Anthropic has until 5 pm today to give in to the demands of the US Department of Defense, which wants the company to remove any restrictions on what the military can do with the technology.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei isn’t backing down. He published a blog post Thursday outlining his company’s moral stand against the use of Anthropic’s technology for surveillance of American citizens and autonomous weapons.
Amodei is being cheered by a lot of people in Silicon Valley for sticking to his guns. The fracas has even revived the anti-military sentiment at Google, where a tiny fraction of its employees wrote a letter to the company imploring it to make a similar stand. So far, Google is available without any restrictions for unclassified use.
Of course, the military already isn’t allowed to surveil American citizens. And Anthropic’s prohibition against autonomous weapons isn’t so much a moral one but a technological one: It doesn’t think AI is currently good enough to serve that purpose.
It’s pretty clear where this is headed. The Pentagon is going to use the Defense Production Act to compel Anthropic to remove restrictions on its technology. Anthropic will probably sue the government, and in the end, it looks like both sides will get what they want.