Workers at Google and OpenAI have expressed their support of Anthropic in its legal dispute with the US Department of War after the AI startup was blacklisted for refusing to allow its technology be used for domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
Anthropic filed two lawsuits on Monday contesting the government’s authority to label it a “supply chain risk to national security” – an unprecedented designation that was previously reserved for foreign adversaries.
It followed orders from President Donald Trump for all federal agencies to “immediately cease” all use of Anthropic’s technology.
More than 30 employees from Google and OpenAI – both rivals of the Claude creator – filed a legal brief, just hours after Anthropic launched its legal action against the Pentagon and other federal agencies
“The government’s designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk was an improper and arbitrary use of power that has serious ramifications for our industry,” the amicus brief states.
“The technical concerns animating Anthropic’s ‘red lines’ are legitimate and widely recognised within our scientific community as requiring some kind of response.
“The best currently available AI systems cannot safely or reliably handle fully autonomous lethal targeting, and should not be available for domestic mass surveillance of the American people.”
Signatories of the brief are listed as “engineers, researchers, scientists, and other professionals” at Google and OpenAI.
They include Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean and OpenAI’s Creative Community Lead Soukaina Mansour.
Separately, nearly 900 employees at Google and OpenAI have signed an open letter calling on their bosses to block attempts from the US government to use AI in these ‘red line’ scenarios.
“We hope our leaders will put aside their differences and stand together to refuse the Department of War’s current demands for permission to use our models for domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight,” the letter states.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has not put his name to the latest legal brief, but he spoke out publicly against the government’s decision to blacklist Anthropic.
“I feel competitive with Anthropic for sure, but successfully building safe superintelligence and widely sharing the benefits is way more important that any company competition,” he wrote on X on 28 February.
“To say it very clearly: I think this is a very bad decision from the DoW and I hope they reverse it. If we take heat for strongly criticising it, so be it.”
