Friday afternoon, just as this interview was getting underway, a news alert flashed across my computer screen: the Trump administration was severing ties with Anthropic, the San Francisco AI company founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had invoked a national security law to blacklist the company from doing business with the Pentagon after Amodei refused to allow Anthropic’s tech to be used for mass surveillance of U.S. citizens or for autonomous armed drones that could select and kill targets without human input.
It was a jaw-dropping sequence of events. Anthropic stands to lose a contract worth up to $200 million and could be barred from working with other defense contractors after President Trump posted on Truth Social directing every federal agency to “immediately cease all use of Anthropic technology.” (Anthropic has since said it will challenge the Pentagon in court.)
Max Tegmark has spent the better part of a decade warning that the race to build ever-more-powerful AI systems is outpacing the world’s ability to govern them. The MIT physicist founded the Future of Life Institute in 2014 and helped organize an open letter — ultimately signed by more than 33,000 people, including Elon Musk — calling for a pause in advanced AI development.
His view of the Anthropic crisis is unsparing: the company, like its rivals, has sown the seeds of its own predicament. Tegmark’s argument doesn’t begin with the Pentagon but with a decision made years earlier — a choice, shared across the industry, to resist regulation. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and others have long promised to govern themselves responsibly. Anthropic this week even dropped the central tenet of its own safety pledge — its promise not to release increasingly powerful AI systems until the company was confident they wouldn’t cause harm.
Now, in the absence of rules, there’s not a lot to protect these players, says Tegmark. Here’s more from that interview, edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full conversation this coming week on TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC Download podcast.
When you saw this news just now about Anthropic, what was your first reaction?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It’s so interesting to think back a decade ago, when people were so excited about how we were going to make artificial intelligence to cure cancer, to grow the prosperity in America and make America strong. And here we are now where the U.S. government is pissed off at this company for not wanting AI to be used for domestic mass surveillance of Americans, and also not wanting to have killer robots that can autonomously — without any human input at all — decide who gets killed.
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