In just over a week, negotiations over the Pentagon’s use of Anthropic’s Claude technology fell through, the Trump administration designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk, and the AI company said it would fight that designation in court.
OpenAI, meanwhile, quickly announced a deal of its own, prompting backlash that saw users uninstalling ChatGPT and pushing Anthropic’s Claude to the top of the App Store charts. And at least one OpenAI executive has quit over concerns that the announcement was rushed without appropriate guardrails in place.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed what this means for other startups seeking to work with the federal government, especially the Pentagon, as Kirsten wondered, “Are we going to see a changing of the tune a little bit?”
Sean pointed out that this is an unusual situation in a number of ways, in part because OpenAI and Claude make products that “no one can shut up about.” And crucially, this is a dispute over “how their technologies are being used or not being used to kill people” so it’s naturally going to draw more scrutiny.
Still, Kirsten argued, this is a situation that should “give any startup pause.”
Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.
Kirsten: I’m wondering if other startups are starting to look at what’s happened with the federal government, specifically the Pentagon and Anthropic, that debate and wrestling match, and [take] pause about whether they want to be going after federal dollars. Are we going to see a changing of the tune a little bit?
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