now sued the Department of Defense and other federal agencies in two courts in DC and California, challenging the Pentacon's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk. Uh it seems like, from what I've read, I'm not a lawyer, um, but from what I've read, it seems like they have a pretty strong case in that that uh supply chain risk designation usually has to be associated with a foreign government and foreign actions. So uh it may just be, you know, kind of revenge, and in that case, they would have a good standing for this lawsuit. Um

Carolyn Woodard 14:31

in addition to that, I think I did mention last week that they are uh Claude is adding a million new users daily uh since this started. And some of this is uh surge from individuals who are downloading the freemium tools. A lot of people are downloading the paid tools. It has reached the number one spot on the Apple App Store for downloads.

Carolyn Woodard 14:58

I myself had been thinking about using Claude. It has a lot of different um tools that it can connect up to, specific for nonprofits. So I've started using it. I'm very impressed with it so far. I did get the paid version, as we talk about. Make sure you get the paid version so you're um not on the menu, you're at the table, and you have those enterprise protections. I'll report back to you on what I learned about the different aspects of Claude and uh nonprofits.

Carolyn Woodard 15:29

It seems to indicate that there's an ethical migration of people who are going to prefer a tool that has stronger ethics and takes a stand versus tools like OpenAI immediately said, Oh, sure, we'll we'll help out the Pentagon. And they seem to have been losing some customers because of that.

Carolyn Woodard 15:49

It is complex, so it probably isn't an either-or choice. Uh, you can use AI to write grants, and you can still be a fierce advocate for regulating data centers, for uh standing up for your values and the tools that you'll use, for you know, using a tool that uh reflects your the values of your organization uh as much as you can.

Carolyn Woodard 16:14

You can take action locally. I mean, we always say act locally, but um this is one of those issues where data centers are a local issue. So if you're concerned about environmental impacts, community impacts, electricity costs on low-income people, water usage, all of these issues that are tied up in this, the furious pace at which they are building uh data centers, then you know maybe take a look around and see where you can act locally.

Carolyn Woodard 16:46

Go to a zoning board meeting. Uh there are probably local organizations that are working around these issues, land use, environment, and zoning. So you can go to one of their meetings and learn what they're doing and how you can contribute.

Carolyn Woodard 17:03

You can also advocate for sector-wide advocacy. So, as nonprofits, we have collective voice. There are organizations that work nationally on behalf of nonprofits to advocate for uh ethical use of tools, to advocate for regulation, to advocate for the environment. So you can take action in that way too.

Carolyn Woodard 17:27

And of course, ethical vetting. So your choice of a provider is can be aligned with your values as an organization, even if it doesn't solve energy problems on its own, doesn't solve all of the ethical issues that are out there around AI. So

Carolyn Woodard 17:42

I just want to leave you with the thought that AI isn't a force of nature, it isn't a wave that's washing over us, that's just gonna wash us all away. It is industrial choices, capitalism, choices made by people, and you do have agency, and your nonprofit has agency in those choices that you make and in the way the sector is going to develop.

Carolyn Woodard 18:04

The market is gonna respond to the market. So, as you can see from the anthropic Claude story, I mean a lot of it is marketing, but a lot of it is the free market responding to consumers. So that is another way that you have a voice.

Carolyn Woodard 18:20

So I'm gonna leave it there. Uh, you can hear us again in your podcast feed on Friday with our regularly scheduled technology topics podcast, or I will be talking about some more nonprofit AI issues next week on Tuesday. Take care.