I had thought that OpenAI, xAI, and GDM might leave Anthropic to face the music on their own. Then we got word of a petition signed by numerous GDM staff and about a dozen OpenAI staff, urging their employers to draw the same red lines as Anthropic, and I wondered if this was actually about xAI and Trump 2.0 against everyone else. Now we hear that xAI has in fact already agreed to everything the Pentagon wants, but Grok is not considered as capable or reliable as the other AIs.
I’m not sure how it will all turn out. But it reminds me most of when Trump 2.0 started putting pressure on the elite universities via their funding. The administration had turned its attention to a particular class of powerful institutions, made public demands of them all, and they each responded in their own way—Harvard resisted, Columbia folded. Now it’s the turn of the frontier AI companies to be confronted.
In my opinion, the significance extends beyond internal US affairs and even beyond conflicts of the moment, such as a possible war with Iran, to the whole nature of the “Pax Silica” grouping which seems to be the first truly AI-driven geopolitical association, since these four companies are at the hub of it all, and what’s being determined is their relationship to US hard power.
Now that war with Iran has actually started, I feel that this must have also been a factor in how Trump 2.0 tackled the situation with Anthropic. If Anthropic really did express misgivings about the use of Claude in the capture of Venezuela’s Maduro, the Pentagon must have been concerned about what Anthropic could get up to during a war with Iran, a far larger operation.
I have no understanding of where and how frontier AI is playing a role in this war, but I wonder if any agency involved has already switched from Claude to “WarGPT”? I have yet to use an interface like OpenClaw, but I would guess that it’s pretty easy to change the model you’re using. Maybe it’s only hard to change over, if you’re using a finetuned model like a custom GPT.
If your have an agent that’s works, you wouldn’t want to switch it’s model and get potentially more bugs right in the moment you start a war. The alternative models like the open sourced models from Meta that they have are likely worse than the frontier models they access from Anthropic and there might be performance degradation that you don’t want to discover the moment you are waging war.
I would expect that the generals who are actually using the technology don’t like it when they are told from above that they have to now start the 6-month process of moving off them when they would rather focus on the war.
I had thought that OpenAI, xAI, and GDM might leave Anthropic to face the music on their own. Then we got word of a petition signed by numerous GDM staff and about a dozen OpenAI staff, urging their employers to draw the same red lines as Anthropic, and I wondered if this was actually about xAI and Trump 2.0 against everyone else. Now we hear that xAI has in fact already agreed to everything the Pentagon wants, but Grok is not considered as capable or reliable as the other AIs.
I’m not sure how it will all turn out. But it reminds me most of when Trump 2.0 started putting pressure on the elite universities via their funding. The administration had turned its attention to a particular class of powerful institutions, made public demands of them all, and they each responded in their own way—Harvard resisted, Columbia folded. Now it’s the turn of the frontier AI companies to be confronted.
In my opinion, the significance extends beyond internal US affairs and even beyond conflicts of the moment, such as a possible war with Iran, to the whole nature of the “Pax Silica” grouping which seems to be the first truly AI-driven geopolitical association, since these four companies are at the hub of it all, and what’s being determined is their relationship to US hard power.
Now that war with Iran has actually started, I feel that this must have also been a factor in how Trump 2.0 tackled the situation with Anthropic. If Anthropic really did express misgivings about the use of Claude in the capture of Venezuela’s Maduro, the Pentagon must have been concerned about what Anthropic could get up to during a war with Iran, a far larger operation.
I have no understanding of where and how frontier AI is playing a role in this war, but I wonder if any agency involved has already switched from Claude to “WarGPT”? I have yet to use an interface like OpenClaw, but I would guess that it’s pretty easy to change the model you’re using. Maybe it’s only hard to change over, if you’re using a finetuned model like a custom GPT.
If your have an agent that’s works, you wouldn’t want to switch it’s model and get potentially more bugs right in the moment you start a war. The alternative models like the open sourced models from Meta that they have are likely worse than the frontier models they access from Anthropic and there might be performance degradation that you don’t want to discover the moment you are waging war.
I would expect that the generals who are actually using the technology don’t like it when they are told from above that they have to now start the 6-month process of moving off them when they would rather focus on the war.