AI company Anthropic said it could not accept the Pentagon’s “best and final” offer to resolve a dispute over restrictions the company has in place on how the U.S. military can use its AI models. With just hours left before a Friday deadline to comply with the Pentagon’s demands or face actions that could see Anthropic barred from doing business with any company that also does business with the U.S. military, the dispute turned increasingly ugly.
Pentagon officials have publicly questioned the character of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Meanwhile, employees at competing AI labs have signed open letters supporting Anthropic’s position. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told his employees in a memo on Thursday, according to reporting from Axios, that OpenAI would push for the same limitations on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance that Anthropic has as it negotiates to extend the use of ChatGPT, currently available to the military for nonsensitive use cases, to more classified domains.
The Anthropic-Pentagon fight is now threatening to spiral into an industrywide rebellion among tech workers at AI companies over how the AI systems they are building are used by the military. On Thursday, more than 100 workers at Google sent a letter to Jeff Dean, the company’s chief scientist, also asking for similar limits on how Google’s Gemini AI models are used by the U.S. military, according to the New York Times.
