It feels voyeuristic to read someone’s breakup texts, but usually the parties involved in the split aren’t an AI lab with a billion-dollar valuation and the biggest agency in the federal government, so you can be forgiven for being interested in taking a peek. On Tuesday, court documents were released that include the emails that led to Anthropic and the Department of Defense falling out earlier this year, and they read just about as you’d expect based on the public accounting of the situation.
In the back-and-forth, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made clear that his primary concern was that the Department of Defense would use his lab’s AI models for purposes that he and the company weren’t comfortable with—namely, integrating the technology into autonomous weapons systems and domestic surveillance tools. As has been noted previously, the Pentagon’s position is that it could utilize the technology for “all lawful uses,” which creates a considerable amount of wiggle room.
The emails do reveal that the seeds for the split were planted in January, when the Department of Defense’s undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, Emil Michael, reached out to Amodei after radio silence for several weeks. In it, Michael said he was “hoping that we are closer to engaging with your revised POV”—basically, hoping that Anthropic is ready to play ball with the Pentagon’s demands. Amodei responded by reiterating his position that there need to be guardrails in place for the use of AI, including barring its use for fully autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance.
Michael said that was “just not workable,” and warned there was “one more chance to align on core principles that would lead to legal language” before deciding to part ways. He followed up by noting that “there is no distinction in our world between weapons that are defensive or offensive” (a detail that seems noteworthy given the ongoing debate over the sale of “defensive” weapons to Israel), so attempts by Amodei to make a distinction as to how his company’s technology could be used would be futile.
Amodei pointed out that the “all lawful uses” standard wouldn’t fly for Anthropic because US law does allow for domestic surveillance. In response to some apparent proposed language from the Pentagon, Amodei noted to Michael that the department seemed to “completely remove our redlines.” The next day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that his agency would be designating Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, which pretty much put an end to that whole negotiation.
If anything, Amodei comes off looking pretty good in the emails, given that he held to his convictions. Less impressive was Michael, who did everything he could to extract the concessions his agency was looking for. But Michael already looked pretty compromised in this whole situation, given that he was sitting on a fat stack of stock for Anthropic competitor xAI, among other investments in AI firms. Even if enriching himself was only in the back of his mind during his back-and-forth with Amodei, at the front of his mind was figuring out how to keep the door open for using AI to kill people and surveil citizens, so not exactly a guy with a strong moral compass either way.
We’ve uploaded the full 346-page court document for you to browse here.
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