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The trap Anthropic built for itself
Friday afternoon, just as this interview was getting underway, a news alert flashed across my computer screen: the Trump administration was severing ties with Anthropic, the San Francisco AI company founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had invoked anational security lawto blacklist the company from doing business with the Pentagon after Amodei refused to allow Anthropic’s tech to be used for mass surveillance of U.S. citizens or for autonomous armed drones that could select and kill targets without human input. It was a jaw-dropping sequence. Anthropic stands to lose a contract worth up to $200 million and will be barred from working with other defense contractors after President Trump posted on Truth Social directing every federal agency to “immediately cease all use of Anthropic technology.” (Anthropic has since said it willchallenge the Pentagon in court.) Max Tegmark has spent the better part of a decade warning that the race to build ever-more-powerful AI systems is outpacing the world’s ability to govern them. The MIT physicist founded theFuture of Life Institutein 2014 and helped organize anopen letter— ultimately signed by more than 33,000 people, including Elon Musk — calling for a pause in advanced AI development. His view of the Anthropic crisis is unsparing: the company, like its rivals, has sown the seeds of its own predicament. Tegmark’s argument doesn’t begin with the Pentagon but with a decision made years earlier — a choice, shared across the industry, to resist binding regulation. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and others have long promised to govern themselves responsibly. Anthropic this week even dropped thecentral tenet of its own safety pledge— its promise not to release increasingly powerful AI systems until the company was confident they wouldn’t cause harm. Now, in the absence of rules, there’s not a lot to protect these players, says Tegmark. Here’s more from that interview, edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full conversation this coming week on TechCrunch’sStrictlyVC Downloadpodcast. When you saw this news just now about Anthropic, what was your first reaction? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It’s so interesting to think back a decade ago, when people were so excited about how we were going to make artificial intelligence to cure cancer, to grow the prosperity in America and make America strong. And here we are now where the U.S. government is pissed off at this company for not wanting AI to be used for domestic mass surveillance of Americans, and also not wanting to have killer robots that can autonomously — without any human input at all — decide who gets killed. Anthropic has staked its entire identity on being a safety-first AI company, and yet it was collaborating with defense and intelligence agencies [dating back to at least 2024]. Do you think that’s at all contradictory? It is contradictory. If I can give a little cynical take on this — yes, Anthropic has been very good at marketing themselves as all about safety. But if you actually look at the facts rather than the claims, what you see is that Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and xAI have all talked a lot about how they care about safety. None of them has come out supporting binding safety regulation the way we have in other industries. And all four of these companies have now broken their own promises. First we had Google — this big slogan, ‘Don’t be evil.’ Then they dropped that. Then they dropped another longer commitment that basically said they promised not to do harm with AI. They dropped that so they could sell AI for surveillance and weapons. OpenAI just dropped the word safety from their mission statement. xAI shut down their whole safety team. And now Anthropic, earlier in the week, dropped their most important safety commitment — the promise not to release powerful AI systems until they were sure they weren’t going to cause harm. How did companies that made such prominent safety commitments end up in this position? All of these companies, especially OpenAI and Google DeepMind but to some extent also Anthropic, have persistently lobbied against regulation of AI, saying, ‘Just trust us, we’re going to regulate ourselves.’ And they’ve successfully lobbied. So we right now have less regulation on AI systems in America than on sandwiches. You know, if you want to open a sandwich shop and the health inspector finds 15 rats in the kitchen, he won’t let you sell any sandwiches until you fix it. But if you say, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to sell sandwiches, I’m going to sell AI girlfriends for 11-year-olds, and they’ve been linked to suicides in the past, and then I’m going to release something called superintelligence which might overthrow the U.S. government, but I have a good feeling about mine’ — the inspector has to say, ‘Fine, go ahead, just don’t sell sandwiches.’ There’s food safety regulation and no AI regulation.And this, I feel, all of these companies really share the blame for. Because if they had taken all these promises that they made back in the day for how they were going to be so safe and goody-goody, and gotten together, and then gone to the government and said, ‘Please take our voluntary commitments and turn them into U.S. law that binds even our most sloppy competitors’ — this would have happened instead. We’re in a complete regulatory vacuum. And we know what happens when there’s a complete corporate amnesty: you getthalidomide, you get tobacco companies pushing cigarettes on kids, you get asbestos causing lung cancer. So it’s sort of ironic that their own resistance to having laws saying what’s okay and not okay to do with AI is now coming back and biting them. There is no law right now against building AI to kill Americans, so the government can just suddenly ask for it. If the companies themselves had earlier come out and said, ‘We want this law,’ they wouldn’t be in this pickle. They really shot themselves in the foot. The companies’ counter-argument is always the race with China — if American companies don’t do this, Beijing will. Does that argument hold? Let’s analyze that. The most common talking point from the lobbyists for the AI companies — they’re now better funded and more numerous than the lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry, the pharma industry and the military-industrial complex combined — is that whenever anyone proposes any kind of regulation, they say, ‘But China.’ So let’s look at that. China is in the process of banning AI girlfriends outright. Not just age limits — they’re looking at banningall anthropomorphic AI. Why? Not because they want to please America but because they feel this is screwing up Chinese youth and making China weak. Obviously, it’s making American youth weak, too. And when people say we have to race to build superintelligence so we can win against China — when we don’t actually know how to control superintelligence, so that the default outcome is that humanity loses control of Earth to alien machines — guess what? The Chinese Communist Party really likes control. Who in their right mind thinks that Xi Jinping is going to tolerate some Chinese AI company building something that overthrows the Chinese government? No way. It’s clearly really bad for the American government too if it gets overthrown in a coup by the first American company to build superintelligence. This is a national security threat. That’s compelling framing — superintelligence as a national security threat, not an asset. Do you see that view gaining traction in Washington? I think if people in the national security community listen to Dario Amodei describe his vision — he’s given a famous speech where he says we’ll soon have acountry of geniuses in a data center— they might start thinking: wait, did Dario just use the word ‘country’? Maybe I should put that country of geniuses in a data center on the same threat list I’m keeping tabs on, because that sounds threatening to the U.S. government. And I think fairly soon, enough people in the U.S. national security community are going to realize that uncontrollable superintelligence is a threat, not a tool. This is totally analogous to the Cold War. There was a race for dominance — economic and military — against the Soviet Union. We Americans won that one without ever engaging in the second race, which was to see who could put the most nuclear craters in the other superpower. People realized that was just suicide. No one wins. The same logic applies here. What does all of this mean for the pace of AI development more broadly? How close do you think we are to the systems you’re describing? Six years ago, almost every expert in AI I knew predicted we were decades away from having AI that could master language and knowledge at human level — maybe 2040, maybe 2050. They were all wrong, because we already have that now. We’ve seen AI progress quite rapidly from high school level to college level to PhD level to university professor level in some areas. Last year, AI won the gold medal at the International Mathematics Olympiad, which is about as difficult as human tasks get. Iwrote a papertogether withYoshua Bengio,Dan Hendrycks, and other top AI researchers just a few months ago giving a rigorous definition of AGI. According to this, GPT-4 was 27% of the way there. GPT-5 was 57% of the way there. So we’re not there yet, but going from 27% to 57% that quickly suggests it might not be that long. When I lectured to my students yesterday at MIT, I told them that even if it takes four years, that means when they graduate, they might not be able to get any jobs anymore. It’s certainly not too soon to start preparing for it. Anthropic is now blacklisted. I’m curious to see what happens next — will the other AI giants stand with them and say, we won’t do this either? Or does someone like xAI raise their hand and say, Anthropic didn’t want that contract, we’ll take it?[Editor’s note: Hours after the interview, OpenAI announced itsown dealwith the Pentagon.] Last night, Sam Altman came out and said he stands with Anthropic and has the same red lines. I admire him for the courage of saying that. Google, as of when we started this interview, had said nothing. If they just stay quiet, I think that’s incredibly embarrassing for them as a company, and a lot of their staff will feel the same. We haven’t heard anything from xAI yet either. So it’ll be interesting to see. Basically, there’s this moment where everybody has to show their true colors. Is there a version of this where the outcome is actually good? Yes, and this is why I’m actually optimistic in a strange way. There’s such an obvious alternative here. If we just start treating AI companies like any other companies — drop the corporate amnesty — they would clearly have to do something like a clinical trial before they released something this powerful, and demonstrate to independent experts that they know how to control it. Then we get a golden age with all the good stuff from AI, without the existential angst. That’s not the path we’re on right now. But it could be.
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The billion-dollar infrastructure deals powering the AI boom
It takes a lot of computing power to run an AI product — and as the tech industry races to tap the power of AI models, there’s a parallel race underway to build the infrastructure that will power them. On arecent earnings call, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang estimated that between $3 trillion and $4 trillion will be spent on AI infrastructure by the end of the decade — with much of that money coming from AI companies. Along the way, they’re placing immense strain on power grids and pushing the industry’s building capacity to its limit. Below, we’ve laid out everything we know about the biggest AI infrastructure projects, including major spending from Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI. We’ll keep it updated as the boom continues and the numbers climb even higher. This is arguably the deal that kicked off the whole contemporary AI boom:In 2019, Microsoft made a $1 billion investment in a buzzy non-profit called OpenAI, known mostly for its association with Elon Musk. Crucially, the deal made Microsoft the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI — and as the demands of model training became more intense, more of Microsoft’s investment started to comein the form of Azure cloud creditrather than cash. It was a great deal for both sides: Microsoft was able to claim more Azure sales, and OpenAI got more money for its biggest single expense. In the years that followed, Microsoft would build its investment up to nearly $14 billion — a move that is set to pay off enormously when OpenAI converts into a for-profit company. The partnership between the two companies has unwound more recently. Last year, OpenAI announced it wouldno longer be using Microsoft’s cloud exclusively, instead giving the company a right of first refusal on future infrastructure demands but pursuing others if Azure couldn’t meet their needs. Microsoft has also begun exploring other foundation models to power its AI products, establishing even more independence from the AI giant. OpenAI’s arrangement with Microsoft was so successful that it’s become a common practice for AI services to sign on with a particular cloud provider. Anthropic has received $8 billion in investment from Amazon, whilemaking kernel-level modificationson the company’s hardware to make it better suited for AI training. Google Cloud has also signed onsmaller AI companies like Lovable and Windsurfas “primary computing partners,” although those deals did not involve any investment. And even OpenAI has gone back to the well, receiving a $100 billion investment from Nvidiain September, giving it capacity to buy even more of the company’s GPUs. On June 30, 2025, Oracle revealed in an SEC filing that it had signed a $30 billion cloud services deal with an unnamed partner; this is more than the company’s cloud revenues for all of the previous fiscal year. OpenAI was eventually revealed as the partner, securing Oraclea spot alongside Googleas one of OpenAI’s string of post-Microsoft hosting partners. Unsurprisingly, the company’s stock went shooting up. A few months later, it happened again.On September 10, Oracle revealed a five-year, $300 billion deal for compute power, set to begin in 2027. Oracle’s stockclimbed even higher, briefly making founder Larry Ellison the richest man in the world. The sheer scale of the deal is stunning: OpenAI does not have $300 billion to spend, so the figure presumes immense growth for both companies, and more than a little faith. But before a single dollar is spent, the deal has already cemented Oracle as one of the leading AI infrastructure providers — and a financial force to be reckoned with. As AI labs scramble to build infrastructure, they’re mostly buying GPUs from one company: Nvidia. That trade has made Nvidia flush with cash — and it’s been investing that cash back into the industry in increasingly unconventional ways. In September 2025, Nvidia boughta 4% stake in rival Intelfor $5 billion — but even more surprising has been the deals with its own customers. One week after the Intel deal was revealed, the company announceda $100 billion investment in OpenAI, paid for with GPUs that would be used in OpenAI’s ongoing data center projects. Nvidia has since announced a similar deal with Elon Musk’s xAI, and OpenAI launcheda separate GPU-for-stock arrangementwith AMD. If that seems circular, it’s because it is. Nvidia’s GPUs are valuable because they’re so scarce — and by trading them directly into an ever-inflating data center scheme, Nvidia is making sure they stay that way. You could say the same thing about OpenAI’s privately held stock, which is all the more valuable because it can’t be obtained through public markets. For now, OpenAI and Nvidia are riding high and nobody seems too worried — but if the momentum starts to flag, this sort of arrangement will get a lot more scrutiny. For companies like Meta that already havesignificant legacy infrastructure, the story is more complicated — although equally expensive. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the company plans to spend $600 billion on U.S. infrastructurethrough the end of 2028. In the first half of 2025, the company spent$30 billion morethan the previous year, driven largely by the company’s growing AI ambitions. Some of that spending goes toward big ticket cloud contracts, like a recent$10 billion deal with Google Cloud, but even more resources are being poured into two massive new data centers. A new 2,250-acre site in Louisiana,dubbed Hyperion, will cost an estimated $10 billion to build out andprovide an estimated 5 gigawatts of compute power. Notably, the site includes an arrangement with a local nuclear power plant to handle the increased energy load. A smaller site in Ohio, called Prometheus, is expected to come online in 2026, powered by natural gas. That kind of buildout comes with real environmental costs. Elon Musk’s xAI built its own hybrid data center and power-generation plant in South Memphis, Tennessee. The plant has quickly become one of the county’s largest emitters of smog-producing chemicals, thanks to a string of natural gas turbines thatexperts say violate the Clean Air Act. Just two days after his second inauguration last January, President Trump announced a joint venture between SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle, meant to spend $500 billion building AI infrastructure in the United States. Named “Stargate” after the 1994 film, the project arrived with incredible amounts of hype, with Trump calling it “the largest AI infrastructure project in history.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman seemed to agree, saying, ”I think this will be the most important project of this era.” In broad strokes, the plan was for SoftBank to provide the funding, with Oracle handling the buildout with input from OpenAI. Overseeing it all was Trump, who promised to clear away any regulatory hurdles that might slow down the build. But there were doubts from the beginning, including from Elon Musk, Altman’s business rival, who claimed the project did not have the available funds. As the hype has died down, the project has lost some momentum.In August, Bloomberg reported that the partners were failing to reach consensus. Nonetheless, the project has moved forward with the construction ofeight data centers in Abilene, Texas, with construction on the final building set to be finished by the end of 2026. “Capital expenditures” are usually a pretty dry metric, referring to a company’s spending on physical assets. But as tech companies lined up to report their capex plans for 2026, the rush of data center spendingmade the figures a lot more interesting— and a lot bigger. Amazon was the capex leader, projecting $200 billion in 2026 spending (up from $131 billion in 2025), while Google was a close second with an estimate between $175 billion and $185 billion (up from $91 billion in 2025). Meta estimated $115 billion to $135 billion (up from $71 billion the previous year), although that figure is a little deceptive because a lot of the data center projects have beenkept off their books entirely. All told, hyperscalers are planning to spendnearly $700 billion on data center projects in 2026 alone. It was enough money to spook some investors. The companies were mostly undeterred, however, explaining that AI infrastructure was vital to their companies’ future. It’s set up a strange dynamic. As you might expect, tech executives are more bullish on AI than their Wall Street counterparts — and the more tech companies spend, the more nervous their bankers get. Add in thehuge amounts of debtmany companies are taking on to fund those buildouts, and you start to hear CFOs across the valley grinding their teeth. That hasn’t put a damper on AI spending yet, but it will soon — unless of course, hyperscalers show they can make those investments pay off. This article was first published on September 22.
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Anthropic’s Claude rises to No. 2 in the App Store following Pentagon dispute
Anthropic’s chatbot Claude seems to have benefited from the attention around the company’s fraught negotiations with the Pentagon. Asfirst reported by CNBC, as of Saturday afternoon, Claude is currently ranked number two among free apps in Apple’s US App Store — the number one app is OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and number three is Google Gemini. According todata from SensorTower, Claude was just outside the top 100 at the end of January, and has spent most of February somewhere in the top 20. Its ranking has climbed in the last few days, from sixth on Wednesday to fourth on Thursday to second on Saturday (today). After Anthropic attempted to negotiate for safeguards preventing the Department of Defense from using its AI models for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to stop using all Anthropic products and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said he’sdesignating the company a supply-chain threat. OpenAI subsequentlyannounced its own agreement with the Pentagon, which CEO Sam Altman claimed includes safeguards related to domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons.
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OpenAI’s Sam Altman announces Pentagon deal with ‘technical safeguards’
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced late on Friday that his company has reached an agreement allowing the Department of Defense to use its AI models in the department’s classified network. This follows a high-profile standoff between the DoD — also known under the Trump administration as the Department of War — and OpenAI’s rival Anthropic. The Pentagonpushed AI companies, including Anthropic, to allow their models to be used for “all lawful purposes,”while Anthropic sought to draw a red line around mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Ina lengthy statement released Thursday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the company “never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in anad hocmanner,” but he argued that “in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.” More than 60 OpenAI employees and 300 Google employeessigned an open letter this weekasking their employers to support Anthropic’s position. After Anthropic and the Pentagon failed to reach an agreement, President Donald Trump criticized the “Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic” ina social media postthat also directed federal agencies to stop using the company’s products after a six-month phase-out period. Inaseparatepost, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claimed Anthropic was trying to “seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military.” Hegseth also said he is designating Anthropic as a supply-chain risk: “Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.” On Friday,Anthropic saidit had “not yet received direct communication from the Department of War or the White House on the status of our negotiations,” but insisted it would “challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.” Surprisingly, Altmanclaimed in a post on Xthat OpenAI’s new defense contract includes protections addressing the same issues that became a flashpoint for Anthropic. “Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems,” Altman said. “The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.” Altman said OpenAI “will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted,” and it will deploy engineers with the Pentagon “to help with our models and to ensure their safety.” “We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept,” Altman added. “We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.” Fortune’s Sharon Goldman reportsthat Altman told OpenAI employees at an all-hands meeting that the government will allow the company to build its own “safety stack” to prevent misuse and that “if the model refuses to do a task, then the government would not force OpenAI to make it do that task.” Altman’s post came shortly before news broke that the U.S. and Israeli governmentshave begun bombing Iran, with Trump calling for the overthrow of the Iranian government.
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Trump Orders Federal Agencies to Cease Use of Anthropic
Trump said the company’s actions were “putting American lives at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in jeopardy.”
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OpenAI Reaches Agreement With Department of War to Deploy Models on Classified Network
OpenAI said its models will operate under specific safety principles, including prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance.
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Open Compute Might Be AMD’s Biggest Moat Yet
AMD’s Archana Vemulapalli says Helios emerged from the company’s work within the Open Compute Project, where it worked closely with Meta to advance rack-scale AI.
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Pentagon moves to designate Anthropic as a supply-chain risk
In a post on Truth Social, President Trump directed federal agencies to cease use of all Anthropic products after the company’spublic dispute with the Department of Defense. The president allowed for a six-month phase-out period for departments using the products, but emphasized that Anthropic was no longer welcome as a federal contractor. “We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again,” the president wrote in the post. pic.twitter.com/B51SWfn81N Notably, the president’s post did not mention any plans to designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, as had been previously mentioned as a consequence. However,a subsequent tweetfrom Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made good on the threat. “In conjunction with the President’s directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic’s technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security,” Secretary Hegseth wrote. “Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.” The Pentagon dispute centered on Anthropic’s refusal to allow its AI models to be used to power either mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, which Secretary Hegseth found unduly restrictive. CEO Dario Amodei reiterated his stancein a public post on Thursday, refusing to compromise on the two points. “Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters — with our two requested safeguards in place,” Amodei wrote at the time. “Should the Department choose to offboard Anthropic, we will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider, avoiding any disruption to ongoing military planning, operations, or other critical missions.” OpenAI has come out in support of Anthropic’s decision.Per the BBC, CEO Sam Altman sent a memo to staff on Thursday saying he shared the same “red lines” and that any OpenAI-related defense contracts would also reject uses that were “unlawful or unsuited to cloud deployments, such as domestic surveillance and autonomous offensive weapons.” OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who very publicly fell out with Altman inNovember 2023and has since co-founded his own AI company, also waded into the conversation on Friday,writing on X: “It’s extremely good that Anthropic has not backed down, and it’s significant that OpenAI has taken a similar stance. In the future, there will be much more challenging situations of this nature, and it will be critical for the relevant leaders to rise up to the occasion, for fierce competitors to put their differences aside. Good to see that happen today.” Anthropic, OpenAI and Google each receivedcontract awardsfrom the U.S. Defense Department last July. While someGoogle employeeshave come out in support of Anthropic, Google and its parent company have yet to comment.
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Anthropic vs. the Pentagon: What’s actually at stake?
The past two weeks have been defined by aclashbetween Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as the two battle over the military’s use of AI. Anthropic refuses to allow its AI models to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or for fully autonomous weapons that conduct strikes without human input. At the same time, Secretary Hegseth has argued the Department of Defense shouldn’t be limited by the rules of a vendor, arguing any “lawful use” of the technology should be permitted. On Thursday,Amodei publicly signaledthat Anthropic isn’t backing down — despite threats that his company could be designated as a supply chain risk as a result. But with the news cycle moving fast, it’s worth revisiting exactly what’s at stake in the fight. At its core, this fight is about who controls powerful AI systems — the companies that build them, or the government that wants to deploy them. As we said above, Anthropic doesn’t want its AI models to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or for autonomous weapons with no humans in the loop for targeting and firing decisions. Traditional defense contractors typically have little say in how their products will be used, but Anthropic has argued from its inception that AI technology poses unique risks and therefore requires unique safeguards. From the company’s perspective, the question is how to maintain those safeguards when the technology is being used by the military. The U.S. military already relies on highly automated systems, some of which are lethal. The decision to use lethal force has historically been left to humans, but there are few legal restrictions on military use of autonomous weapons. The DoD doesn’t categorically ban fully autonomous weapons systems. According to a2023 DOD directive, AI systems can select and engage targets without human intervention, as long as they meet certain standards and pass review by senior defense officials. That’s precisely what makes Anthropic nervous. Military technology is secretive by nature, so if the U.S. military were taking steps to automate lethal decision-making, we might not know about it until it was operational. And if it used Anthropic’s models, it could count as “lawful use.” Anthropic’s position isn’t that such uses should be permanently off the table. It’s that its models aren’t capable enough to support them safely yet. Imagine an autonomous system misidentifying a target, escalating a conflict without human authorization, or making a split-second lethal decision that no one can reverse. Put a less-capable AI in charge of weapons, and you get a very fast, very confident machine that’s bad at making high-stakes calls. AI also has the power to supercharge lawful surveillance of American citizens to a concerning degree. Under current U.S. laws, surveillance of American citizens is already possible, whether through collection of texts, emails, and other communication. AI changes the equation by enabling automated large-scale pattern detection, entity resolution across datasets, predictive risk scoring, and continuous behavioral analysis. The Pentagon’s argument is that it should be able to deploy Anthropic’s technology for any lawful use it deems necessary, rather than be limited by Anthropic’s internal policies on things like autonomous weapons or surveillance. More specifically, Secretary Hegseth has argued the Department of Defense shouldn’t be limited by the rules of a vendor and that it would engage in “lawful use” of the technology. Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, said in aThursday X postthat the department has no interest in conducting mass domestic surveillance or deploying autonomous weapons. “Here’s what we’re asking: Allow the Pentagon to use Anthropic’s model for all lawful purposes,” Parnell said. “This is a simple, common-sense request that will prevent Anthropic from jeopardizing critical military operations and potentially putting our warfighters at risk. We will not let ANY company dictate the terms regarding how we make operational decisions.” He added that Anthropic has until 5:01 p.m. ET on Friday to decide. “Otherwise, we will terminate our partnership with Anthropic and deem them a supply chain risk for DOW,” he said. Despite the DoD’s stance that it simply doesn’t believe it should be limited by a corporation’s usage policies, Secretary Hegseth’s concerns about Anthropic have at times seemed connected to cultural grievance. Ina speech at SpaceX and xAI offices in January, Hegseth railed against “woke AI” in a speech that some saw as a preview of his feud with Anthropic. “Department of War AI will not be woke,” Hegseth said. “We’re building war-ready weapons and systems, not chatbots for an Ivy League faculty lounge.” The Pentagon has threatened to either declare Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — which effectively blacklists Anthropic from doing business with the government — or invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) to force the company to tailor its model to the military’s needs. Hegseth has given Anthropic until 5:01 p.m. on Friday to respond. But with the deadline approaching, it’s anyone’s guess whether the Pentagon will make good on its threat. This is not a fight either party can easily walk away from. Sachin Seth, a VC at Trousdale Ventures who focuses on defense tech, says a supply chain risk label for Anthropic could mean “lights out” for the company. However, he said, if Anthropic is dropped from the DoD, it could be a national security issue. “[The Department] would have to wait six to 12 months for either OpenAI or xAI to catch up,” Seth told TechCrunch. “That leaves a window of up to a year where they might be working from not the best model, but the second or third best.” xAI is gearing up to become classified-ready and replace Anthropic, and it’s fair to say given ownerElon Musk’s rhetoricon the matter that the company would have no problem giving the DoD total control over its technology. Recentreportsindicate that OpenAI may stick to the same red lines as Anthropic.
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Musk bashes OpenAI in deposition, saying ‘nobody committed suicide because of Grok’
In a newly released deposition filed in Elon Musk’s case against OpenAI, the tech executive attacked OpenAI’s safety record, claiming that his company, xAI, better prioritizes safety. He went so far as to say that “Nobody has committed suicide because of Grok, but apparently they have because of ChatGPT.” The comment came up in a line of questioning about apublic letterMusk signed in March 2023. In it, he called on AI labs to pause development of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, OpenAI’s flagship model at the time, for at least six months. The letter, which was signed by over 1,100 people, including many AI experts, stated there was not enough planning and management taking place at AI labs, as they were locked in an “out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control.” Those fears have since gained credibility. OpenAI now faces aseries of lawsuitsalleging thatChatGPT’s manipulative conversation tacticshave led several people to experience negative mental health effects, with some dying by suicide. Musk’s comment suggests that these incidents could be used as fodder in his case against OpenAI. The transcript of Musk’s video testimony, which took place back in September, was filed publicly this week, ahead of the expected jury trial next month. Thelawsuitagainst OpenAI centers on the company’s shift from a nonprofit AI research lab to a for-profit company, whichMusk claims violatedits founding agreements. As part of his arguments, Musk claims that AI safety could be compromised by OpenAI’s commercial relationships, as such relationships would place speed, scale, and revenue above safety concerns. However, since that recording, xAI has faced safety concerns of its own. Last month, Musk’s social network X wasflooded with nonconsensual nude imagesgenerated by xAI’s Grok, some of whichwere said to be of minors. This led the California Attorney General’s office toopen an investigationinto the matter. The EU is alsorunning its own investigation, and other governments have taken action, too, with some imposing blocks and bans. In the newly filed deposition, Musk claimed he had signed the AI safety letter because “it seemed like a good idea,” not because he had just incorporated an AI company looking to compete with OpenAI. “I signed it, as many people did, to urge caution with AI development,” Musk said. “I just wanted … AI safety to be prioritized.” Musk also responded to other questions in the deposition, including those about artificial general intelligence, or AGI — the concept of AI that can match or surpass human reasoning across a broad range of tasks — saying “it has a risk.” He also confirmed that he “was mistaken” about hissupposed $100 million donationto OpenAI; thesecond amended complaintin the case puts the actual figure closer to $44.8 million. He also recalled why OpenAI was founded, which, from his perspective, was because he was “increasingly concerned about the danger of Google being a monopoly in AI,” adding that his conversations with Google co-founder Larry Page were “alarming, in that he did not seem to be taking AI safety seriously.” OpenAI was formed as a counterweight to that threat, Musk claimed.
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