Anthropic Vows To Fight Trump Administration Over Snub of AI Technology

Artificial intelligence firm Anthropic says it will go to court to fight the Trump administration’s blacklisting of its technology and designation that the company is a supply chain risk.“We believe this designation would both be legally unsound and set a dangerous precedent for any American company that negotiates with the government,” Anthropic said in a blog post Friday night. The company noted that the designation is historically reserved for American adversaries and has never been publicly applied to an American company. The company has clashed with the administration over AI safety. Anthropic wanted assurances its Claude AI systems would not be used for mass domestic surveillance of Americans or to run fully autonomous weapons. The Trump administration wanted unrestricted use by the military for any legal purpose.“The AI systems of today are nowhere near reliable enough to make fully autonomous weapons,” Anthropic’s chief executive officer, Dario Amodei, told CBS News on Friday. “You know, anyone who’s worked with AI models understands that there’s a basic unpredictability to them that in a purely technical way we have not solved.”“We are not categorically against fully autonomous weapons. We simply believe that the reliability is not there yet, and that we need to have a conversation about oversight,” Mr. Amodei added.Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude is embedded in Pentagon systems and has been used since June 2024. The tools can be used for document summaries and controlling machines, including drones.The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic’s systems were used in the recent operation targeting Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro. While the exact role Claude played remains unclear, the incident allegedly sparked internal questions at Anthropic.Anthropic has partnered with defense contractor Palantir to deliver AI capabilities on secure government systems. An Anthropic employee reportedly reached out to a counterpart at Palantir for more information on Claude’s use in the Venezuela operation.The Defense Department will have six months to phase out Anthropic, according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Mr. Amodie says the move away from his company will hurt the American military. “I’ve talked to people on the ground, uniformed military officers, who say, ‘This is essential. Not having this will set us back six months, 12 months, maybe longer,'” Mr. Amodie said.“We’ll do everything we can to support the Department of War to provide its technology for as long as it takes to off-board us and, and on-board, you know, a competitor who’s willing to do these things that, that, that we are not, that we are not willing to do,” Mr. Amodie said.OpenAI said it has reached an agreement to deploy its AI models on the Defense Department’s classified network, with more limited prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and requirements for human control over the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems.“We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place,” OpenAI’s chief executive officer Sam Altman said in an X post.Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers. It signed a two-year $200 million contract with the Pentagon last summer.The publicity around the controversy has helped Anthropic in one way. Its Claude AI app jumped to number two on Apple’s top free apps on Saturday, just behind ChatGPT and above Google’s Gemini.

Anthropic Vows To Fight Trump Administration Over Snub of AI Technology

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