Donald Trump boasted about severing the ties between the US military and Anthropic the same day multiple reports said that negotiations between the Department of Defense and the AI startup had resumed.
“Well, I fired Anthropic. Anthropic is in trouble because I fired [them] like dogs, because they shouldn’t have done that,” Trump told Politico.
Trump on Friday ordered the entire federal government to cease using Anthropic’s tech, which the state and treasury departments have begun, according to their respective heads.
The termination may not be permanent, though. Negotiations have restarted between the Pentagon and Anthropic over the military’s use of the company’s AI and the contract between the two, according to the Financial Times and Bloomberg. Anthropic’s products, which include the popular Claude chatbot and coding assistant, are integrated into Palantir’s Maven system, a newly vital tool of military intelligence that was used in recent strikes on Iran, according to The Washington Post.
Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, has been discussing the Pentagon’s contract with Emil Michael, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering and a former Uber executive, per Bloomberg. The two strongly dislike one another, the New York Times reported.
On Thursday, Amodei sent a scorching message to his employees disparaging the Trump administration and rival OpenAI, which late last week jumped into the void left by the government and Anthropic’s breakup and announced its own deal with the military. Amodei called OpenAI CEO Sam Altman “mendacious” and said Altman’s claims of that the Pentagon would abide by safeguards amounted to nothing more than “safety theater”. From his end, Altman acceded to employees in an internal message this week that the company would have no control over how the military used OpenAI’s technology.
Anthropic last week refused a deal with the Pentagon over concerns its model could be used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, declared the company a “supply-chain risk” in response, a designation that prevents all government contractors from using its technology and which has never been used before against a US company. Silicon Valley, including OpenAI, has backed Anthropic in the fight over the designation. Amodei said his company will sue over the label. The retributive blacklisting of the company could cause significant financial harm if formally enacted. Anthropic’s most recent round of financing, some $60bn, is in jeopardy over the fracas with the Pentagon, per Axios.
As the defense secretary vowed punitive measures against Anthropic, his agency also announced a deal with OpenAI to use its technology for military operations in its classified network. The timing as well as questions over ethics elicited backlash that propelled Claude’s app to the top of the download charts in the US. In the following days, Altman said he would amend the agreement with the department and admitted his company’s conduct appeared “opportunistic and sloppy”.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
