Anthropic’s fallout with the US Department of Defense may not hurt it. The Pentagon threatened to designate the AI company a “supply chain risk,” barring it from work with other defense contractors.
But the row has given Anthropic a popularity boost — its Claude bot is now top of Apple’s US charts — while rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT saw a surge of uninstalls after it signed its own deal with the DoD. A
nthropic’s defense contracts are perhaps 5% of its total business, the AI-focused writer Scott Alexander noted, and Anthropic believes the designation will not hurt its other business. Prediction markets are betting that Anthropic will be unaffected, although Stratechery’s Ben Thompson was less sanguine: He argued that the decision “would decimate Anthropic.”