Heather Somerville

We are expecting to hear Anthropic talk about how the Pentagon has retaliated against its first free speech and its speech should be protected under the First Amendment.

It's going to talk about how the Pentagon's behavior and actions have already detrimentally impacted its business and its ability to raise money from investors has been negatively impacted.

What the U.S.

government has said in its response is that it is well within its right.

It has the discretion to declare anthropic a supply chain risk and that the government's actions are not retaliatory.

They have nothing to do with free speech, but they have to do with this building mistrust of anthropic and a fear that anthropic, if it has access to resources,

The Pentagon's wartime infrastructure can meddle with the AI models, can put limitations on its technology, can create changes to the AI that's been deployed that will negatively affect U.S.

national security.

We have companies in Silicon Valley that are using AI and machine learning to try to improve outcomes from mining.

There's one company in particular that I profiled, Brimstone, out here in Oakland, focusing on producing critical minerals out of rocks that are abundant and cheap.

So the idea is if you can get...

a whole bunch of cheap rocks easily and produce these critical minerals that we need and China dominates, the U.S.

might have a shot at producing economically some of these pretty precious materials that we are lacking.

And it's focused on aluminum, magnesium, titanium to start.

Other companies that we've looked at are focused on

Antimony, which is a rare earth that is essential to a lot of critical industries.

And there's other companies that are focused on rare earth magnets.

Who is funding these startups?

It's private and public money.

On the private capital side, there's venture capital interest for the first time that I've ever seen in this space.