Microsoft’s brief in Anthropic case shows new alliance and willingness to challenge Trump administration – GeekWire
The brief filed by Microsoft in Anthropic’s case against the US Department of Defense shows the depth of the relationship between the two companies, and Microsoft’s willingness to take on the federal government at key moments in its history.
Microsoft on Tuesday asked a federal judge in San Francisco to temporarily block the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk, arguing that immediate enforcement would hurt Microsoft and other government contractors that depend on Anthropic’s technology.
The government’s designation imposes “significant and extensive costs and risks” on companies that use Anthropic models “as the basis for their products and services, which they provide to the US military,” Microsoft said in the filing.
The New York Times DealBook called Microsoft’s brief a “stunning move” and a “significant decision” by a company that is one of America’s largest government contractors, noting that it stood out in an era when the unwritten rule of American business was to avoid defrauding the White House.
It comes a day after Microsoft launched Copilot Cowork, a new AI product built on Anthropic’s Claude models, and four months after Microsoft committed to investing up to $5 billion in startups in a deal that includes Anthropic spending at least $30 billion on Microsoft Azure.
Amazon, which has invested 8 billion dollars in Anthropic, has not gone public about the case or the placement of supply chain risk. We’ve contacted the company for comment.
Microsoft has not shied away from fighting Washington, DC, at key moments in its history, from its historic antitrust battle with the Justice Department in the late 1990s to its fight in the Supreme Court against the Trump administration over DACA immigration protections.
The Redmond-based company has built one of the government’s deepest partnerships in technology, led by President and Vice Chairman Brad Smith, a former D.C. attorney. New York Times he was once called “the de facto ambassador of the technology industry at large.”
Anthropic sued the Department of Defense on Monday over the designation, which has historically been reserved for foreign enemies. There followed a breakdown in contract negotiations in which Anthropic refused to drop two lines of caution in its AI models: no use of fully autonomous weapons and no use of mass surveillance of the American people.
President Trump has separately ordered all government agencies to stop using Anthropic technology.
OpenAI, on the other hand, moved quickly to fill the void left by Anthropic, announcing its Pentagon deal on the same day that the appointment dropped. CEO Sam Altman later admitted that the timing looked “opportunistic and sloppy.” Thirty-seven developers and researchers from OpenAI and Google, including Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, separately filed their own amicus briefs in support of Anthropic.
In its amicus briefs, Microsoft said AI should not be used to “surveill large numbers of people at home or put the country in a situation where autonomous machines can start a war independently,” matching Anthropic’s stance on two sticking points in the debate.
Microsoft also signaled a double whammy in the government’s approach: the Pentagon gave itself six months to change Anthropic’s models but made the name work quickly for contractors. Without the restraining order, Microsoft warned, it and other companies would have to “take immediate action to modify existing product configurations and contracts” for the military.
