The Anthropic Mess Continues, Frontier AI and the Uncertain Future of Law, Q&A on Netflix, Dating Apps, F1
Episode publishedPodcast: Sharp Tech with Ben ThompsonSharp Tech with Ben Thompson
Transcript preview
Preview only
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, it's great to see you. It's great to be back. How you doing?
I'm doing okay. I mean, looks like you just leave, go on vacation, let me go to my own devices, and I just go out and get canceled apparently.
Can I tell you what? Nothing on my vacation was more relaxing than not recording a Friday night emergency episode about anthropic versus Oh, yeah. We're out on emergency episodes. Yeah.
Yeah. We're not doing those anymore.
We may be post emergency episode on this podcast, but we are gonna talk about Anthropic and the Trump administration on this podcast. One week ago, for anybody who's missed it, the Trump administration canceled the defense contract with Anthropic and announced a plan to phase Anthropic out of all government institutions within the next six months or so. That will take some time. Secretary Pete Hegseth
If it happens.
Yeah. TBD on all of this. So it's changing by the day here. Pete Hegseth also threatened to label the company a supply chain risk to national security, potentially implicating many more Anthropic contracts.
Well, he went beyond that. He said that, no one who has contracts with The US can work with Anthropic, which goes even supply chain risk is a very Serious designation. Yeah. It also does not go that far. So there's, like, there there's there's been, some definitional issues all along
the Broadening the scope of the potential implications, at least in Hegs' tweet, and they have not followed through on that threat one week later. So, again, TBD on a lot of this. For now, we will talk about everything you wrote earlier in the week. I wrote about it for Friday as well. We do have to start with the updates as we record Thursday afternoon here. I'll read from the information, which republished an internal memo from Dario Amade to Anthropic employees. It was a long memo. This is not the whole memo, but it did culminate with this. The real reasons DOW and the Trump administration
Keep exploring with a free account.
A free account preserves the short preview. Upgrade to Pro for the full transcript and episode chat.