Will the Pentagon’s Anthropic controversy scare startups away from defense work? | TechCrunch

Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2. Book Exhibit Table Now. Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. In just over a week, negotiations over the Pentagon’s use of Anthropic’s Claude technology fell through, the Trump administration designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk, and the AI company said it would fight that designation in court. OpenAI, meanwhile, quickly announced a deal of its own, prompting backlash that saw users uninstalling ChatGPT and pushing Anthropic’s Claude to the top of the App Store charts. And at least one OpenAI executive has quit over concerns that the announcement was rushed without appropriate guardrails in place. On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed what this means for other startups seeking to work with the federal government, especially the Pentagon, as Kirsten wondered, “Are we going to see a changing of the tune a little bit?” Sean pointed out that this is an unusual situation in a number of ways, in part because OpenAI and Anthropic make products that “no one can shut up about.” And cru