Fears mount as one A.I. giant is blacklisted while others are pressured to “hold the red lines”
The tech titans are clashing. On Feb. 28, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused the Pentagon’s demands to remove policy usage constraints from its A.I. application Claude that would enable domestic surveillance and power fully autonomous weapons.
The White House subsequently canceled its contract with Anthropic and blacklisted it as a “supply chain risk.” Defending his decision to uphold those “red lines,” Amodei explained:
A.I. doesn’t show the judgment that a human soldier would show—friendly fire or shooting a civilian, or just the wrong kind of thing. We don’t want to sell something that we don’t think is reliable, and we don’t want to sell something that could get our own people killed, or that could get innocent people killed (CBS News, March 3).
Support for Anthropic went ballistic. Claude catapulted from 49th most used free iPhone app to number one in 24 hours. And calls to boycott OpenAI and xAI for complying with the Pentagon reached a fever pitch.
In the “Good Tech/Bad Tech” cover story of our May 2025 issue of the Socionomist, researcher Chuck Thompson demonstrates a clear correlation between social mood and the public’s fear or trust in technology, and by extension, its broader use as tools to protect—or destroy.
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