Running an AI company isn't a cheap thing to do, especially if you're at the forefront of developing new models. You need to buy or rent hundreds of thousands of GPUs, pay huge energy and water bills, and hire lots of highly skilled and qualified staff. So, where does one find a handy source of money for all of this? In the case of Anthropic, it's turned to the military as the pot of bountiful cash, but according to one report, it's now discovering that all that glitters isn't gold.
The agreement between Anthropic and the then-named Department of Defense to "prototype frontier AI capabilities that advance U.S. national security" was announced last July, and while it was only given a capped $200 million budget—a fraction of the money it's received from Microsoft and Nvidia—the makers of Claude were looking "look forward to deepening our collaboration across the Department to solve critical mission challenges".
