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Amrith Ramkumar

👤 Speaker
190 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

Almost immediately, the tension started running hot.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

Around the same time, it's important to note that the Trump administration signed an executive order about woke AI that essentially implicitly was calling out Anthropic and others that they felt their models were too woke.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

And if you asked certain questions about how many genders there were or other things like that, you would get a woke response.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

And Anthropic was widely seen as a main target.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

And then right away, Anthropic and the military, there were discussions about what Claude could and couldn't be used for.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

And in Anthropic's terms of service, it states very clearly it cannot be used for anything related to domestic surveillance.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

And autonomous weapons is another red line that the company has drawn.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

It's been very hard, as you can imagine, to unearth too many details about how these models get used, but we are told they offer some benefits, especially in the planning stages of these different missions.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

So yes, this is one of the first times we know that a specific model was used in an operation like this where people died, and that was on a pretty large scale.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

Afterward, people at Anthropic started asking some questions about how and why and things of that nature.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

And then someone at Anthropic asked someone at Palantir how COD was used in Venezuela.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

And sort of the tone of the question and the substance set off alarm bells and the Department of Defense found out

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

Pete Hegseth, in a speech last month, he said essentially that we need AI tools that let us fight wars.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

And he was referring to Anthropic when he said that, we're told.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

So the Pentagon has sort of stayed at that spot.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

And they're continuing to say, like, we need every AI model that we work with to agree to be used in all waffle use cases.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

And that has to apply across the board.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

It's gotten pretty bad in the sense that the Pentagon has now threatened to label Anthropic a supply chain risk, which sounds pretty vague, but is actually a pretty big deal because that's something that's usually only used for companies associated with foreign adversaries.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

And if they'd go through with that, that would mean all Pentagon vendors and contractors would have to certify that they don't use Anthropix models in their government work.

The Journal.
Anthropic’s Pentagon Problems

So if you think about that, that means Anthropix's biggest investors and customers, they would all have to say, in the context of their government work with the Pentagon, Anthropix and Quad had nothing to do with this.