The San Francisco artificial intelligence company Anthropic is in a heated battle with the Pentagon, and the city’s sidewalks have spoken.
A video posted on X by famed venture capitalist Roy E. Bahat on Friday morning shows chalk writings on the sidewalk in front of the firm’s headquarters praising it for rebuffing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempt to gain unfettered access to Anthropic’s AI model for military purposes.
“Thank you for defending our freedoms,” someone scrawled outside the building at 500 Howard St. “Have courage” and “God loves Anthropic” read two more.
As of early Friday afternoon, only faint chalk outlines remained on the sidewalk.
The sidewalk messages wrapped around the block and were filled with dozens of thank-yous and “We love you.” One quoted Nelson Mandela: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” There were several American flags drawn on the ground. It is unclear who wrote the messages. No one at Anthropic wanted to comment on the matter.
The show of solidarity comes as Anthropic, which is behind the popular AI chatbot Claude, is clashing with the Department of Defense over a $200 million contract over the use of AI.
The conflagration heated up before a 5:01 p.m. deadline Friday set by Hegseth for Anthropic to come around and give it unrestricted access to the firm’s AI, which the firm has refused to do.
President Donald Trump, just ahead of the deadline, posted that the ‘UNITED STATES WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS!” He warned of “major civil and criminal consequences” for the company and said he had directed all federal agencies to stop using its technology.
Anthropic, which has a reputation as a more principled AI firm that is cautious of its own technology whose CEO has warned of potentially dystopian consequences of AI, is seeking to maintain safeguards that would block the Pentagon from using the system for mass domestic surveillance of Americans, or for autonomous weapons that operate without human oversight.
The Pentagon has said it does not plan to use the technology in those ways, but argues that Anthropic cannot decide how its tools will be lawfully used for national security.
One of the sidewalk messages commented on the matter: “No mass surveillance is so obvious.”
The fight began on Jan. 9 when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth published a memo calling for AI companies to remove restrictions on their technologies. The Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, met Hegseth at the Pentagon Tuesday and was then issued an ultimatum to agree to its terms by Friday at 5:01 p.m. EST.
On Thursday, Amodei said in a statement that the company won’t change its position despite threats: “We cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”