AI Startup Anthropic to Partner With Palantir, AWS to Sell to Intelligence and Defense Agencies

The iconic Edwin Starr counterculture anthem righteously proclaimed war is good for “absolutely nothing.” Your AI chatbot begs to differ. 

On Thursday, AI startup Anthropic announced it is teaming up with defense contractors Palantir and Amazon Web Services to get its wares into the highly — highly — lucrative intelligence and military market.

Squabble of the Models

Anthropic was set up in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI employees as a public benefit corporation. On paper, that means the company can develop AI safely to benefit people, rather than focusing solely on maximizing shareholder returns.

That’s a slightly different structure than nonprofit OpenAI, which has a for-profit subsidiary and is in talks with California regulators to become a full-blown for-profit entity. The two are, nevertheless, competitors: Anthropic’s large language models, named Claude, are up against OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Anthropic’s partnership with Palantir and AWS — which both hold billions of dollars’ worth of defense contracts — is another competitive strike, coming months after OpenAI reversed its opposition to “military and warfare” applications, and weeks after it reportedly teamed up with government contractor Carahsoft to hunt for lucrative Pentagon cash. The entry into defense is a potential goldmine, but risks social backlash:

• In recent years, many employees at Google and Microsoft have vociferously protested their bosses’ overtures to the defense sector, arguing their AI technologies shouldn’t be used for military purposes. Earlier this year, roughly 200 Google DeepMind employees — 5% of staff — signed an open letter calling for an end to all contracts with defense organizations.
• But the hundreds of billions in the defense industry are hard to resist, and companies are piling in: Meta said this week that its Llama models will be open to US intelligence agencies and defense contractors.

Eurotrip: In May, Anthropic launched Claude in Europe. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to cut back military support for NATO members unless they meet pledges to spend 2% or more of GDP on defense: That could open up big contracts on the other side of the pond.