Air Force pushing contractors to purge Anthropic by Sept. 1: Memo
The Pentagon's new target is to remove Anthropic department-wide by end of September, even as the AI titan is suing the government to overturn it.
The Pentagon's new target is to remove Anthropic department-wide by end of September, even as the AI titan is suing the government to overturn it.
By imposing export controls on the bug-hunting AI Mythos/Fable 5, the Commerce Department has complicated the Pentagon’s already fraught relationship with Anthropic.
The “National Security Presidential Memorandum” urges closer collaboration with AI companies — as long as they’re compliant with Pentagon demands — and orders a sweeping revision of Biden-era guardrails on military AI.
The EO creates a “voluntary framework” for AI developers to give the government early access to their latest tech.
Mythos is just the first of a new generation of AIs that can patch vulnerable code at superhuman speed, said Pentagon CTO Emil Michael and Cyber Policy chief Katie Sutton, downplaying the uniqueness of Anthropic.
The Defense Department has made agreements with Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, SpaceX, and Reflection, according to an announcement this morning, with an eighth, Oracle, added just hours later.
"The record strongly suggests that the reasons given for designating Anthropic a supply chain risk were pretextual and that [the government’s] real motive was unlawful retaliation," said Judge Rita Lin.
“Anthropic’s got a strong case, stronger than it should … primarily because the President’s made ‘admissions against interest’” on social media, attorney Sean Timmons told Breaking Defense.
“We've already deployed OpenAI in the last few weeks, and we're going to deploy the others here, [starting] with Gemini," Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael said.
This week on The Weekly Break Out, we talk Iran developments and the latest in the back-and-forth between Anthropic and the Pentagon.
CEO Dario Amodei said he would still sue to overturn the designation of Anthropic as a “supply chain risk,” but he said the company was “having productive conversations with the Department of War” — which Pentagon CTO Emil Michael promptly denied.
Anthropic had refused a Pentagon ultimatum to lift internal policies safeguarding against the use of its AI for lethal autonomous weapons or for mass domestic surveillance.
The Pentagon has threatened to deem the AI firm a supply chain risk, something CEO Dario Amodei says is contradictory.
"What we're not going to do is let any one company dictate a new set of policies above and beyond what Congress has passed," Under Secretary Emil Michael said of the ongoing impasse between the Pentagon and Anthropic.