Meet Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, the brother & sister who are CEO and President of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic. They look like the kids who ran a lemonade stand down the street about five years ago. Instead of a lemonade stand, five years ago they left the company OpenAI and founded Anthropic. While at OpenAI, Dario was a product developer, and Daniela was head of the safety division. Anthropic is a privately-held company which produces Claude, widely regarded as the best AI engine on the market. Anthropic was recently valued at 380 billion dollars, in proportion to its most recent private equity offering.
The Pentagon has been in a public dispute with Anthropic regarding a $200 million contract for the use of an advanced version of the Claude AI. Anthropic insisted that the program not be used for two purposes: 1) mass Surveillance of US citizens, and 2) fully autonomous weapons targeting.
“We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties. To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI.”
“Partially autonomous weapons…are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons…may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk.”
The Pentagon insisted that Anthropic could put no restrictions on its use of the technology, and cancelled the contract. Further, in an act of retaliation, the Pentagon declared the Anthropic was a “Supply-Chain Risk”. President Trump issued an executive order calling on all U.S. government agencies to begin a 6-month’s phase-out of Anthropic’s products. If the designation of “Supply-Chain Risk” is formalized, it would also block companies with any Federal contracts from using Anthropic’s products.
Most large corporations perform some kind of service for the Federal Government. Blocking all of those companies would have a throttling impact on Anthropic’s ability to compete with OpenAI. Trump’s former AI advisor Dean Ball described the Trump administration's actions against Anthropic—specifically the Pentagon's supply chain risk designation—as "attempted corporate murder".
Within hours of cancelling the contract with Anthropic, the Pentagon signed a new contract with OpenAI to provide the same services. Incredibly, OpenAI issued a public statement that it would also refuse to provide services for autonomous weapons targeting or mass surveillance of Americans. Apparently, these issues were only pretexts for cancelling the Anthropic contract, and subsequent blacklisting of the company. OpenAI’s public statement included the following text:
“We have three main red lines that guide our work with the DoW, which are generally shared by several other frontier labs:
No use of OpenAI technology for mass domestic surveillance.
No use of OpenAI technology to direct autonomous weapons systems.
No use of OpenAI technology for high-stakes automated decisions (e.g. systems such as “social credit”).”
https://openai.com/index/our-agreement-with-the-department-of-war/
Oligarchy
There’s little doubt in my mind about the reason for the repression of Anthropic is the political orientation of their leaders. Sam Altman donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s Inauguration Committee. In 2024, Dario Amodei donated $214,000 to Democratic candidates, including Kamala Harris.
There is a class of oligarchs emerging in the United States, consisting of billionaires to centimillionaires. The oligarchs have taken control of a dismaying range of facets of American society. In media alone, oligarchs have taken control of a large portion of America’s major newspapers, news organizations, popular entertainment and social media sites.
In Russia in the early 2000s, the price of great wealth was allegiance to the political authority of Vladimir Putin. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of Russia’s largest oil company, had his company dismantled, his lawyers imprisoned and was himself imprisoned for a decade for politically opposing Putin.
Today, in the U.S., it appears that Trump and the Republican Party are acting as gatekeepers to the accumulation of great wealth. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and Patrick Soon-Shiong have all publicly aligned themselves with Trump, as well as other billionaires, such as Peter Theil, Miriam Adelson, Howard Lutnick, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and others who were already politically aligned. A dozen other billionaires have been appointed to high-level positions in the Trump administration.
The notion that political allegiance is necessary for business success is antithetical to the idea of American freedom. When one of America’s most promising businesses is crushed because of political donations, we have lost American freedom, and become a tyranny.
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