Don’t bet that the Pentagon – or Anthropic – is acting in the public interest | Bruce Schneier and Nathan E Sanders

The lesson here isn't that one AI company is more ethical than another. It's that we must renovate our democratic structures

OpenAI is in and Anthropic is out as a supplier of AI technology for the US defense department. This news caps a week of bluster by the highest officials in the US government towards some of the wealthiest titans of the big tech industry, and the overhanging specter of the existential risks posed by a new technology powerful enough that the Pentagon claims it is essential to national security. At issue is Anthropic's insistence that the US Department of Defense (DoD) could not use its models to facilitate mass surveillance" or fully autonomous weapons," provisions the defense secretary Pete Hegseth derided as woke".

It all came to a head on Friday evening when Donald Trump issued an order for federal government agencies to discontinue use of Anthropic models. Within hours, OpenAI had swooped in, potentially seizing hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts by striking an agreement with the administration to provide classified government systems with AI.