The Scoop
Anthropic may be standing its ground against the Pentagon, but the AI powerhouse is doing so with a noticeably quiet quarter: its own high-profile backers. Despite the company’s defiance, Silicon Valley’s biggest players have remained silent.
In a recent meeting between Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the issue of Anthropic came up, according to two people who were briefed on the encounter.
Amazon has invested billions in the startup, a crucial part of Amazon’s custom chip strategy as the largest consumer of the company’s Trainium AI chips. And Hegseth had been threatening to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk, which would make it impossible for many of the military’s suppliers to do business with the company.
Jassy demurred, declining to take Anthropic’s side, the people said.
He wasn’t alone. Despite Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s very vocal opposition to the Pentagon’s demands — and rival OpenAI Sam Altman’s running commentary on the matter — a number of Anthropic investors have remained silent.
One investor told Semafor that speaking up might further inflame things with the administration and that they were still holding out hope the issue could be resolved. Another said that Anthropic requested they say nothing. Anthropic and Amazon declined to comment. The Pentagon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In this article:
Know More
Anthropic has been butting heads with the Pentagon since at least early December, after a tense meeting between CEO Dario Amodei and Emil Michael, a former tech executive who now serves as chief technology officer for the military, Semafor first reported.
The Pentagon has demanded that AI companies with defense contracts agree to provide their technology for “all lawful uses” — but Anthropic has requested explicit carveouts that would prohibit their models from being used for surveillance of American citizens and for autonomous weapons systems. Defense officials say the carveouts are unnecessary because those uses are already illegal.
On Friday, Hegseth threatened to designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” which would prohibit the model’s use by the military and its suppliers. Anthropic said in a statement that it disagrees with that characterization.
A person familiar with the Trump administration’s thinking on the issue said the situation remains fluid. The president is considering an executive order, say, using the Defense Production Act to compel Anthropic’s cooperation, as an alternative option to blacklisting the company. It’s unclear what the executive order would stipulate, the person cautioned.
The dispute has been a long time in the making. Since last May, Anthropic, which employs several Biden-era staffers, has been clashing with the Trump administration over issues like state AI regulation and the use of AI models for law enforcement purposes, Semafor first reported.
Last Friday, competitor OpenAI struck a deal with the Pentagon to take Anthropic’s place, offering AI services for classified uses. CEO Sam Altman said the company had reached an agreement that also prohibits domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. “The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement,” he said on X.
Reed’s view
Despite potential disruption to its enterprise sales, Anthropic’s stance has so far amounted to a public relations victory. Outside its San Francisco offices, supporters wrote messages in chalk, thanking the company for its anti-war position. Meanwhile, Claude rose to number 1 in the Apple App Store over the weekend.
The prevailing view among pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to in Silicon Valley — even if they disagree with Anthropic’s position — is that private companies should be able to decide the terms of their contracts with the federal government without fear of punishment.
In other words, use of the Defense Production Act to compel Anthropic to offer its product without any restrictions made a lot more sense than labeling the company a supply chain risk.
But it doesn’t appear as if that message is getting passed along to the Pentagon, which is now in an awkward position, having threatened Anthropic with the much more severe designation of being a threat to national security.
To be sure, the White House has not yet made the designation official. But the situation has highlighted the upside down world we’re in, where a young Silicon Valley startup with a first-time entrepreneur at the helm is so desperately needed by the US government that its founder is able to stand up to the White House — while the CEOs of the world’s most powerful companies can’t speak freely on the issue.
Destroying Anthropic would not help the US stay ahead of China — or anyone else — on AI, and it’s likely it would be a setback for national security, not a risk. Now that it’s clear that Anthropic isn’t going to budge, it’s up to the Trump administration to find a way to de-escalate the situation.