Trump blacklists Anthropic in AI battle
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Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. This edition is published in the early hours of Saturday, the 28th of February. President Trump orders US government agencies to stop doing business with Anthropic after the firm said it won't allow its AI model to be used for mass domestic surveillance or making fully autonomous weapons. The former US President Bill Clinton tells a congressional committee he did nothing wrong during his acquaintance with Jeffrey Epstein. And the American singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka has died aged 86.
I wrote a song, a rock and roll song called Mr. Moon. I played it in the school auditorium. The response from the kids was phenomenal. I realized then I liked the attention.
Also in the podcast, Argentina's President Javier Millet tries to scrap laws protecting glaciers from the mining industry. And the English Premier League is to launch its first direct-to-customer streaming platform next season. Should there be restrictions on how artificial intelligence is deployed on the battlefield? President Trump wants the US military to have the freedom to do what it likes with the technology. Anthropic, the US firm whose clawed AI assistant was reportedly used in the Venezuela raid last month, thinks there should be some red lines. It's refused to bow down to the Pentagon's demand that it lift all its restrictions. And so the US president has now ordered the government to stop doing business with the firm.
Our North America technology correspondent, Lily Chimali, told me how the row unfolded.
What we heard on Tuesday was that Dario Amodi, the CEO of Anthropic, and Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, now the Secretary of War, met and that during that meeting, Hegseth gave Amodi an ultimatum saying, you must basically give us unfettered access to this technology. You can't have any say in how it gets used. Now, that didn't sit well with the CEO of Anthropic because he has some red lines as to how he wants cloud to be used. He doesn't want to see it used for mass domestic surveillance. He doesn't want to see it used in the context of making final targeting decisions without human intervention. He dug in his heels again on Thursday. And here we are on Friday at a deadline that Hegsap had given him during that meeting at the Pentagon.
And now Trump is saying Anthropic is basically going to be removed from all government agency work.
So this is Anthropic wanting to put in guardrails for how its technology is used on the battlefield, the US government having none of it.
That's exactly right. And other companies in Silicon Valley, AI developers have been keeping a very close eye on this debate as it's unfolded. Before Trump's pronouncement, we heard from Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, which is the maker of ChatGPT, big competitor to Anthropic. He said that he agrees with Dario Amodi's red lines, even though Altman has been pretty friendly with the Trump administration and has done a couple of events with the president himself. We also heard from the Alphabet Workers Union, which represents workers at Google. There's been actually workers at a couple of Silicon Valley companies who have raised the red flag here. But the union said that they are worried that if Google were put in the same position as Anthropic has been, that they would actually capitulate.
And they wanted to have some clarity from Google as to what exactly its policy is. We have contacted Google and have not heard back.
Yeah, essentially, this is an argument over who has the final say over how AI is used.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–7:23
2
What led President Trump to blacklist Anthropic?
7:23–11:33
3
What are the implications of AI in military applications?
11:33–14:11
4
How does Anthropic's CEO respond to government demands?
14:11–32:45
5
What were the outcomes of the third round of nuclear negotiations with Iran?
32:45–33:36