is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
It’s the day of the Pentagon’s looming ultimatum for Anthropic: allow the US military unchecked access to its technology, including for mass surveillance and fully autonomous lethal weapons, or potentially be designated a “supply chain risk” and potentially lose hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts. Amid the intensifying public statements and threats, tech workers across the industry are looking at their own companies’ government and military contracts wondering what kind of future they’re helping to build.
While the Department of Defense has spent weeks negotiating with Anthropic over removing its guardrails, including allowing the US military to use Anthropic’s AI kill targets with no human oversight, OpenAI and xAI had reportedly already agreed to such terms, although OpenAI is reportedly attempting to adopt the same red lines in the agreements as Anthropic. The overall situation has left employees at some companies with defense contracts feeling betrayed. “When I joined the tech industry, I thought tech was about making people’s lives easier,” an Amazon Web Services employee told The Verge, “but now it seems like it’s all about making it easier to surveil and deport and kill people.”
In conversations with The Verge, current and former employees from OpenAI, xAI, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google expressed similar feelings about the changing moral landscape of their companies. Organized groups representing 700,000 tech workers at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and more have signed a letter demanding that the companies reject the Pentagon’s demands. But many saw little chance of their employers — whether they’re directly embroiled in this conflict or not — questioning the government or pushing back.
“From their perspective, they’d love to keep making money and not have to talk about it,” said a software engineer from Microsoft.
So far, Anthropic has stood its ground. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei put out a statement on Thursday that the Pentagon’s “threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.” But he has stated that he is not at all opposed to lethal autonomous weapons sometime in the future, just that the technology was not reliable enough “today.” Amodei even offered to partner with the DoD on “R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer,” he wrote in the statement.
In the past few years, however, major tech companies have loosened their rules or changed their mission statements to expand into lucrative government or military contracts. In 2024, OpenAI removed a ban on “military and warfare” use cases from its terms of service; after that, it signed a deal with autonomous weapons maker Anduril and then its DoD contract, and just this week, Anthropic changed its oft-touted responsible scaling policy, dropping its longtime safety pledge in order to ensure it stayed competitive in the AI race. Big Tech players like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have also allowed defense and intelligence agencies to use their AI products, including some agreeing to work with ICE despite growing outcry from the public and employees alike.
In past years, tech workers’ resistance to partnerships and deals they deem harmful to society at large sometimes led to big change. In 2018, for instance, thousands of Google employees successfully pressured the company to end its “Project Maven” partnership with the Pentagon, and Microsoft workers presented leadership with an anti-ICE petition signed by about 500 Microsoft employees, though Microsoft still works with the agency. In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, tech companies made public statements about and financial commitments supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. But in recent months, the industry has seen a very different reality: a culture of fear and silence, especially amid cooperation with the Trump administration and ICE, tech workers recently told The Verge.
Companies have followed in the footsteps of longtime surveillance and military tech partnerships, who have only become more hawkish. That includes the Peter Thiel-cofounded Palantir, whose CEO Alex Karp recently stated to shareholders that “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them. And we hope you’re in favor of that.” (Protect Democracy, a nonprofit, recently put out an open letter calling for Congressional oversight of the Department of Defense’s demands for unrestricted use of AI. )
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, xAI, and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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