Anthropic vs Pentagon: How AI is changing war

0:00Sean Gourley: This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by Adobe Acrobat Studio.

0:04Danny: A lot of us lead very busy lives, including the tech bosses you hear from on this podcast. We're dealing with more information than ever before, often across disconnected tools and working in hybrid teams.

0:16Sean Gourley: If this sounds familiar and you're someone whose life involves scrolling through contracts, reports or pitches with important data buried in long documents or different sources, then you'll know it can sometimes be a struggle to keep up.

0:27Danny: Or at least to do so in a timely way.

0:30Sean Gourley: Adobe, the company that invented the PDF back in 1993, is changing that with Adobe Acrobat Studio. It's a modern workspace designed to help you work smarter and save time.

0:40Danny: Acrobat Studio isn't just for essential PDF tasks like editing or signing documents. It's an AI-powered space built to help you use simple language prompts to get information quickly from multiple documents and sources, including PDFs, Office 365 files, and web pages.

0:56Sean Gourley: It's for people with busy, demanding jobs who want to spend less time on admin.

1:00Danny: And more time on the work that really matters.

1:02Sean Gourley: Check out Adobe Acrobat Studio and its new features now.

1:06Danny: This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by PwC.

1:10Sean Gourley: How do you use AI in ways that drive real business value? It isn't just about the tech, it's a new way of thinking going further, faster. This is where PwC comes in, shaping AI to fit your business to help you innovate with impact, empower your people and accelerate growth. Working with you side by side, bringing deep industry know-how with expert change management to unlock real value and drive lasting impact.

1:36Danny: PwC knows how your business works, so you can put AI to work for your business. Discover more at pwc.co.uk.

1:51Sean Gourley: Hello and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast where every week we unpack how technology is reshaping business, culture and everyday life. I am Danny Fortson out here in Silicon Valley.

2:02Danny: And I'm Katie Prescott, Katie in the city, the city of London. And this week we're talking about how artificial intelligence is being used to wage war.

2:12Sean Gourley: Yeah, nice and light fare this week. Indeed, last week, U.S. President Donald Trump launched a major air attack on Iran, and according to some reports, AI tools built by Anthropic, the$380 billion company run by Dario Amadei, friend of the pod, did play a role in those attacks. but just hours before the strikes he had declared that's donald trump that the federal government would end its use of those very same tools and he posted in his truth social account quote we don't need it we don't want it and we will not do business with them again exclamation point just to underline the point yes exactly so this feud between his administration and anthropic has months in the making and centers on how its AI models can or how they do not want them to be used by the Pentagon.

3:10Danny: He's not backwards in coming forwards, is he, your president? Some of those messages on Truth Social were quite extraordinary. He described those at Anthropic as left-wing nutjobs. So this is not just some sort of boring, contractual to and fro between AI companies and the government. I mean, it really speaks to something bigger. Who gets to decide how AI, incredibly powerful AI systems are used in war? And on one side, you've got this private business, which is one of the leading developers of AI, and on the other side, the Pentagon. And it sparked this huge debate really about what ethical means when it comes to national security.

3:56Sean Gourley: That's right. And in a moment, we're going to bring on a great guest to talk about this. His name is Sean Gourley. He's the founder and former CEO of Primer, which is a San Francisco-based AI defense company. He was also a former advisor to the Pentagon and current advisor to AI defense startups. So he'll be helping us unpack what it all means. So our big question that we're going to explore with him and right now is how is AI remaking war.

4:26Danny: Well, let's get into that big story. I think we all knew that AI was remaking war, as you say, but it's only when something like this happens that it really sharpens the mind and you can see it. So just going back to that row before the strikes on Tehran this weekend, the row between Anthropic and the US Department of Defense, they have been negotiating over exactly how the Pentagon could use the firm's technology. And Anthropic was the first AI company to have its tech used by the Department of Defense. Its model CLAWD is used for intelligence analysis, cyber operations, operational planning, and things like simulation and modeling.

5:05Danny: So Anthropic said, you can use all our AI, that's fine. But there are two key areas where we don't want you to use it. And that is domestic surveillance in the US, and also operating autonomous weapons without any human control at all.

5:21Sean Gourley: That's right. So those are the two red And Pentagon officials sent Anthropic their kind of final agree or else last week. They had until 5 p.m. last Friday to accept this final offer. Anthropic refused. They're saying we could not in God conscious grant the military unrest unrestricted access to his technology. It all went pear-shaped. Trump terminated this$200 million deal that Anthropic had with the Pentagon. ordered all federal agencies to stop working with the company. And amazingly, the Defense Department or Department of War designated Anthropic, an American company based in California, a security threat and a risk to its supply chain.

6:06Which is something that happens to Chinese businesses like Huawei,

6:12Danny: but not, as you say, an all-American Silicon Valley AI champion like Anthropic. Anthropic has responded to all of this. Dari Amadei did a very lengthy interview on CBS News last weekend. Yeah. But in a statement, they said that being designated a supply chain risk would both be legally unsound and set a dangerous precedent for any American company that negotiates with the government. And they have vowed to sue the government over this. But then things got really interesting. And there was another twist in the tale, because just after Anthropic's deadline had passed, Its great rival, OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, friend of the pod, swooped in and said that they'd struck their own deal with the Department of Defense.

6:57Danny: And Sam Altman put out a blog saying its red lines were even stronger than Anthropics, which was very confusing. Trying to follow it and trying to work out what the red lines actually were when it came to the use of this technology or not. And it's probably worth going back to look at how this row really started, because it was actually back in January when Claude was used by the US military in its raid to capture the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, back in January.

7:24Sean Gourley: Yeah, so Quad was used apparently in that operation in conjunction with Palantir, which is another Silicon Valley company or formerly Silicon Valley. But at the time of the kind of this Maduro abduction, Anthropic didn't comment, but said any use of its AI tools was required to comply with its usage policies. And at the same time, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, called on all AI companies to hand over their technology to the military for use without restrictions. And he was even like, there's stories of like around the Pentagon. He's put up these like old school recruiting posters, but they're generated by AI.

8:06Sean Gourley: And it's like, I want you to use AI. This meant that the AI companies working with the Pentagon had to renegotiate their contracts because there was this kind of new three line whip from on high that we needed all the AI. We needed unfettered access. And that led to like some renegotiations, which really kicked off this row with Anthropic.

8:29Danny: I think it's fair to say a lot of this story really hinges, though, on the personalities of the characters involved. Perhaps even more than those red lines and what the tech can and can't be used for, which is still, I think, incredibly confusing. So it's probably worth picking apart those three big personalities. Dario Amadei, the boss of Anthropic, Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, and another figure, Emil Michael. the undersecretary for who's who's basically the CTO of the Pentagon so Danny why don't we start with Emil just just tell me sort of who is he and and what was his role in all of this stuff

9:10Sean Gourley: yeah so what I think what's so interesting about all this because we're talking about like AI and these powerful systems and how they're going to be used and all this stuff but ultimately this comes down to humans and humans getting in a room deciding yes or no what they agree what they don't agree on and do people like each other, right? So Emil Michael is kind of at the center of this. He was the former chief business officer at Uber back in like Uber's crazy hyper growth days where they were like warring with regulators all over the world. They were expanding into China and Russia, like all over Europe, London.

9:49Sean Gourley: And he's seen as like through a couple different lenses. this one he's like this world-class deal maker so like he helped uber raise something like 15 billion dollars back when 15 billion dollars was a lot of money you know pre-a pre-ai pre-ai 100 billion yeah and so uber was like the most lavishly funded startup around it was doing all this stuff and emil michael was like the guy really driving that right alongside travis

10:16Danny: kalanick the ceo so this is a businessman essentially businessman but also a tech guy

10:23Sean Gourley: he was based in silicon valley right and he's so he knows also altman and amaday through just being a silicon valley tech guy yeah and so the other thing that he's really known for it during his time at uber is he was kind of seen as like the exemplar of uber's really aggressive what was later dubbed quote-unquote toxic culture. So back in 2014, he spoke openly about the idea of spending like a million dollars, for example, to dig up dirt on journalists and critics because Uber had a lot of critics at the time because of the way they were operating. It should be noted that Michael later apologized for his comments.

11:04Sean Gourley: And then also during a business trip out to Seoul, Korea, this is like this infamous trip. He and a bunch of executives went to a hostess bar. there was an hr complaint filed he asked a female employee to help him cover it up it became this huge controversy at this very like i don't know if you remember you know uber at the time was like in the news every day over its culture what's a hostess bar i believe asking a man yes i know i have never been to korea but the implication was like there are women there and you can kind of go off with a woman of your choosing all right to play Parcheesi presumably I see you know yeah you know so anyway it became this big controversy he left amid like this really crazy time at Uber and he is the person who was hired last year brought in to be kind of the right hand man to Pete Hegseth and his goal was or his kind of mandate was to basically inject AI into the veins of the Pentagon to kind of bring it up to speed for the modern world.

12:15Danny: In the way that Donald Trump does, he turned to the business world. Yeah. To find someone who could work within the Department of Defense. Yes, exactly. To push the AI strategy. So he's there in the Pentagon. And I guess then part of his job has been negotiating with the frontier AI labs like Anthropic.

12:35Sean Gourley: That's right. And so here he is speaking to Bloomberg last week before breaking off the talks with Anthropic. For any AI system we might use, are we using it to protect our warfighters in the right way? Are we using it to sort of give them the best tools to be efficient and to be lethal when they have to be lethal? And that's the primary thing in Secretary Higgs as head. And we told them that ultimately, at the end of the day, we follow the law, all laws, but we can't let any one company stand between us and the warfighter because they don't make the rules. Congress makes the rules. The president signed them.

13:15Sean Gourley: We execute them and we do so safely. So I guess what he's saying is we don't like being dictated to. We don't like to be told what to do. You're a vendor. Then we do what we want with it. Yes. So he's one character. And then who are the other two guys?

13:31Danny: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who probably needs no introduction in all of this. But I would say he has misjudged the situation in many ways. So when this was all blowing up initially, and this is obviously pre the Tehran strikes, Altman and others in Silicon Valley actually seemed very supportive of Anthropik's stance against the White House and it was seen as an ethical stance. And I think there was a sense, not necessarily about the rights and wrongs of what they were saying, but really that a tech company shouldn't be bossed around by the president in this way. And so his decision then to come and accept the contract with the Pentagon.

14:17Sean Gourley: Within hours. Within hours.

14:19Danny: It caused a huge amount of blowback. And we saw Claude rising through the ranks on the

14:25Sean Gourley: app store and people deinstalling or uninstalling chat gpt and and he did say he's like look i don't think anthropic should be classified as a supply chain risk he's like i don't think that's a good thing by the way i am taking this contract and so a lot of people just saw it as just kind of

14:46Danny: ick profiteering you know not really standing up for what is right and didn't smell great and it's probably worth explaining isn't it the relationship between sam altman and dario amaday the guy that he kind of screwed over here by taking that contract because they used to work together and then dario amaday spun out anthropic from open ai didn't he yeah he and his sister and

15:12Sean Gourley: five others left open AI to start Anthropic. And as we mentioned last week on the pod, he set it up as we're going to do it differently. I.e. we're going to do it better. We are the AI safety lab. They saw things within open AI. They didn't seem to like that didn't jive with their moral ethics, whatever. And so they left, set up their own stall and said, we're going to do this differently. We are the AI safety lab. And back in December, 2024, I actually met the entire top team of Anthropic and sat down with Dario Amadei at the headquarters here in San Francisco. And this was on the back of a first big essay he wrote about all the wonderful things that AI could bring to the world if this quote unquote all goes right.

15:59Sean Gourley: I'm someone who actually takes the potential for AI and where it could go very seriously. It's possible that I'm wrong about, you know, where AI is going to go and what's going to happen. But, you know, I think I'm not sure that, you know, the impacts are actually going to be very serious. And so let's think about how this can go well. What could AI actually do for humanity that, you know, looking back a decade or two from now, people could say, wow, that really actually made our lives better? That's him, you know, the glass half full. but obviously even then what he's saying there i think really kind of hints at you know he's also thinking deeply about how this might not make our lives better or there's like the very much

16:46Danny: a downside to these systems yeah you can really hear the seeds of the argument with the pentagon and what he just said can't you the real focus on safety the the fear as well about where the technology could go and you can you can feel him grappling with that so i don't think it's surprising at all actually when you think about the discussion that well discussion is the wrong

17:08Sean Gourley: word the argument the fight and that was december 2024 and now we're in what march 2026 yeah just you know life comes at you fast and as we mentioned last week just to muddle the picture further they actually just recently got rid of one of their core safety pledges, which was we will not put out AI systems unless we're certain that our guardrails are sufficient to kind of keep bad things from happening. And what's really interesting is that you mentioned Sam Altman, he kind of realized what was happening as you started to see Anthropic goes to the top of the charts in the app store people are uninstalling chat gpt and he's like oops and he did put out a mea culpa online that and i think he said quote one thing i did i think i did wrong we shouldn't have rushed this thing out on friday the issues are super complex and demand clear communication we were genuinely trying to de-escalate things really okay that's just my editorialism.

18:16Danny: Don't get involved if you're trying to when things are literally blowing up.

18:19Sean Gourley: Yes, and avoid a much worse outcome. But I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy. Good learning experience for me as we face higher stakes decisions in the future. So clearly, he saw this blowback and was like, Oh, my goodness. But basically, where we sit now, anthropic is on the outs, the Treasury Secretary said, same thing. We're not using anthropic anymore. Get rid of it. open ai has stepped into the breach and now they're after the fact trying to be like actually those red lines that dario was really kind of dying on that hill we're trying to impose those kind of after the deal has been agreed so that looks like they're trying to do that to kind of inject some of those same controls but again it gets back to like didn't sound like emil michael really liked Dario he called him a liar with a god complex yeah and Trump calling him left left wing nut job left wing so he's a liar with a god complex he's a left wing nut job like all of this stuff so there's just this real kind of personal animus that has been dropped into the middle of all this what is a very big big question of like how are we going to use these things because they're really powerful and now we're in something that looks a lot like a hot war in the Middle East Yeah.

19:38Danny: Well, two things. Firstly, it's another example of tech just being split down political lines, right? So people who fall into the left wing nutjob camp are siding with Anthropic and downloading it and shunning OpenAI. And it's very much made OpenAI look like Trump's partner in all of this.

19:57Sean Gourley: Yes.

19:58Danny: But for me, the big question is, what do we do globally about this issue of AI safety? Because I don't think personally that these sorts of decisions should be made by Dario Amadei or Sam Altman or even your friend Emil Michael.

20:15Sean Gourley: Not my friend.

20:17Danny: Well, sorry.

20:18Sean Gourley: Never been to a hostess bar. Thank you very much.

20:21Danny: You've never been to a hostess bar. Not with him. I'm joking, obviously. But... We've still failed globally to come up with any sort of body who can look at what's going on with AI and actually try and make these decisions across the board. And I think that's really important. And we had the lead writer from the AI Safety Institute on not that long ago, and they write an annual report. And it's, you know, as I think you said at the time, it struggles to catch up with the speed of change with this technology. The UN last month has launched its own AI safety body to look into the technology. but there are still no guardrails around it.

20:59Danny: And I don't think it's very clear that any have really, frankly, come out of this discussion.

21:04Sean Gourley: I think we have the perfect person to help guide us through that and give some kind of, you know, I think we know some stuff, but let's say we're not like experts in the weeds of the AI and defense world. So on the program now, Sean Gorley, he's the founder and former CEO of Primer, to the San Francisco based AI defense company. He's advised senior officials at the Pentagon, now works as a kind of an advisor to AI defense startups. And he's going to help walk us through some of this.

21:38Danny: Hi, Sean, welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us.

21:41Katie: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

21:43Danny: Can you tell us in your own words, what it is you do?

21:47Katie: Yeah, look, I've done a number of things from sort of studying the mathematical patterns of insurgency in places like Iraq and Afghanistan as part of my PhD work. I've built and sold to AI technology companies. And the most recent one was a company called Primer. And we built and deployed language models for the Department of Defense and a large number of the US intelligence agencies running on classified documents in order to help them improve their processes.

22:13Danny: What's it like dealing with the Department of Defense as an AI business?

22:17Katie: It's changed a lot. So when we started selling into first the intelligence organizations and then the Department of Defense, I think we were doing the first kinds of AI deployments. This is things like Project Maven coming online. And it was like any organization, perhaps even more advanced than most organizations circa 2017, 2018. It was the first AI deployments into a large bureaucracy. And so that had all the kind of the challenges that you would get with working with a large bureaucracy. But it had also the other kind of layer, which was working on top of classified documents, right? And so classified documents, you have to have all sorts of safeguards, you have to have all sorts of checks and balances, and you have to run that in a way that's disconnected from any kind of outside interference.

23:06Katie: And so there's an added layer of complexity on top of navigating a large bureaucracy. and then you've got the whole dynamic which has changed again but was still very much prevalent which is you've got to have the social license to operate and that's not just inside of inside of silicon valley it's also the engineers inside of your organization have to be on board with that and i think as we look at some of the dynamics with anthropic particularly i think you're seeing them struggle with all of those components as we were doing you know eight years ago when we started

23:34Sean Gourley: this journey as well you have a great kind of vantage point for this discussion because we're just before you came on, we were talking about the whole blow up between Anthropic and the Pentagon and open AI coming in. But if we get to start at like 30 ,000 feet, what we're trying to kind of unpick, which is a little difficult because the nature of a lot of these technologies, it's kind of classified how they're used, but where are we or how should we think about the importance of AI in defense in war, like the role it can play currently or does play and where things are going?

24:08Katie: Look, I think you've got world leaders saying those who control artificial intelligence will control the geopolitical sphere through military dominance. That's one way of looking at it. I think you've had Putin say similar things to that nature. I think here, the fact when Anthropoc says, perhaps we don't want you to have unfitted access to all of our artificial intelligence, immediately the Department of War cracks down and says, you're going to have major issues if you take that position. I think that tells you how important And artificial intelligence is, right? The scale of the reaction to any kind of limitations being placed on it, I think, suggests very clearly that this is a primary technology to enable military dominance.

24:51Sean Gourley: The background or the backdrop to all of this is China. What is your sense of, can we give like a comparison, you know, right and left of like where we are, where the technology is here relative to China? Because if you talk to certain people in Silicon Valley, particularly like we had last year, we had Vinod Khosla and he was slamming Meta who were trying to open source things. He's like, this is like open sourcing the Manhattan Project. This is insane. You know, and like this is a an existential race against China. But I'd love to get your sense of what's happening there relative to what's happening, you know, in the West.

25:28Katie: Yeah, look, I think that the dynamic of this is, again, my sort of mental model going through is this is artificial intelligence represents third technological offset in military parlance, right? So the first one was nuclear weapons, the second one was precision munitions and stealth weaponry, and the third is artificial intelligence. And an offset for those that maybe don't track military terminology is a technological advantage that is so great that it means that if the opponent doesn't have it, it's not worth even showing up for battle because you'd be defeated before you start. And I think that's the right frame.

26:04Katie: We've had two of them. This artificial intelligence is the third. What does that mean? It means if you take some of the scenarios of a human piloted F-35 against a machine piloted autonomous drone, the autonomous drone with similar kinds of mechanical capabilities will beat the human pilot again and again and again.

26:24Sean Gourley: And those are war games that have already happened, right?

26:26Katie: So these are tests and simulations that happened. They're now running live inside of specially modified aircraft. And the dynamic on this is just humans are slow. We have risk tolerances that machines don't. Machines are much faster than us. And machines are also able to play and practice these games many times over. So in certain scenarios like that, which is now several years old in terms of research, which is ancient in terms of artificial intelligence, machines are clearly better than us, right? And I think the trajectory that we're all seeing in this is that they're getting better and better at a very much faster rate.

26:57Katie: Now, that's not to say that they're better than us at everything today, but I think the writing's very much on the wall, is that if you own the best artificial intelligence and you can deploy that inside of your military with autonomous weapons, you will defeat a human-controlled conventional weapons system. And I think for those tracking this stuff, it seems pretty clear that that's where things are going. And so as you look at this, you say, well, should we open source this technology? And it brings with it all sorts of kind of questions around, well, are you giving up your military supremacy for the sake of your commercial benefit?

27:34Katie: Or are you not willing to make that trade? And I would probably argue that the primacy of military supremacy is something that should be taken very seriously as a first citizen in that debate.

27:52Sean Gourley: Let's pause there for a moment to talk about today's sponsor, Adobe Acrobat Studio.

27:57Danny: Acrobat Studio helps documents work harder, organizing projects, extracting insights quickly and creating professional content from the files you already have.

28:06Sean Gourley: It's designed for individuals, teams and businesses who need AI powered tools that are easy to deploy and use.

28:12Danny: And Adobe says your data stays secure and isn't used to train its AI models.

28:17Sean Gourley: So if you want to rethink what PDFs can do, check out Adobe Acrobat Studio and its new features now.

28:24Danny: This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by PwC.

28:29Sean Gourley: Every leader is looking for that next opportunity for growth. But as technology and AI reshapes entire industries, the path forward isn't always clear. This is where PwC comes in, helping you put AI to use in ways that drive real business value. Working alongside you, bringing the deep tech expertise, AI capabilities, strategic insight and industry knowledge you need to innovate with impact, empower your people and accelerate growth.

28:57Danny: PwC knows how your business works, so you can put AI to work for your business. Discover more at pwc.co.uk.

29:27Sean Gourley: thriving every day. The Drop by GNC is where the latest solutions in health and wellness land first. Nonstop innovation and fresh finds daily. Explore what's new and what's next on The Drop by GNC.

29:47Danny: So how do you think AI then should be considered within this idea of an offset? I mean, And it sounds like you're saying it's essentially the same as nuclear power. What does that mean for governments? But also, what does it mean for vendors like Anthropic who are selling the technology?

30:05Katie: That's a big question to sort of unfold. What does it mean for a company? So firstly, you've got to understand that corporations are building very, very powerful technology, not necessarily for military applications, but it has very, very strong military applications or it could be repurposed for military applications. And that is one of the most significant military technologies that we've seen certainly in the last 30 or 40 years. So what does it mean for those companies? Firstly, you can't ignore, it's like if you were building a nuclear weapon, you can't be like, well, you know, I'm just going to ignore the fact that this could be used for military and just pretend that that doesn't exist, right?

30:43Katie: Like somebody is going to come knocking on your door at some point and say, the technology you've built is so powerful that you have to consider the military applications. And so I think getting into this sort of game and look, Anthropic took steps. They deployed the technology on classified networks as we did. Once you're in that, you're in the game. And I think to pull out halfway through and say, oh, I don't quite like this game. I think at best is naive, but at worst is poorly kind of thought out. So I think that realizing ramifications of getting in this game is that if you get into the game and sell technology to the Pentagon, you play by the Pentagon's rules.

31:23Katie: And one of those rules is if you are so fortunate as a company to build a technology that has immense military advantages, you don't just get to hit stop and say, I'm out. I think that's sort of the dynamic here that I think America is wrestling with, which is what happens when a private company builds a technology so powerful it changes the military balance of the globe. Right. And that's maybe just a little bit beyond kind of where we are today. But if you project that forward 12 months or 24 months, like, you know, these companies or private companies are very much in a place where where that is that is the reality that they're sitting with.

32:02Katie: And I think at that point you need to figure out how to work with the Pentagon or stop building the technology.

32:09Danny: I was interested that earlier you used the phrase social license. Do you mean by that basically getting staff buy-in for the fact that what you're selling is going to be used in war? And do you get a sense that maybe that's what Anthropic hasn't got with its team and that's maybe why some of this has happened?

32:29Katie: Yeah, we saw this early on. There was a company involved in the Maven project. There was a computer vision company out of New York.

32:35Sean Gourley: Maven, just for people who don't know, there was this drone project.

32:37Katie: It was the first AI project the Pentagon took on and represented. And I think history will record that as being a very significant contract and vehicle to bring AI into the Pentagon.

32:49Sean Gourley: And Google eventually threw in the towel because people revolted. People walked out, signed letters. and these are the employees saying, we don't want to be in the business of war.

33:00Danny: So this is the social license you're talking about?

33:02Katie: Yeah, 100%. So Google protests, there are people marching out of the company and saying, if you do this contract, we will not work here anymore. And so there are a number of companies that were actually involved in that Maven project that lost their social license to operate with their employees, where their employees said, oh, I never signed up to be part of a defense company. And I think this was sort of part of the Silicon Valley sort of belief that, you know, defense wasn't needed. It wasn't necessary. We live in a world of peace and can't we all just get along with each other? And a very naive view that sort of permeated the valley, which is changing, but it's still very much like, oh, we just don't need defense.

33:39Katie: And if I put my head in the sand and believe that it's not there, then it just goes away. So I think that there's a big kind of change of bringing people from that position to know defense is an imperative. If you want the society that we're living in, you're going to need to have the ways and means not just of defending it, but also projecting that force to further the interests of the nation. So that trajectory has to happen and all the employees have to be brought along with it. In such a competitive kind of war for talent between some of the teams that are building these foundation models, losing 10, 20 % of your top researchers could put you back six months compared to your competitors, which is equivalent to hundreds of billions of dollars of market capitalization being lost.

34:20Katie: And so I think one of the dynamics here is if your employees aren't with you, it's very, very hard to go into the defense space. And particularly if you've started your company on the premise that we will build artificial intelligence that will do no harm to humanity. It's a hard line to come in and say, oh, by the way, we're going to build killer robots, right? Which is there. And I think, look, I think the leadership of Anthropic has walked a pretty good line up to this point. And they've certainly been involved in doing some very, very interesting work with the national security organizations.

34:52Katie: But I do sense that they lost that buy-in from their employees just recently. I think the Maduro stuff down in Venezuela was probably a tipping point for that. And I think the big kind of takeaway on this is if you're going to go in and deploy technology to the Pentagon, which I think is a good and a strong mission to have, then you need to also defer and say, I trust that the institutions of this country are going to use it in a way that is consistent with the law. And I also defer the definition of what the law is to the democratic structures and processes of the country. So the moment you go in and say, look, I want to write the law, and that law is what I believe it should be, then you're saying I'm protecting democracy, but you're undermining it at the same time.

35:41Danny: We were talking about this a little bit before you came on, and it feels like trust in the institutions has been eroded by having a very erratic president in power. And I wonder if the answer to all of this is to have something like we do for nuclear, which is some sort of global standards around AI, which various institutions have tried and failed to put in place.

36:04Katie: Yeah, I had this conversation at a meeting with the Pentagon back in 2015, the Office of Net Assessment. They brought together a bunch of thinkers back in 2015, put us up in West Point for a week and said, like, let's war game out how all of this stuff is going to unfold. And I had this conversation with one of the other attendees who was there, and I won't say who it was, but they were saying, look, can't we just regulate this? And I think my response then as it is now is regulation of this is not an impossible. Like, it's incredibly difficult to regulate a set of weights that can be downloaded onto a thumb drive.

36:42Katie: How do you regulate the use of that. So I think regulation is very, very difficult. And regulation across an international set of organizations that can't even kind of get around the table at the UN Security Council and agree on what to do about anything is sort of gone. I think the reality of the world that we're moving into today, or I think the last few days with Iran has shown, is that the rule-based order that we've been living in, international rule-based order, is very quickly being replaced by might as right. And, you know, any kind of international kind of coordination across that is being trumped by, you know, those that have the ways, the means to get their way.

37:20Sean Gourley: If we put this in the context, again, of like the third offset and, you know, comparing it to nukes, in that context, the answer would seem to be have the biggest nukes or have the biggest arsenal or have the most powerful weapons. if you want to quote unquote win?

37:41Katie: Yeah, to bring it back to the military side is like, don't lose the AI arms race, right? The speed at which AI evolves, right? So that's the first thing is the speed that evolves. If you get a six month lead on your opponent, you may have twice the kind of capabilities that they have, which may mean you have half or a quarter of the kind of the attrition or any kind of conflict. So if you can get a six month lead on your opponent, but there is very much this kind of ai arms race that's unfolding where if you fall behind you expose yourself to your opponent coming after you and and exercising that advantage

38:16Sean Gourley: to tremendous effect and this is very real because i was just looking in the past i think it was in the past week andrel you know palmer luckers company they just put out a video i think it's the world's first fully autonomous fighter jet yep and they just have this video of like okay you don't need a pilot anymore and to your point like this is going to be better than tom cruise and top gun because it's a machine and it doesn't get tired or lazy or whatever

38:44Katie: and it'll take risks that humans won't it's got reaction times that humans you know will never biologically get to and frankly our appetite for losing one of those systems is is a lot is a lot higher than for losing a piloted system inside of that if whoever you know if if china would to wake up tomorrow and have a fleet of 1 ,000 of these autonomous systems ready and available, they would probably be able to knock out the entire air force projection of a U.S. carrier group, right? And this is the major projection of U.S. power in the world. If China were to have 1 ,000 or maybe it's 5 ,000 of these systems up, running and built tomorrow, what would stop them from going and taking that and saying, look, we've taken Taiwan, come and stop us.

39:33Katie: And you'd run the calculus on that. And you're like, yeah, we're going to lose that every time. So you see how close we are. It's I love, love that the US has got their first with with with Anderle and getting that stuff up. We've got to get a lot more of them in action. We've got to get, you know, that stuff up and running. But if China were to get a six month lead on that, you can bet that they would take advantage of that and use that to say we are now the number one military in the world, because I think whoever owns that is going to own the skies and is going to own the spaces they choose to reject their power.

40:03Sean Gourley: You're freaking me out, Sean. Can I just lighten the mood? Yes, Katie.

40:08Danny: Nothing is going to look as good as Tom Cruise in Top Gun, guys. Come on.

40:13Katie: But the reality is an automated system would have got that done with far less drama. It would have been a much worse movie. Didn't we love the drama?

40:21Sean Gourley: Yeah, but like would you want to watch an AI play volleyball all greased up in jeans.

40:27Katie: I mean, you know, it's just not the same. That's the next Chinese humanoid robot. They're going to have greased up humanoid robots playing volleyball and smacking each other on the arse.

40:37Danny: Sean, thank you. Thanks so much for coming on and taking the time to speak to us about all of this.

40:43Katie: My pleasure. Thank you.

40:46Danny: I have to say it was fascinating to hear from somebody within the defence industry with that perspective because I sense that I'm probably more on the left-wing nutjob side of pacifism.

41:01Danny: I'm sure Trump would put me in that box. So it was interesting to hear his view. I think that point about a social license and bringing your teams with you and people not having signed up to Anthropic to make weapons is really crucial. And it's fascinating to hear Dario Amadei grapple with this stuff. What on earth do you do with this power? Because with great power comes great responsibility.

41:25Sean Gourley: If you're working at one of these foundation model companies, I feel like you have to sit down and have a very serious conversation with yourself before you start. Because to his point, like, these things are very powerful. And as they've said, if you listen to Sam Altman, if you listen to Dari Amadei, they know how powerful these things are. They know what they can be used for. They know it can be very dangerous. And of course, like in the world of like the great power politics and all of that stuff, of course, these things are going to be used in ways that are deeply uncomfortable. They're going to be used to kill people, like to put a fine point on it.

42:06And you have to be like, okay, am I okay with this?

42:10Danny: And if you don't like the person who's in charge of the country who is making decisions on this, then it becomes problematic.

42:21Sean Gourley: Yeah. Mix in a bit of the culture wars, the left versus right, the West Coast progressives versus the Pentagon. It's tricky. It's tricky. But that is it, I think, for this week's episode of the Times Tech Podcast. If you're enjoying the show, drop us a line to let us know.

42:38Danny: and we'd love to know your thoughts about the ai and defense and who decides the guardrails is it the military the government silicon valley bosses let us know your thoughts um and any

42:49Sean Gourley: questions that come up as well yes and you can email us at techpod at the times.co.uk that is techpod at the times.co.uk we will see you back here next week and katie i hope your uh case of the sniffles has moved on.

43:06Danny: Yeah, the never ending virus. Thank you. Goodbye.

43:10Sean Gourley: Rest up. Bye bye.

43:12Danny: Today's episode of the Times Tech podcast was sponsored by Adobe Acrobat Studio.

43:17Sean Gourley: Acrobat Studio is about more than just the PDF.

43:20Danny: It's a collaborative workspace designed to make working with colleagues across teams and time zones faster and easier.

43:28Sean Gourley: One of the features is PDF Spaces, which brings PDFs, Microsoft 365 files and websites together in shared spaces.

43:36Danny: It helps centralize notes and draft documents so you can see the full picture of a project all on a secure platform.

43:43Sean Gourley: There's also an AI Assistant, which can summarize information, pull out key insights and help you understand what's in your files without reading everything manually.

43:51Danny: Which helps if you're dealing with a lot of information, but a short on time.

43:56Sean Gourley: And with integration with Adobe Express, you can turn documents into presentations or branded content without switching tools.

44:03Danny: So it's not about creating more paperwork. It's about making your paperwork work harder.

44:09Sean Gourley: Check out Adobe Acrobat Studio and its new features now.

44:13Danny: This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by PwC.

44:18Sean Gourley: AI that delivers. It isn't just about the tech. It's a new way of thinking. And it's empowering your people to create value in new ways. This is where PwC helps you shape AI to fit your business, delivering real value. Working with you, combining strategy, industry insight and deep tech expertise to help you innovate with impact, empower your people and accelerate growth.

44:42Danny: PwC knows how your business works, so you can put AI to work for your business. Discover more at pwc.co.uk.