Anthropic, Silicon Valley’s conscience?

Points clés

• + Anthropic's recent clash with the White House over the use of AI in military and surveillance technology signalled lofty principles. Yet it's already embedded in the defence systems it claims to resist.
• + AI industry demonstrates it has principles – and they’re flexible
• + The free world has found itself a new hero: 43-year-old American, Dario Amodei. Amodei is a cofounder and the CEO of Anthropic, the main rival to OpenAI in the artificial intelligence (AI) market. According to international media, he embodies the resistance to the US administration’s drift towards fascism. After all, isn’t Anthropic ‘that AI startup that dares to contradict Donald Trump’ (Le Monde, 11 February 2026) by refusing to submit to the Pentagon’s diktats? The company whose ‘principled stand’ made Trump’s team ‘livid’ (Fortune, 21 February 2026)? Since his return to the White House in January 2025, Trump’s increasingly overt alliance with tech industry leaders has caused some unease in a reputedly liberal sector. Anthropic has supposedly ridden to the rescue, however, and restored the sector’s reputation by laying down its red lines for the state and military.
• + But let’s have a look at the facts. In July 2025 Anthropic signed a $200m two-year contract with the US Department of Defense, becoming the first company to use a large language model (LLM) on the Pentagon’s classified networks. Its flagship product, Claude, has been integrated with Palantir’s big data platform, and the whole system is hosted on top-secret infrastructure built by Amazon. From its creation in 2021, Anthropic has trumpeted its commitment to ethics, so it imposed two restrictions on its AI models which seem to have been accepted at the time by the military: not to use them for mass surveillance of Americans or to control fully autonomous weapons.
• + Shortly afterwards, however, Trump issued an executive order aimed at ‘preventing woke AI in the federal government’. This was followed on 11 December 2025 by a memorandum calling on executive departments and agencies to review existing contracts between the federal government and LLM providers, to ensure these models contained no ‘ideological bias’. In February the Pentagon publicly demanded that (…)
• + (1) See Francesca Bria, ‘Takeover by Big Tech’ and Evgeny Morozov, ‘Sovereignty for sale’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, November 2025.
• + (2) ‘Increasing public trust in artificial intelligence through unbiased AI principles’, 11 December 2025, www.whitehouse.gov/.

Sources Médiatiques