The Pentagon’s attack on Anthropic over the military use of AI has fractured the fragile truce that has reigned between Silicon Valley and Donald Trump’s administration for much of the president’s second term.
The dissent began with Dean Ball, a former Trump official who last year wrote much of the administration’s AI Action Plan. He excoriated the decision to brand Anthropic a supply chain risk, calling it “by a profoundly wide margin the most damaging policy move I have ever seen”.
Since then, Microsoft and trade groups representing Apple, Meta, OpenAI, Amazon and Google have written to the president or signed punchy legal briefs urging US courts to side with Anthropic after the start-up refused to give the American military unconstrained access to its models.