National Security

Amodei vs. Altman: The Pentagon Deal

When the Pentagon demanded unrestricted access to frontier AI, Dario Amodei refused and got blacklisted. Sam Altman said he agreed with Anthropic's red lines, then struck his own deal with the Department of War that same Friday night. The substantive disagreement is narrow but real: Amodei argued that existing law hasn't caught up with AI's ability to aggregate public data into comprehensive surveillance profiles, so the Pentagon's assurance that it would follow current statutes wasn't enough. Altman accepted that assurance, framing the deal as the Pentagon agreeing to OpenAI's principles. Seventy OpenAI employees signed a letter supporting Anthropic before Altman's deal went through. The episode crystallized the difference between the two leaders. Amodei treats safety commitments as constraints that must hold even when they're expensive, though his own company dropped its Responsible Scaling Policy pledge that same month under competitive pressure. Altman treats them as negotiating positions, things you advocate for but ultimately resolve through dealmaking rather than confrontation. Both approaches have costs. Amodei lost a major government contract and faces a supply-chain-risk designation. Altman kept the contract but earned the accusation that OpenAI replaced a blacklisted competitor while claiming solidarity with it.