‘Unprecedented and unlawful’: OpenAI and Google staff rush to support Anthropic's lawsuit against Pentagon AI blacklist

Over 30 OpenAI and Google DeepMind employees filed an amicus brief on 9 March in support of Anthropic's lawsuit against the US Defense Department. Anthropic, led by CEO Dario Amodei, is suing the US government to block enforcement of the “supply-chain risk” label, a designation typically 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 filing came just hours after Anthropic filed its two lawsuits against the US DoD and other federal agencies, calling the Trump administration's action “unprecedented and unlawful.”

Among those named in the brief are 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 argues 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 backs the supposed red lines, Anthropic says it sought during the negotiations with the Pentagon: 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 talks between Anthropic and the US government collapsed. 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.