Report from Politico
In Brief – A three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the Pentagon can blacklist AI company Anthropic for the Department of Defense and its contractors. Two judges found that the agency had sufficient grounds to designate the company’s products as a supply-chain risk under a 2018 national security law that allows federal agencies to bar companies from doing business with the government when their products could be sabotaged by “any person”. They noted that Anthropic’s models contain restrictions preventing them from performing certain tasks, and that the 2018 law, unlike other similar statutes, did not require finding that the company was an adversary or held malicious intent. The standoff arose after Anthropic insisted on contract terms prohibiting their AI tools from being used for autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance, while the Pentagon insisted that its AI tools needed to be available for all legal applications. Anthropic said it disagrees with the decision in the DC Circuit and noted that a federal judge in California recently sided with the company.
Context – Although the second Trump Administration has been strongly pro-AI, cracks are building at home based on increasing public anxiety, a vocal cadre of anti-Big Tech conservatives, and a culture of sci-fi AI dystopia. Despite rejecting formal government oversight of AI models, the Administration intervened to temporarily block the release of an advanced Anthropic model and is calling for the top companies to voluntarily allow government security reviews. Anthropic’s vocally progressive leadership is clearly seen as troublesome because opposing “Woke AI” is a priority across the Trump orbit. Furthermore, CEO Dario Amodei has called for a coordinated slowdown in AI development and an antitrust exemption allowing for safety collaboration, which the DOJ’s top antitrust official said probably wasn’t needed, while David Sacks, a top AI policy advisor to President Trump, argued that building safe and reliable AI models was just good business. However, Trump sometimes woos critics, and Amodei recently dined with him and joined a major AI industry leader White House lunch.