Sam Altman backs rival Anthropic in fight with Pentagon

OpenAI boss Sam Altman has weighed in to the deepening row between the US Department of Defense and rival AI company, Anthropic, throwing his support behind his competitor.

Altman said in a note to staff that he had the same "red lines" as Anthropic boss Dario Amodei, who has refused to give the Pentagon unfettered access to the firm's AI tools.

In the note seen by the BBC, Altman said any OpenAI contracts for defence would also reject uses that were "unlawful or unsuited to cloud deployments, such as domestic surveillance and autonomous offensive weapons".

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has threatened Amodei with retaliation if the tech boss insists on limiting how Anthropic is used.

In a meeting with Amodei on Tuesday Hegseth appeared to make two contradictory threats.

He said he would invoke the Defense Production Act, allowing the government to use Anthropic's products as it saw fit.

He also said he would deem Anthropic a "supply chain risk," meaning the company would be labelled not secure enough for government use.

Anthropic has said it objects to the potential for its AI tools including Claude to be used by the government in two ways: "mass domestic surveillance" and "fully autonomous weapons."

The Department of Defense (DoD) has said it is not asking to use Anthropic for either of those purposes. However, it wants the company to accept "any lawful use" of its tools.

There are few laws in the US that deal with AI tool and capabilities.

Emil Michael, a former Uber executive who now serves as Undersecretary of Defence, posted on X a number of times the night following Amodei's rejection of Hegseth's pressure. He made personal attacks against the executive and claimed Anthropic's decision was an attempt to grab government power.

"Dario Amodei wants to override Congress and make his own rules to defy democratically decided laws," Michael wrote in one post.

However, within the tech community there is mounting support for Anthropic's leader.

Altman's internal memo added that the way the government is reacting to Anthropic's safety concerns "risks our national security, and also risks the government resorting to actions which could risk American leadership in AI. We would like to try to help de-escalate things."

Amodei was an early employee of OpenAI. He and a handful of other OpenAI employees left the company to found Anthropic after disagreements with Altman.

The two startups now compete directly for users and corporate customers with an evolving offer of AI chatbots, agents and other tools.

"I do not fully understand how things got here; I do not know why Anthropic did their deal with the Pentagon and Palantir in the way they originally did it," Altman wrote.

"But regardless of how we got here, this is no longer just an issue between Anthropic and the DoW; this is an issue for the whole industry and it is important to clarify our stance."

Anthropic in 2024 entered in to a partnership with Palantir, a major government contractor, allowing Claude to be used within Palantir's government products.

The Department of War (DoW) is a secondary name for the Defence Department under an executive order signed by US President Donald Trump in September.

Altman said OpenAI was also "going to see if there is a deal with the DoW that allows our models to be deployed in classified environments and that fits with our principles."

A former official with the DoD, who asked not to be named, told the BBC that Anthropic appeared to have the upper hand in the fight.

"This is great PR for them and they simply do not need the money," the former official said.

Anthropic's work with the Pentagon is part of a contract worth $200 million. The company's most recent valuation came earlier this month and put the company's worth at $380 billion, based on its current revenue and future expected earnings.

The former official added that the DoD's basis for threatening Anthropic with invoking either the Defense Production Act and being labeled a supply chain risk was "extremely flimsy".

Should Hegseth make good on either threat, Anthropic could in theory sue the Defence Department or individuals working within the agency.

On Friday morning, groups representing roughly 700,000 tech workers within Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, all companies that have their own contracts with the Defence Department, signed an open letter urging the companies they worked for to also "refuse to comply" with the Pentagon's demands.

"Tech workers are united in our stance that our employers should not be in the business of war," the elected Executive Board of the Alphabet Workers Union said in a separate statement.

The union also expressed concern that Google would capitulate to the Pentagon's demands if the tech giant found itself in a similar position to Anthropic.

The BBC has requested a response to those concerns from Google.