Who's in charge of the world's most powerful technology?
Can any company take on the Trump administration and survive?
These are the questions at the heart of an extraordinary fight
between the Pentagon and one of America's leading AI labs, Anthropic.
A fight that I've been witnessing close up in real time.
Anthropic had long worked with America's military,
but stipulated that its tools not be used for the mass surveillance of Americans
or to drive fully autonomous weapons.
The Trump administration recently demanded all such constraints be lifted.
The Pentagon, it said, needed to be able to use Anthropic's models for all lawful uses.
Anthropic refused.
After a week of high drama and insults from each side,
the Pentagon formally declared Anthropic to be a supply chain risk.
Effectively, a blacklist.
A designation that no American company has ever received.
I've been in San Francisco as this drama reached its end game.
I was the first journalist to sit down with Mr. Amodei after this unprecedented designation.
So good to see you.
Yes, great to see you.
We talked about the fallout of the fight.