The standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon has forced the tech industry to once again grapple with the question of how its products are used for war – and what lines it will not cross. Amid Silicon Valley’s rightward shift under Donald Trump and the signing of lucrative defense contracts, big tech’s answer is looking very different than it did even less than a decade ago.
Anthropic’s feud with the Trump administration escalated three days ago as the AI firm sued the Department of Defense, claiming that the government’s decision to blacklist it from government work violated its first amendment rights. The company and the Pentagon have been locked in a months-long standoff, with Anthropic attempting to prohibit its AI model from being used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous lethal weapons.
Anthropic has argued that giving in to the DoD’s demands to permit “any lawful use” of its technology would violate its founding safety principles and open up its technology for potential abuse, staking an ethical boundary that others in the industry must decide whether they want to cross.
Although Anthropic’s refusal to remove safety guardrails and the Pentagon’s subsequent retaliation have highlighted longstanding concerns over the use of AI for conflict, the fight has shown how much the goal posts have moved when it comes to big tech’s ties to the military.
“If people are looking for good guys and bad guys, where a good guy is someone who doesn’t support war,” said Margaret Mitchell, an AI researcher and chief ethics scientist at the tech firm Hugging Face. “Then they’re not going to find that here.”
Anti-military protests to military contracts
There’s a number of contributing factors in big tech’s newfound embrace of militarism. Its alignment with the Trump administration, which has included shows of fealty to Trump from major CEOs, has tied tech firms to the government’s desire to expand its military capabilities. The administration’s vow to overhaul federal agencies using artificial intelligence has also specifically signaled an opportunity for AI firms to integrate their products into government and military operations in a way that could secure revenue for years to come. Looming in the background, concern over China’s technological advancement and a surge in international defense spending have also shifted attitudes in the industry.
It was not so long ago, however, that working with the military on potentially harmful technology was seen as a red line for many big tech workers. In 2018, thousands of Google employees launched a protest against a program to analyze drone footage for the DoD called Project Maven.
“We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” over 3,000 workers stated in an open letter at the time. Google decided not to renew Project Maven following the protests and published policies that barred pursuing technology that could “cause or directly facilitate…
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