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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
In theory, I knew that this kind of thing can happen in any family. Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals, and I wouldn't even call my cousin Alan an upstanding citizen. But it's one thing to know and another thing to understand. Alan, murder me? What the hell was Alan thinking?
From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Em Gessen, and this is The Idiot, out March 26th, wherever you get your podcasts. From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitro-Leff. This is The Daily. As the U.S. bombardment of Iran has escalated, it's become increasingly clear just how much the U.S. military has been relying on sophisticated artificial intelligence.
And that's made the Defense Department's bitter fight with the AI giant Anthropic over who controls that technology one of the most high-stakes strategic battles of our time. Today, my colleague Shira Frankel on the standoff between the Trump administration and Anthropic and what it really reveals about the future of warfare. It's Monday, March 9th.
Shira, it's wonderful to have you back on The Daily. Thank you for having me. So, as this war in the Middle East has progressed, we've been hearing more and more about the U.S. using AI in its attacks on Iran. It's one of the first times, really, where this technology is very clearly having a practical application for the U.S. military. We are seeing it in action. And at the same time,
In the background, there has been this ongoing bubbling battle over the use of that technology. So we're going to get into the specifics of all of that. But first, can you just lay out what this fight is fundamentally about? Well, this fight is so much bigger than one company and this particular moment with the Pentagon.
It's really about the future of warfare and the role that AI is going to play in war. Right now, in the Middle East, as the U.S. looks for targets to strike, it is using anthropics technology to analyze intelligence, analyze satellite imagery. And so in a sense, these private technology companies based in Silicon Valley and the Pentagon need each other more than ever.
But there's a question about how they're going to work together going forward. Mm-hmm. As we all hurdle towards this vision of robot wars, of AI-backed weapons, fighting AI-backed weapons, they're trying to figure out who gets to say what's safe and what's not. So on one side, you have these private Silicon Valley companies.
You have Anthropic, which is the first AI company that was authorized to work on classified US military systems. You have OpenAI, which is this behemoth of AI companies. You have longstanding companies like Google and Microsoft, which have AI divisions.
So you really have a number of very powerful companies in the Valley that want to do business with the Pentagon and are, in some cases, doing some business with the Pentagon, figuring out how to navigate that relationship. And on the other side, you have the Pentagon, which is thinking about this global AI arms race against China, Iran and Russia and how America is going to fare in that.
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Chapter 2: How is AI currently being used by the U.S. military?
And just to get a lay of the land here, can you just explain how the Pentagon is broadly making use of this technology? What function it plays? Yeah. So right now, AI plays a huge role in what's called SIGINT, or signals intelligence. What I mean by that is that the military at any given time is ingesting an incredible amount of data.
Text messages, postings on social media pages, phone calls, all of this is intelligence that's gathered by the military and then used to make critical decisions. Now, in the past, there was a room full of human beings that would have to sit there and analyze all this intelligence. But now we have AI and this is exactly what AI is really good at.
It ingests data and then it tells you, here's an important note you should take out of this. Here's my summary. Here's one phone call that's better than all the other phone calls that you should actually be listening to. And so this is critically important right now in the Middle East where we're seeing this AI technology being used.
But spinning forward, it's only going to become more important as AI gets better and better and the military wants to integrate it into more parts of its weapons arsenal. Okay, so a hugely important debate happening at a very important time. Just orient us, Shira. How did this whole fight start?
It actually starts in this very positive, optimistic way in that the Pentagon issues a call-out last year saying it wants to introduce AI. It invites all these AI companies to basically come into the military and show them how they can be helpful. How can the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, start integrating AI into its own systems? And they immediately get a lot of takers.
You've got Silicon Valley's biggest AI companies, Google, XAI, Anthropic, and OpenAI, all raise their hands and say, we want to participate. We want to work with the Pentagon. And of all the AI companies that begin working with the Pentagon... Anthropic Emerges is kind of the best and the most seamlessly integrated into the Pentagon systems.
It's working with Palantir, this data analytics company. It's one of the only ones that is approved to work on classified systems.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the Anthropic and Pentagon standoff?
And so people across the DoD tell us that it really quickly became absolutely fundamental to their work and made their lives easier. Okay, so I just want to pause here because from what I know of Anthropic, this is a company that brands itself as the socially responsible AI company, the company that emphasizes AI safety a lot.
And so it's just kind of interesting to me to hear that they were the first ones to be so embedded within the U.S. military. Yeah. That's true. This is a company that was founded by people who left OpenAI because they wanted a safer AI company. They said they wanted more safeguards. I mean, this is their entire premise and how they draw employees to work there.
What they also are, however, is a company that really believes in working with the government. We've seen their top executives say that they think AI can make our country safer. It can help the U.S. military defend against adversaries. They are, by all accounts, deeply patriotic as well.
And so while the two things don't seem to naturally go hand in hand, I think in the minds of their chief executives, at least from People that are sitting in the room with them, they say, yes, they wanted to work with the government, and they thought they could be the ones to do it safely. Okay, so that explains why, at this point in the story, all sides are working well together.
When do things start to change? Things start to change on January 9th, when the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hexeth, comes out with this pretty big memo. And he tells the military, he tells everyone across Silicon Valley that things are about to change. AI is critical for the future of warfare. China is developing AI weapons. Russia is developing AI weapons. If the U.S.
wants to be competitive, AI has to be at the center of everything, from autonomous weapons like drones or fighter jets that have no pilots to data systems. And this kicks off a need for new contracts with all the AI companies, and they do what companies do.
Their lawyers start sending contracts back and forth with the Pentagon's lawyers, trying to figure out how they can come to some sort of new agreement about this. And how does that go? They have differences. They have things that they're trying to figure out.
But it's all sort of happening quietly behind the scenes when all of a sudden something happens that ends up escalating tensions between Anthropic and the Pentagon. News reports emerged that Anthropic's Claude technology was used as part of the capture of Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela's leader. Right. I remember when that came out.
It was this surprising moment to find out that an AI model was used to do something like that, like this very on-the-ground operation that involved boots on the ground and lots of planning. AI was in the middle of it. Yeah, I mean, I think it was even surprising, confusing for people who work at Anthropic, who did not know if their technology was used in the Maduro raid.
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Chapter 4: What sparked the conflict between Anthropic and the Pentagon?
To try to do damage control, it sounds like, with his own employees. Exactly.
And we've seen him announce subsequently that he may have made a mistake rushing too quickly into a deal with the Pentagon and that he's actually sought new language now around the mass surveillance of Americans and other assurances so that his employees will not be as upset as they have been in the last few days about this contract with the Pentagon.
So where this stands now is that you have two of Silicon Valley's largest companies basically battling it out over what safe AI looks like. On one hand, you have Sam Altman, OpenAI, and his version of working with the Pentagon. On the other, you have Dario Amadei and Anthropic saying, this is how we think safe AI should play out.
And Shira, through all this, it's clear that both companies are trying to win the optics battle in all of this. Both are claiming the mantle of safety, asserting or reassuring people, their own employees, that that's what they care about. But I just want to push on what they actually mean by that, by safety.
Because when we were talking earlier about the red lines, Anthropic insisting that its model shouldn't be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons, they were saying their models just aren't ready yet. They're still error prone. And so it sounds like they're arguing it's not safe to use their model in those ways now. Right.
But do you think these companies are opposed to those models being used for mass surveillance, for autonomous weapons ever? No. I think ultimately these companies are well aware that the way the world is headed is that AI is going to be at the center of pretty much everything the government does. From surveillance to weapon systems, AI is going to play a role. Right.
You also have to remember these companies are really competitive. They're technologists who love what they do. They love the future of AI. And so there's also sort of a personal vested interest in making the AI good enough to play this really central role across the government. Right. I mean, and there's billions at stake, we should say, in this industry being invested.
These companies are locked into competition with each other. And there's no going back, is what you're saying. There is no going back. When you speak to some of these technologists, they describe what the world looks like in the future. And honestly, depending how much sci-fi you've read in your life, that is a very attractive vision or a really... scary vision of the future.
So they look forward and they imagine a war in which there's no human soldier on the battlefield. Where back in Washington or wherever on some military base, there's a guy with a headset who's controlling a fleet of drones or submarines or fighterless jets. And they're fighting against another nation state, which has very much the same.
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