veryone’s got an opinion on Anthropic’s face-off with the Pentagon.

The past few days have brought a deluge of news and updates as the government continues to blacklist the AI firm, with its technology now being shut out of the US Treasury and the federal housing agency, along with the military. The company’s designation as a supply chain risk marks an unprecedented retaliatory move by the government, and risks chilling future contracts between tech companies and federal agencies.

If you’re trying to sort out the situation, The Deep View has picked three of the most poignant and viral essays published in recent days:

• “Clawed,” By Dean W. Ball for Hyperdimensional. In this long-form piece, Ball makes the argument that the fight between Anthropic and the U.S. government is indicative of a “death rattle of the old republic.” The fight also marks one of the first times the question of who should control AI has been debated in the public eye, and the government got off on “extraordinarily bad footing” in the argument.
• “Anthropic and Alignment,” by Ben Thompson for Stratechery. Thompson argues that Anthropic’s insistence on designating how its models can be used is “fundamentally misaligned with reality,” claiming that it is intolerable for corporate executives to supersede the decisions of elected officials.
• “A Few Observations on AI Companies and Their Military Usage Policies,” by Sarah Shoker for fishbowlificiation. Shoker, former leader of OpenAI’s geopolitics team, takes a broader view of the subject, pointing out that frontier AI labs don’t have coherent policies around military AI use, which has allowed these firms to live in a vague grey area of “optionality.” Additionally, the use of AI in military action is largely opaque due to policy, disinformation and the fog of war creating “black boxes" all around.

Even Deep View readers have strong thoughts on the topic: In our daily poll, we asked “should Anthropic have acquiesced to the Pentagon’s request to remove safety restrictions,” to which 78.8% responded “No.”

Our Deeper View

This situation has made one reality abundantly clear: AI will impact our society and future in monumental ways. The fight between the US Government and Anthropic is about more than just one company or one contract. Instead, it boils down to power, for the first time putting on public display “the nexus of control over frontier AI,” as Ball’s essay notes. In the end, the one who controls the technology effectively controls the future.