Nick Robins-Early , The Guardian; Anthropic-Pentagon battle shows how big tech has reversed course on AI and war
"The standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon has forced the tech industry to once again grapple with the question of how its products are used for war – and what lines it will not cross. Amid Silicon Valley’s rightward shift under Donald Trump and the signing of lucrative defense contracts, big tech’s answer is looking very different than it did even less than a decade ago."
Anthropic; Introducing The Anthropic Institute
"We’re launching The Anthropic Institute, a new effort to confront the most significant challenges that powerful AI will pose to our societies. The Anthropic Institute will draw on research from across Anthropic to provide information that other researchers and the public can use during our transition to a world containing much more powerful AI systems.
In the five years since Anthropic began, AI progress has moved incredibly quickly. It took us two years to release our first commercial model, and just three more to develop models that can discover severe cybersecurity vulnerabilities, take on a wide range of real work, and even begin to accelerate the pace of AI development itself.
We predict that far more dramatic progress will follow in the next two years. One of our company’s core convictions is that AI development is accelerating: that the improvements we make are compounding over time. Because of this, extremely powerful AI, like the kind our CEO Dario Amodei describes in Machines of Loving Grace, is coming far sooner than many think.
If this is right, society is shortly going to need to confront many massive challenges. How will powerful AI systems reshape our jobs and economies? What kinds of opportunities for greater societal resilience will they give us? What kinds of threats will they magnify or introduce? What are the expressed “values” of AI systems and how will society help companies determine what the appropriate values are? And, if the recursive self-improvement of AI systems does begin to occur, who in the world should be made aware, and how should these systems be governed?
The Anthropic Institute’s goal is to tell the world what we’re learning about these challenges as we build frontier AI systems, and to partner with external audiences to help address the risks we must confront. Whether our societies are able to do so will determine whether or not transformative AI delivers the radical upsides that we believe are possible in science, economic development, and human agency.
The Institute is led by our co-founder Jack Clark, who will assume a new role as Anthropic’s Head of Public Benefit. It has an interdisciplinary staff of machine learning engineers, economists, and social scientists, bringing together and expanding three of Anthropic’s research teams: the Frontier Red Team, which stress-tests AI systems to understand the outermost limits of their current capabilities; Societal Impacts, which studies how AI is being used in the real world; and Economic Research, which tracks its impact on jobs and the larger economy. The Institute will also incubate new teams, and is currently working on efforts around forecasting AI progress and better understanding how powerful AI will interact with the legal system.
The Institute has a unique vantage point: it has access to information that only the builders of frontier AI systems possess. It will use this to its full advantage, reporting candidly about what we’re learning about the shape of the technology we’re making. At the same time, the Institute is a two-way street. It will engage with workers and industries facing displacement, and with the people and communities who feel the future bearing down on them but are unsure how to respond. What we learn will inform what the Institute studies, and how our company as a whole chooses to act.
The Anthropic Institute has made several founding hires:
Maria Curi, Axios; Anthropic sues Pentagon over rare "supply chain risk" label
"Anthropic on Monday sued the Pentagon, alleging its designation as a "supply chain risk" violates the company's First Amendment rights and exceeds the government's authority.
Why it matters: Supply chain risk designations are usually reserved for foreign adversaries that pose a national security risk — a punishment that could be hard for the government to square as it relied on Claude for operations in Iran.
State of play: The Pentagon last week designated Anthropic a supply chain risk, meaning companies must stop using Claude in cases directly tied to the department.
Anthropic is asking courts to undo the supply chain risk designation, block its enforcement and require federal agencies to withdraw directives to drop the company.
Willem Marx , NPR; OpenAI robotics leader resigns over concerns about Pentagon AI deal
"A senior member of OpenAI's robotics team has resigned, citing concerns about how the company moved forward with a recently announced partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense.
Caitlin Kalinowski, who served as a member of technical staff focused on robotics and hardware, posted on social media that she had stepped down on "principle" after the company revealed plans to make its AI systems available inside secure Defense Department computing systems...
In public posts explaining her decision, Kalinowski wrote: "I resigned from OpenAI. I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn't an easy call."
She said policy guardrails around certain AI uses were not sufficiently defined before OpenAI announced an agreement with the Pentagon. "AI has an important role in national security," Kalinowski wrote. "But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.""
Ken Harbaugh, The Atlantic; Anthropic’s Ethical Stand Could Be Paying Off
"The events of the past week reminded me of my early days as a Navy pilot nearly three decades ago. One of my first tasks was to sign a document pledging never to surveil American citizens. By the time of the 9/11 attacks, I was an aircraft commander, leading combat-reconnaissance aircrews that gathered large-scale intelligence and informed battlefield targeting decisions. I took for granted that somewhere along those decision chains, a human being was in the loop.
I could not have defined artificial intelligence then, but I understood instinctively that a person, not a machine, would bear the weight of life-and-death choices. This was not a bureaucratic consideration. It was a hard line that those of us in uniform were expected to hold.
In the standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon, a private company was forced to hold the line against its own government. In doing so, Anthropic may have earned something more valuable than the contract it lost. In an industry where trust is the scarcest resource, Anthropic just banked a substantial deposit."
Jackie Snow, Quartz; OpenAI, Anthropic, and the fog of AI war
"The rupture between the administration and Anthropic is nominally about guardrails. The company said it refused to let its tools be used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance and wouldn't budge when officials demanded blanket permission to use the technology in any lawful scenario. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the company couldn’t agree in good conscience. Trump responded by calling Anthropic a “radical-left, woke company” that would never dictate how the military fights.
Within hours of the ban, OpenAI announced a new deal to deploy its models in classified Pentagon settings. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman disclosed a notable detail: The agreement includes the same prohibitions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons that Anthropic had sought. The Pentagon, he wrote on X $TWTR 0.00%, “agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.”
So the company that got blacklisted and the company that got rewarded appear to have secured functionally similar terms. The difference is most likely politics, or more precisely, the perception of obedience this administration seems to require from the private sector. OpenAI’s president gave $25 million to a pro-Trump super PAC last year. Anthropic hired Biden administration officials and lobbied for AI regulation."
Joe Wilkins, Futurism; US Military Using Claude to Select Targets in Iran Strikes
"As the Wall Street Journal reported as the attacks unfolded the military strike force had a hand in selecting its targets from Anthropic’s Claude chatbot.
According to the paper, Anthropic’s large language model, Claude, is the key “AI tool” used by US Central Command in the Middle East. Its tasks include assessing intelligence, simulated war games, and even identifying military targets — in short, helping military leaders plan attacks that have already claimed hundreds of lives.
Anthropic’s role in the devastating attacks might come as news for anyone who thought the company’s ethical redlines precluded it from any military work whatsoever. The company and its CEO, Dario Amodei, have been roiled in a messy conflict with the Trump administration over two particular moral boundaries: the use of Claude for surveillance of US citizens, and for fully-autonomous, lethal weaponry.
It appears that using Claude to select targets, though, isn’t brushing up against the bot’s ethical guardrails.
That’s striking, because Anthropic has spent the latter part of February embroiled in conflict with the Pentagon over the use of Claude."
In response, US president Donald Trump on Friday directed all US federal agencies to cease using Anthropic’s technology, saying he would “never allow a radical left, woke company to dictate how our great military fights and wins wars!”
Hours later, rival AI lab OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) announced it had struck its own deal with the Department of Defense. The key difference appears to be that OpenAI permits “all lawful uses” of its tools, without specifying ethical lines OpenAI won’t cross.
What does this mean for military AI? Is it the end for the idea of “ethical AI” in warfare?"
David Nield , TechRadar ; 'No ethics at all': the 'cancel ChatGPT' trend is growing after OpenAI signs a deal with the US military
"After Claude developer Anthropic walked away from a deal with the US Department of War over safety and security concerns, OpenAI has decided to sign an agreement with the military – and ChatGPT users are far from happy about it.
As reported by Windows Central, a growing number of people are canceling their ChatGPT subscriptions and switching to other AI chatbots instead, including Claude. A quick browse of social media or Reddit is enough to see that there's a growing backlash to the move.
Some Redditors are posting guides to extracting yourself and your data from ChatGPT, while others are accusing OpenAI of having "no ethics at all" and "selling their soul" by agreeing to allow their AI models to be used by the US military complex."
Adam Gabbatt and Dara Kerr, The Guardian; OpenAI to work with Pentagon after Anthropic dropped by Trump over company’s ethics concerns
CEO Sam Altman claims military will not use AI product for autonomous killing systems or mass surveillance
"OpenAI said it had struck a deal with the Pentagon to supply AI to classified US military networks, hours after Donald Trump ordered the government to stop using the services of one of the company’s main competitors.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, announced the move on Friday night. It came after an agreement between Anthropic, a rival AI company that runs the Claude system, and the Trump administration broke down after Anthropic sought assurances its technology would not be used for mass surveillance – nor for autonomous weapons systems that can kill people without human input.
Announcing the deal, Altman insisted that OpenAI’s agreement with the government included assurances that it would not be used to those ends.
“Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems,” Altman wrote on X. He added that the Pentagon “agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement”.
Altman also said he hoped the Pentagon would “offer these same terms to all AI companies” as a way to “de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and toward reasonable agreements”."
Ross Douthat, The New York Times ; If A.I. Is a Weapon, Who Should Control It?
"We spent the Cold War worrying mostly about military folly, and A.I. entered into our anxieties even then: the Soviet Doomsday Machine in “Dr. Strangelove,” the game-playing computer in “WarGames” and of course the fateful “Terminator” decision to make Skynet operational.
But for the last few years, as A.I. advances have concentrated potentially extraordinary power in the hands of a few companies and C.E.O.s — themselves embedded in a Bay Area culture of science-fiction dreams and apocalyptic fears — it’s become more natural to worry more about private power and ambition, about would-be A.I. god-kings rather than presidents and generals.
Until, that is, the current collision between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, the artificial intelligence pioneer, over whether Anthropic’s A.I. models should be bound by the company’s ethical constraints or made available for all uses the Pentagon might have in mind."
Cade Metz , The New York Times; OpenAI Reaches A.I. Agreement With Defense Dept. After Anthropic Clash
"OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said on Friday that it had reached an agreement with the Pentagon to provide its artificial intelligence technologies for classified systems, just hours after President Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using A.I. technology made by rival Anthropic.
Under the deal, OpenAI agreed to let the Pentagon use its A.I. systems for any lawful purpose, a term required by the Pentagon. But OpenAI also said it had found a way to ensure that its technologies would adhere to its safety principles by installing specific technical guardrails on its systems."
Julian E. Barnes and Sheera Frenkel , The New York Times; Trump Orders Government to Stop Using Anthropic After Pentagon Standoff
"President Trump on Friday ordered all federal agencies to stop using artificial intelligence technology made by Anthropic, a directive that could vastly complicate government intelligence analysis and defense work.
Writing on Truth Social, Mr. Trump used harsh words for Anthropic, describing it as a “radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about.”
Shortly after Mr. Trump’s announcement, and 13 minutes after a Pentagon deadline, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designatedthe company a “supply-chain risk to national security.” The label means that no contractor or supplier that works with the military can do business with Anthropic.
The move is all but unheard-of, legal experts said. It strips an American company of its government work by using a process previously deployed only with foreign companies the United States considered security risks."
Adam Satariano, Julian E. Barnes and Sheera Frenkel , The New York Times; Pentagon Standoff Is a Decisive Moment for How A.I. Will Be Used in War
The Pentagon’s contract dispute with Anthropic is part of a wider clash about the use of artificial intelligence for national security and who decides on any safeguards.
"The fight between the Department of Defense and the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has ostensibly been about a $200 million contract over the use of A.I. in classified systems.
But as the two sides careen toward a 5:01 p.m. Friday deadlineover terms of the contract, far more is at stake.
Amid the legalese and heated rhetoric are questions being asked globally about how to use A.I., what the technology’s risks are and who gets to decide on setting any limits — the makers of A.I. or national governments.
Underlying it all is fear and awe over the dizzying pace of A.I. progress and the technology’s uncertain impact on society."
