The story so far: (deep breath) In the lead up to the US war with Iran, Anthropic engaged in conversations with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about whether cloud AI models could be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. It appears the Pentagon took this as an insult and treated Amodei like a hostile entity trying to wrest control of the military from the Trump administration. Everyone was freaking out, and Hegseth responded in a completely strange way: by declaring Anthropic a supply-chain risk, and making the legally dubious claim that no business with government contracts was now allowed to work with Anthropic — starting in six months, however, because the Pentagon, at the time, was busy using the cloud to prepare to bomb Iran. Anthropic’s main competitor, OpenAI, signed an agreement allowing the Pentagon to use its products on classified channels, and a few hours later, bombs fell on Iran.
But now a week has passed, and the FT says Amodei is once again in talks with Emile Michael, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, who previously said Amodei is “a liar and has a goddamn mind.”
Amodei’s apparent memo to his staff, reported earlier Wednesday, included the following run-on sentences about the difference between his experience negotiating with the Pentagon (or “DoW” if you prefer) and his opponent Sam Altman:
“We haven’t praised Trump’s dictator-style bravado (whereas Sam has), we’ve supported AI regulation that goes against his agenda, we’ve told the truth about many AI policy issues (like job displacement), and we’ve actually kept our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with him to produce ‘security theater’ for the benefit of workers (which, I solemnly swear to you, is actually Everyone at DOW, Palantir, our political advisors, etc. agreed that this was the problem we were trying to solve).
Earlier on Wednesday, a tech industry group called the Information Technology Industry Council, which includes Nvidia, Amazon, Apple and even OpenAI, said it was “concerned by recent reports” about an unnamed tech company that was in dispute with the Pentagon.
Gizmodo contacted Anthropic for confirmation that renewed talks are underway, as well as details about any such talks. We’ll update if we hear back.
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