Over 30 OpenAI and Google DeepMind employees have filed an amicus brief supporting the Anthropic lawsuit against the US Defence Department. Notably, Anthropic is suing the US government in order to stop them from enforcing the supply chain risk label which has majorly been used for adversarial foreign companies.
“If allowed to proceed, this effort to punish one of the leading U.S. AI companies will undoubtedly have consequences for the United States’ industrial and scientific competitiveness in the field of artificial intelligence and beyond,” the employees wrote in the brief.
The amicus brief was filed in the court just hours after Anthropic filed its two lawsuits against the US DoD and other federal agencies calling the Trump administration action ‘unprecedented and unlawful’.
Among the employees who are named in the brief include Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, Google DeepMind researchers Zhengdong Wang, Alexander Matt Turner, and Noah Siegel, along with OpenAI researchers Gabriel Wu, Pamela Mishkin, Roman Novak and more.
The brief notes that the designation “introduces an unpredictability in our industry that undermines American innovation and competitiveness. It chills professional debate on the benefits and risks of frontier AI systems and various ways that risks can be addressed to optimize the technology’s deployment”.
It also supports the supposed red lines which Anthropic has claimed it requested during the negotiations with the Pentagon, that is, non-deployment of AI for autonomous lethal weapons and domestic mass surveillance.
“In the absence of public law, the contractual and technological requirements that AI developers impose on the use of their systems represent a vital safeguard against their catastrophic misuse,” the brief adds.
Sam Altman on Anthropic being labelled supply chain risk:
OpenAI struck its own deal with the Pentagon just hours after the negotiations between Anthropic and the US government broke down. However, the ChatGPT maker and its boss Sam Altman have both spoken out against Anthropic’s labelling as a supply chain risk.
“Enforcing the SCR designation on Anthropic would be very bad for our industry and our country, and obviously their company. We said to the DoW before and after. We said that part of the reason we were willing to do this quickly was in the hopes of de-escalation.” Altman said in a post on X.
“I feel competitive with Anthropic for sure, but successfully building safe superintelligence and widely sharing the benefits is way more important than any company competition. I believe they would do something to try to help us in the face of great injustice if we could.” he added.
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