Trump’s Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on Friday designated Anthropic as a “supply chain risk,” and Trump ordered government suppliers and contractors to stop doing business with the American AI company, essentially blacklisting the company over the company’s insistence on limitations to its artificial intelligence tools.
The DOD and Anthropic had been negotiating terms of usage for the AI services including Claude, its AI assistant, as Anthropic argued for restrictions on mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous lethal weapons.
The negotiations of a $200 million contract appeared to hang on a phrase the government insisted upon, to allow the AI company to let the Pentagon use its systems “for any lawful purpose.”
Anthropic reacted:
“We believe this designation would both be legally unsound and set a dangerous precedent for any American company that negotiates with the government,” it added.
Open AI’s Sam Altman also reacted with a deal with the Pentagon:
Sam Altman, CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, the company behind AI assistant ChatGPT, announced a deal had been made with the Pentagon only hours after Anthropic was kicked to the curb, with what Altman claimed were very similar guardrails that the competitor Anthropic was asking for.
The phrasing also included at the Pentagon’s insistence the company allow the DOD to use its AI services “for any lawful purpose.”