nthropic’s saga with the Pentagon continues. Now, it has support.

On Monday, the AI firm sued the Department of Defense and other federal agencies for its recent designation as a supply chain risk, a retaliatory move that could cost the company billions, according to WIRED. The company isn’t fighting alone, however: A coalition of dozens of employees from OpenAI and Google filed an amicus brief in support of the company’s fight against the government.

The brief, which counts supporters such as Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, argues that the designation undermines competitiveness in the industry, stymies discussions of AI safeguards and will have rippling impacts on the industry at large.

“In the absence of public law, the contractual and technological requirements that AI developers impose on the use of their systems represent a vital safeguard against their catastrophic misuse,” the brief claims.

It’s the latest sign that tech workers are not taking the actions of their employers lightly.

• On Saturday, Caitlin Kalinowski, a robotics leader at OpenAI, announced that she resigned from the company after it had struck a deal with the Pentagon following the agency’s fallout with Anthropic. In a post on X, Kalinowski said surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons “are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got,” adding that her resignation is “about principle, not people.”

And in late February, a petition titled “We Will Not Be Divided” from AI workers supporting Anthropic's "red lines" has been signed by nearly 1,000 workers from OpenAI and Google. The petition calls on tech workers at frontier AI companies to stand together against the demands of the Department of War.

Our Deeper View

People like to think of tech companies as single, collective entities that all think and feel the same way about the work they do. However, the recent chaos around Anthropic has demonstrated that they are anything but. These employees clearly have opinions that differ from those of their employers about the gravity of the technology they’re building and how it should be handled. And given the current premium on AI talent, it’s clear that these employees have leverage. However, these examples are likely just the beginning. If the social movements and unionization campaigns from the last century are any indicator, real collective action will take more than a few hundred signatures. The question remains: How much support would it take to sway the decisions of the most powerful entities in AI?