The trap Anthropic built for itself

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and others have long promised to govern themselves responsibly. Now, in the absence of rules, there’s not a lot to protect them.

Friday afternoon, just as this interview was getting underway, a news alert flashed across my computer screen: the Trump administration was severing ties with Anthropic, the San Francisco AI company founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth soon after invoked a national security law to blacklist the company from doing business with the Pentagon after Amodei refused to allow Anthropic’s tech to be used for mass surveillance of U.S. citizens or for autonomous armed drones that could select and kill targets without human input.

It was a jaw-dropping sequence of events. Anthropic stands to lose a contract worth up to $200 million and could be barred from working with other defense contractors after President Trump posted on Truth Social directing every federal agency to “immediately cease all use of Anthropic technology.” (Anthropic has since said it will challenge the Pentagon in court.)