After the week he just went through, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is somehow taking another stab at negotiating a deal with the Pentagon, according to anonymous sources who leaked information to the Financial Times.
The story so far: (Deep breath) In the lead-up to the U.S. war with Iran, Anthropic was engaged in negotiations with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth over whether or not the Claude AI model could be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. The Pentagon seemingly took this as an insult, and treated Amodei like a hostile entity trying to seize control of the military from the Trump Administration. Everyone was being weird, and Hegseth responded in a fittingly weird way: by declaring Anthropic a supply-chain risk, and making the legally dubious claim that now no businesses with government contracts are allowed to work with Anthropic—starting in six months, though, because The Pentagon was, in that moment, busy using Claude to prepare to bomb Iran. Anthropic’s main competitor, OpenAI, signed a deal allowing the Pentagon to use its products on classified channels, and hours later, bombs fell on Iran.
But now a week has passed, and the FT says Amodei is once again in talks with under-secretary of defense for research and engineering, Emil Michael, who previously said Amodei “is a liar and has a God-complex.”
An apparent memo from Amodei to his employees reported earlier on Wednesday included the following run-on sentence about the difference between his negotiating experience with the Pentagon (or “DoW” if you prefer) and that of his rival Sam Altman:
“We haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has), we have supported AI regulation which is against their agenda, we’ve told the truth about a number of AI policy issues (like job displacement), and we’ve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce ‘safety theater’ for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at DoW, Palantir, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve).”
Earlier on Wednesday, a tech industry group called the Information Technology Industry Council that includes Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, and even OpenAI spoke out to say it was “concerned by recent reports,” about an unnamed tech company that was in a dispute with the Pentagon.
Gizmodo reached out to Anthropic for confirmation that renewed negotiations are ongoing, as well as details about any such negotiations. We will update if we hear back.
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