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The fight between Anthropic and the Pentagon looks at first like a fight about AI safety — a principled tech company drawing ethical lines in the sand. It is at least partly that. But it’s also a First Amendment case.
It’s a test of whether the executive branch can summarily execute its vendors for “noncompliance.” It’s an investor risk story for everyone who put hundreds of billions into AI companies on the assumption that the U.S. government would be a customer, not a corporate murderer. And it’s a dress rehearsal for every painful question that humanity hasn't figured out how to answer about the most powerful information technology it has ever built.
What’s the legal status of AI? Who’s in charge of it? When — not if — something goes wrong, who’s responsible?
In other words, this fight is even bigger than it looks. And it’s even stranger than it seems.
