Amrith Ramkumar

In particular, these executives and researchers are worried about gene synthesis screening, which is when companies order synthetic DNA and RNA, a key step to developing certain vaccines and biotech breakthroughs that can also be used to develop new pathogens and bioweapons.

Many people see biological risks as the next frontier in protecting against AI threats.

Congress is under pressure in general because lawmakers haven't passed any significant AI legislation.

Earlier this week, President Trump signed an executive order largely focused on cybersecurity and model oversight of powerful tools before they're released.

But a lot of experts say there's more to be done in the area of biology.

Companies that choose to work with the Pentagon, as long as it is going to comply with legal protections and the sort of the few red lines that the field we have, I think we share with Anthropic and that other companies also independently agree with.

I think it is important to do that.

For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company, and I think they really do care about safety, and I've been happy that they've been supporting our warfighters.

I'm not sure where this is going to go.

The Defense Technology Summit in Florida on Tuesday was really a gathering of some top Pentagon officials and people in the tech world.

And the motivation is to embed the most advanced technology throughout the U.S.

military.

And that was the AI company Anthropic and the use of its tools in the military.

And it's the latest sort of development in this saga that's consumed a lot of Washington.

They are clashing with the Pentagon over how the military uses quad, Anthropic's AI models.

And Anthropic is trying to put up some guardrails and prevent some uses.

And they've been fighting over that for many months now.

This fight is really about AI's use in the military and the government broadly.

It's about whether the technology can be used for, in the future, autonomous weapons potentially, or for surveillance and law enforcement.

And that has far-reaching consequences that will probably not be clear for a while.