The Future of Warfare: Anthropic vs OpenAI
episodePreviously titled “The Future of Warfare: Anthropic vs Open AI” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 4, 2026
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thanks for listening to The Rest Is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com. Hi, Rory here. With so much happening in the world of AI this week, both AI-powered attacks on Iran with Astropix fight with the Pentagon, I've been very lucky to be able to sit down with Matt Clifford again in our exclusive AI miniseries, where we will be talking about defense, security, geopolitics, and even some practical tips on how AI can improve your business. So please sign up at therestispolitics.com to join our member series and listen to the discussion between me and Matt and all the other content that we produce.
A lot of our conversations over the last few episodes, you have brought back to geopolitics, and in particular, the changing and challenging relationship between Europe and the United States under President Trump. I'm really intrigued by how you think about the core principles that are at stake in this Anthropic DoD deal. And the reason I want to do it is that I think right now, because Anthropic is the liberal coded, slightly European, hence the question that we answered. But a lot of people are like, this is outrageous. This is DOD trying to overturn reasonable ethical company drawing red lines around the product.
What are the implications of AI on modern warfare?
But I want to do a thought experiment for you, which is imagine Kamala Harris has been elected. Elon Musk says, of course you can use Starlink in defense. By the way, no one else has anything like it. But here are my red lines about how you're going to use it. And they're deeply ethically based. And in particular, my number one issue is I don't want it used for anything that could increase the likelihood of a nuclear event in Ukraine. And therefore you're not going to use it for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think the same people who are protesting now that Hegsath's overstep would be saying, Why should a private company be setting red lines over what a democratically elected government does with the technology?
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think at some level, the philosophical position that Hegsworth holds, which is that if you bought a bit of kit and you're a military, you want to be able to deploy it and you don't want someone stopping you deploying it. It's absolutely right. But actually, as you've pointed out with Musk, and as the Saudis found out when they bought some very expensive American airplanes and tried to use them in Yemen, and indeed as we found in the Ukraine war where Trump suddenly instructs American companies who we've contracted with not to provide things, or as indeed as the US found when it took on China and China suddenly announced it was going to stop all exports of rare earths, nobody really has sovereignty.
Not even... not even the Secretary of War is actually able to instruct without having a lot of friction of various other actors saying what he can and can't do. And that's partly because of all these things that you've talked about. The more complicated these systems become, the more dependencies you have. I mean, if what you've purchased is a hand grenade. Nobody can stop you using a hand grenade. I mean, it's basically the explosives in the thing. You pull the panel and you chuck it, right? It's gone. And the person who sold it, you can't do anything about it. But increasingly, what we're talking about is defense companies. And we saw this in Afghanistan. It was extraordinary. What really happened to the Afghan military was not the US decision to withdraw 5,000 troops.
It was that the US withdrew about 20,000 contractors, many of whose jobs were about doing the software updates on the helicopters and who sat in these bases. And as soon as they were removed, all these helicopters and planes that the Afghan Air Force had bought were complete useless because they basically needed a software engineer tinkering with them every time they landed. And if they didn't get that, they couldn't take off again, right?
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