I think Amodei is widely underestimated. The consensus viewpoint on the deal that OpenAI struck with the Pentagon is that Anthropic got played. I disagree. I'm certain that Amodei and his team gamed this out. In doing so, I think there's at least two conclusions they would have drawn:
1. Some other AI company would cut a deal with the Pentagon. There's no world in which all the labs boycott the Pentagon. So who? Choosing Grok would be bad for the US, which is a bad outcome, but Amodei would have discounted that option, because he knows that despite their moral failures, the Pentagon is not stupid and Grok sucks.
That leaves Gemini or OpenAI, and I bet they predicted it would be OpenAI. Choosing OpenAI does not harm the republic - say what you will about Altman, ChatGPT is not toxic and it is capable - but it does have the potential to harm OpenAI, which is my second point:
2. OpenAI may benefit from this in the short term, and Anthropic may likewise be harmed in the short term, but what about the long game? Here, the strategic benefits to Anthropic in both distancing themselves from the Trump administration and letting OpenAI sully themselves with this association are readily apparent. This is true from a talent retention and attraction standpoint and especially true from a marketing standpoint. Claude has long had much less market share than ChatGPT. In that position, there are plenty of strategic reasons to take a moral/ethical stand like this.
What I did not expect, and I would guess Amodei did not either, is that Claude would now be #1 in the app store. The benefits from this stance look to be materializing much more quickly than anyone in favour of his courage might have hoped.
Grok is chosen because Musk spent $250+ million to elect Trump and is expected to underwrite the 2026 elections. Also, a lot of Trumps and their friends are invested in SpaceX. So they give them money too, but use OpenAI or Claude. I have a feeling that the military likes Claude more
Also I imagine this is partly due to intra-military power struggles. I'm sure there are a lot in the DoW who like Anthropic- models wise and all that they stand for. The supply chain thing was a way to take the power from them, though petty.
Pete is also facing a lot of risk from AI, power structures will be forced to change once a few teams can take over entire departments of people. The military ecosystem is very much like the private sector in where the number of butts in seats is a metric for people. The dynamics will be changed if your group can just hand-roll what they relied on others for.
They "chose Grok" for political optics, but they don't seriously intend to use it because it's actually just benchmaxxed garbage - hence why they worked with OpenAI.
3. Talent migration to Anthropic. No serious researcher working towards AGI will want it to be in the hands of OpenAI anymore. They are all asking themselves: "do I trust Sam or Dario more with AGI/ASI?" and are finding the former lacking.
It is already telling that Anthropic's models outperform OAI's with half the headcount and a fraction of the funding.
I think that's wishful thinking. Just because someone is a "serious" researcher (careful, sounds like a No True Scotsman coming up), it doesn't mean that they care about AI guardrails or safety, or think our current administration is immoral.
I don't - idealistic motives seems to be common among leading AI developers and researchers. It's totally realistic that Anthropic sticking to principle & taking a hit for it will give it an edge recruiting those idealistic types.
I've hung out with this crowd and they are very idealistic, they care deeply about guardrails and safety, and definitely find the idea of handing the current administration AGI/ASI repulsive.
The mistake here is thinking they can take on Power without really sitting in any officual position of Power.
Wikileaks and Assange got popular too. What happened to them?
The State Dept and CIA do exactly what Assange did. They pick and choose who to target with leaks. They get away with it (mostly even when exposed) because they officially are in power. Assange was not in power.
If you take a moral position do it when you have real power.
They still need a lot of money and what their VC’s think is going to be more important than what Amedei does. Nothing more profitable than war and government.
App Store rankings are meaningless, I have Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini all in top five, with a electronic mail app being 1 and a postal tracking service app (for a very small provider) being 3.
The value of hyperscalers' equity in Anthropic alone dwarfs their contracts with the government. Not to mention the revenue from hosting their models that helps justify the insane capex. Anthropic going to $0 would be a huge hair cut to all of their balance sheets.
They’ve only invested a couple of billions, like 20 or so split between them. Not really something that hurts them long or even medium term.
Microsoft has multiple multi billion dollar government deals, I think Amazon is the only that doesn’t, Google also has a lot of government contracts, especially outside of cloud.
if we consider AIs as "force multipliers" as we do with coding agents, it's easy to see how any AI company can harm the republic if the government they are serving is unethical and amoral.
Nobody gives a shit about jumping to #1 in the app stores, at this scale.
If US & A really goes full-Huawei on Anthropic, they can't IPO. It's an existential crisis for them. I think they can survive in some form, somehow, because their model is really good, probably the best.
And in other times, I would think the US government had sufficient intellectual horsepower to not cut off its own dick, and the golden goose's head, over some idiotic morning-drinker road-rage type beef. But these are not other times. These are these times.
1. Some other AI company would cut a deal with the Pentagon. There's no world in which all the labs boycott the Pentagon. So who? Choosing Grok would be bad for the US, which is a bad outcome, but Amodei would have discounted that option, because he knows that despite their moral failures, the Pentagon is not stupid and Grok sucks.
That leaves Gemini or OpenAI, and I bet they predicted it would be OpenAI. Choosing OpenAI does not harm the republic - say what you will about Altman, ChatGPT is not toxic and it is capable - but it does have the potential to harm OpenAI, which is my second point:
2. OpenAI may benefit from this in the short term, and Anthropic may likewise be harmed in the short term, but what about the long game? Here, the strategic benefits to Anthropic in both distancing themselves from the Trump administration and letting OpenAI sully themselves with this association are readily apparent. This is true from a talent retention and attraction standpoint and especially true from a marketing standpoint. Claude has long had much less market share than ChatGPT. In that position, there are plenty of strategic reasons to take a moral/ethical stand like this.
What I did not expect, and I would guess Amodei did not either, is that Claude would now be #1 in the app store. The benefits from this stance look to be materializing much more quickly than anyone in favour of his courage might have hoped.