Rob Wiblin

It's not just hypocrisy, though.

I count at least three distinct charges critics have levelled at Anthropic and people who support them in their dispute with the Pentagon.

I mentioned the hypocrisy charge, but there's a separate accusation of naivete, that when you're building something as powerful as AI, the state will inevitably crush you if you try to set conditions on their use of it.

And so Anthropic was in the wrong to pick this fight.

And third, there's an accusation of being undemocratic, that a private company has no business telling the elected government what it can and can't do with military technology.

I'm going to take each of these charges seriously and explain where I think they go wrong and why.

Let's dive in.

Let's start with hypocrisy because it's the charge I hear most often and the most straightforward of the three.

Just to quickly jog your memory about the dispute we're talking about.

Anthropic had a contract with the Pentagon that included two restrictions on the use of their AI.

No mass domestic surveillance and no decisions to kill people made by artificial intelligence alone.

The Trump administration demanded those restrictions be removed, Anthropic refused, and rather than merely ending the contract, which people by and large agree would have been fine, Secretary of War and Defense Pete Hegseth declared Anthropic a supply chain risk, a designation previously used only for foreign adversaries, in so doing threatening the company's ability to do much business in the United States at all.

The case to overturn that designation has attracted support from expected allies and unexpected ones alike, including Antarctic's competitors OpenAI and Microsoft, as well as conservative technology experts, who for the most part otherwise agree with the Trump administration's approach to AI.

For years, people in the AI safety world, absolutely including me, have argued that frontier AI is too important and too dangerous to leave entirely in the hands of private companies.

We've called for government oversight, safety standards, a wide range of different things.

So the hypocrisy logic runs.

You want a government control of AI.

Well, now you've got government control of AI, so why complain?

But state the obvious.

Supporting public oversight of frontier AI training doesn't require you to support the government's strong-arming a company into allowing its product to be used for domestic mass surveillance.