One of the staples of “Mad Men,” the AMC drama about Madison Avenue advertising in the 1960s, was the season finale where the fortunes of the company seemed to be heading in a dangerous direction, so all the key players get together to create a new firm in the dark of night and leave the old office an empty shell.

It would be fair to argue that the show turned to this ending too often, but even that was for a reason. There’s something very exciting about the cloak-and-dagger secrecy required to pull off such a stunt, and audiences loved it.

Right now would be a good time for Anthropic — the same company that’s been spooking the markets regularly over the past month every time it’s introduced a new AI tool — to plot its own “Mad Men” moment. Except its escape shouldn’t be to a new office in Silicon Valley with a new name. They need to get the hell out of the United States.

Paging Mark Carney … if Canada wants to be taken seriously as a global AI player, here’s your opportunity.

After what happened in Washington today, I don’t know if Anthropic has another choice but to flee the country. Late this afternoon — about an hour and a half before an arbitrary deadline the Department of Defense (ahem, Department of War) placed on Anthropic to agree to its terms and give up the contractual obligation for the Pentagon to preclude widespread domestic surveillance and machine killing from their AI use cases — President Trump got impatient and dropped a bomb on them.

On Truth Social (of course) the President demanded that the Federal Government agencies bar the use of Anthropic AI immediately. Well, not exactly, because Anthropic is basically the only AI in the defense ecosystem right now with access to classified material and it will take six months at least to change that. But we all got the point. Trump was mad! And he let Anthropic have it for being a tool of leftist lunatics.

And, by the way, if the definition of a leftist lunatic is anyone who doesn’t want the Federal Government using AI to spy on us, we may have a new supermajority political ideology in this country soon. But I digress.

As the details trickled out, the news got worse for Anthropic. The President also called for the company to be considered a Supply Chain Risk, which means that federal contractors will need to pledge that they do not use Anthropic. The company is threatening legal action, but the immediate impact of Trump’s ban will hit Anthropic hard. The U.S. federal government is its biggest contract, and the ban from federal contractors will be brutal.

The only plausible solution will be to find a deep pockets country willing to help Anthropic survive the hit while providing an entry point to other governments, and maybe even other national defense offices.

Enter Canada and its ever-aggressive Prime Minister Mark Carney. Here’s an opportunity for Canada to capture a lead position in AI development by taking a safety-first company into its grasp just as President Trump has made clear they aren’t wanted here anymore.

The most difficult part of moving Anthropic to another country would be picking up the company’s talent base from Silicon Valley and moving them to a close enough and appealing locale, keeping its best and brightest employees on the job. And there’s no city that fits that definition better than Vancouver.

Only a two hour flight from San Francisco, Vancouver would be a perfect new home office for the AI “Mad Men” caper to land. If Carney could help secure the office space and solve the immigration headaches, he’d be more than halfway there. Throw in some extra move incentives and some Canadian federal contracts and it could be an offer Anthropic couldn’t refuse.

Canada alone, of course, doesn’t have a large enough economy to make up for the loss of U.S. business. However, getting out from under the thumb of the Trump administration could be just what Anthropic needs to get a foothold in Europe, where the market for AI partners is still wide open and no strong internal European provider has yet emerged.

Vancouver is also an ideal location to reach Pacific markets. Asian companies skittish of the new demands being made on U.S. companies — and equally skeptical of DeepSeek and other Chinese companies — could find a Canadian Anthropic deeply appealing.

Do I have any inside knowledge that this is being considered by anyone? Of course not. I’ve just watched enough “Mad Men” to recognize when a company seems cornered. And if there’s another way out of this mess than the Don Draper solution, I’m really curious to hear what it might be.