“This is about the principle of standing up for what’s right,” said Dario Amodei, CEO of artificial intelligence company Anthropic, which has found itself at the center of a new kind of firestorm. What’s wrong, in his opinion, is why the AI company he co-founded did what it did. banned by the federal government.
“Given what we have done for the national security of the United States, this feels extremely punitive and inappropriate.”
Anthropic created Claude, an AI chatbot that can be used at work or school. Since last summer, the government version has been deeply integrated into the Pentagon’s military intelligence and classified operations. Last week, ahead of the attack on Iran, the Pentagon demanded that the AI be turned over to Anthropic without restrictions for legitimate military use. The company refused.
“We have these two red lines,” Amodei said. “We’ve accepted that from day one. We still insist on that red line. We’re not going to walk along that red line.”
What about that red line? It does not allow Anthropic’s AI to carry out mass surveillance of American citizens and prohibits its AI from powering fully autonomous weapons without human involvement.
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“We’re not showing the kind of judgment that a human soldier would show, whether it’s fighting each other or shooting civilians or just the wrong kind of thing. We don’t want to sell something that we don’t think we can trust, and we don’t want to sell something that could potentially kill our own people, or potentially kill innocent people,” Amodei said.
It’s a question of who should control the most advanced technology ever created: private technology companies or the federal government?
Asked if he thought Anthropic knew better than the Department of Defense, Amodei said: “One of the things about free markets and free enterprise is that different people can offer different products under different principles. Our model has individuality. It can do certain things. It can certainly do certain things. do not have Make sure you do certain things. And I think we can make good judgments about what the model can reliably do and what it cannot reliably do. ”
After weeks of talks, President Trump on Friday Directed the U.S. government to cease all use of Anthropic’s AI.canceled more than $200 million in federal contracts. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth Humanity is classified as a “supply chain risk to national security” – A first for an American company.
Asked about the president calling Anthropic a “woke company on the left,” Amodei said, “I can’t speak to what the other political parties are doing, what they’re doing. … But I think we’ve tried to be very neutral. So what about the idea that we were somehow partisan, or that we weren’t equal? We were passionately equal.”
The Trump administration’s actions regarding Anthropic have been called an abuse of power by critics. Asked if he agreed, Amodei said: “Again, it goes back to the idea that this is unprecedented.”
But is that an abuse of power? “This has never happened before,” he said. “A designation like this has never happened before in an American company. And I think it was made very clear in some of their statements, some of their language, that this is retaliatory and punitive. I don’t know what else to call it. Retaliatory and punitive.”
As Amodei and Anthropic face government bans, his main rival, Sam Altman of OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT), signed his own Pentagon contract on Friday.
Amodei said Anthropic plans to take legal action. “All we saw was the president’s tweet and Secretary Hegseth’s tweet,” he said. And Mr. Anthropic wants to stay at the table and have a conversation, he says.
Asked what he would say to President Trump, Amodei said: “We are patriotic Americans. Everything we’ve done has been for this country and to support the national security of the United States. We believe in defeating our authoritarian enemies. We believe in defending America.”
“We drew the red line because we believe that crossing that red line is contrary to American values.” “Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world. And we are patriots. In everything we’ve done here, we’ve defended the values of this country.”
Story produced by David Rothman. Editor: George Pozderek.
