At the Pentagon, OpenAI is In and Anthropic Is Out
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Casey, where are you? That beautiful background does not look like your house.
I'm in a ski chalet, in keeping with the hard fork tradition of recording bonus episodes in the strangest places possible. But here's the good news, Kev, because while I was invited on a ski trip, I've never in my life had any intention to ski. And so my plans for this morning were either to talk about AI with my fiance or talk about AI with you. And we flipped the coin and it's you. How are you doing this morning?
Wow, I feel so honored. Well, we have a lot to talk about today because it has been a very crazy 48-hour period in the AI industry and this dispute between the Pentagon and Anthropic and now OpenAI sort of came out of nowhere at the 11th hour and is now involved. It has been truly an insane day and a half in my life. How has it been for you?
Well, let me put it this way, listeners. Kev, imagine you get engaged, and then one week later, your fiancé is declared a supply chain risk. So, yeah, it's been a really, really crazy few hours over here as well.
And just because we are going to talk about Anthropic and OpenAI and all of this today, we should make our AI disclosures. Mine is that I work for The New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity over alleged copyright violations.
Yes. And if you missed the other big breaking anthropic story from over the past week, the man that I am now engaged to works there.
Well, where should we start, Casey?
Well, look, I think if you're tuning in, maybe you've heard the biggest headlines, but I think it's worth hitting you with maybe just a few key bullet points. One is that in the story that we've been covering over the past couple of episodes, it has come to the point of crisis where where Anthropic said it had two red lines that it would not cross. The Pentagon said that it was going to move to declare the company a supply chain risk. And then somehow, within 24 hours of that happening, Sam Altman and OpenAI swooped in and signed a deal that they say will observe those safeguards. And so it was just a truly chaotic 24 hours, and we should dig into it.
Yes, and none of this has been happening through like normal diplomatic channels. Basically, as far as I can tell, the entirety of this conflict has been contained in like a handful of posts on X and a handful of blog posts and some stuff that has been leaking out from either side. So I have been making calls for the last two days to the people who are involved in this situation trying to get some information. And I've gotten a little bit and I'll happily share that with you. But I would say confusion reigns like no one, even the people who are directly involved in this situation are confused about the details here. And so I think we should also just say up front that like there is still a lot that is unknown about what's going on right now.
Absolutely. Maybe to start, Kevin, we could go back to a part of the story that I think is pretty well known, which is just sort of what happened between Anthropic and the Pentagon, particularly in those final hours where the Pentagon finally said, hey, this isn't going to work. We're not going to give you what you want. And time ran out and they did not come to an agreement.
Yeah, this escalation started on Thursday, February 26th, when basically there was a day left until this deadline that the Pentagon had given Anthropic. And Dario Amadei, the CEO of Anthropic, put out a statement on Anthropic's website basically saying, we are not going to compromise no matter what on these two exceptions that we want, mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. He explained why they weren't going to compromise on those.
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