That’s a famous line from perennial presidential candidate Ralph Nader from more than 20 years ago, and it echoes back to what Greek general Pericles said around 420 BCE. Politics will find and change you, whether you want it to or not. Which brings us to Anthropic.
Anthropic—valued at $380 billion, with a deluge of Silicon Valley’s most prominent investors on its cap table—is in what my colleague Jeremy Kahn calls “the biggest crisis in its five-year existence.” The company’s been in an all-out battle with the Pentagon, a standoff that goes something like this: Anthropic has refused to allow its tech to be used around mass surveillance or lethal autonomous weapons. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth didn’t accept this, saying that technology should be used for “any lawful purpose.” And Anthropic didn’t yield.
Cue the cascade of consequences: The Pentagon terminated its $200 million contract with Anthropic and labeled the LLM giant a “supply chain risk.” This is possibly “serious blow to Anthropic’s business” and has no precedent, as Jeremy points out:
Legal and policy experts said the government’s unprecedented decision presents profound questions about the relationship between the government and business in the U.S. It is the first time the U.S. has ever designated an American company a supply chain risk, and the first time the designation has been used in apparent retaliation for a business not agreeing to certain contractual terms. Anthropic said in a statement Friday that it would take legal action to try to overturn the Pentagon’s designation.
