AI Policy & National Security
Defense Experts and Big Tech Close Ranks Behind Anthropic
Thirty former defense and intelligence officials call the Pentagon’s supply-chain-risk designation a “dangerous precedent” as the tech industry mounts an unprecedented unified lobbying campaign and employee protests surge past 900 signatures.
Thirty former senior defense and intelligence officials — including former CIA Director Michael Hayden, two retired four-star generals, and half a dozen former under-secretaries of defense — sent a letter to Congressional leadership on March 5 warning that the Pentagon’s supply-chain-risk designation against Anthropic represents a “dangerous precedent that will chill private-sector investment in national security AI for a generation.” The letter, obtained by CNBC, argues that punishing a company for maintaining safety guardrails sends precisely the wrong signal at a moment when the United States needs its most capable AI firms engaged in defense applications, not excluded from them.
The letter is the most significant intervention yet in the escalating standoff between the Trump administration and Anthropic — the supply-chain-risk designation reported in previous editions that was triggered when CEO Dario Amodei refused Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s demands to remove safeguards against mass surveillance and autonomous weapons targeting. The former officials argue that the designation was “politically motivated rather than grounded in any legitimate supply-chain analysis” and that it undermines the credibility of the Defense Department’s risk assessment process, which is meant to identify genuine foreign-influence and counterfeit-component threats rather than serve as a tool of policy retaliation.
The defense establishment’s pushback arrived the same day that the Information Technology Industry Council — whose members include Nvidia, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon — sent its own letter directly to Hegseth, warning that the designation creates “regulatory uncertainty that jeopardizes billions of dollars in planned AI infrastructure investment.” In a separate, coordinated action, four additional trade associations — the Software & Information Industry Association, TechNet, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, and the Business Software Alliance — jointly wrote to President Trump urging the administration to reverse course. The breadth of the industry response is remarkable: companies that compete fiercely with Anthropic for government contracts and commercial market share have concluded that the precedent of using supply-chain designations as political leverage poses an existential threat to the entire sector.
Meanwhile, the employee-driven “We Will Not Be Divided” open letter at notdivided.org surged past 900 signatures, with roughly 800 coming from Google employees and over 100 from OpenAI staff. The petition’s central argument — that the administration is deliberately trying to fracture the AI industry by rewarding compliant companies and punishing those that maintain safety commitments — appears to be resonating across organizational boundaries in a way that few internal tech-worker campaigns have managed.