Big Tech backs Anthropic in fight against Trump administration

Anthropic, the AI safety startup behind the Claude models, has gained powerful allies in its legal battle against a Trump-era executive order. Google and Amazon, both investors in Anthropic through their cloud divisions, have filed a joint amicus curiae brief with the D.C. Circuit Court. The brief supports Anthropic's challenge to Executive Order 13960, which imposes strict procurement rules and usage limits on federal agencies employing AI models that meet certain criteria, including those trained on large datasets. The tech giants argue the order's vague definitions and compliance burdens create significant market uncertainty, chilling investment and innovation in a critical sector.

The core of the dispute centers on the order's potential to limit the federal government's access to cutting-edge AI, including Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Opus models. Google and Amazon contend that the regulation, aimed at promoting "trustworthy AI," inadvertently favors less capable or open-source models while penalizing leading commercial offerings. Their intervention signals a unified front from the AI industry's largest players against regulatory overreach they perceive as anti-competitive. The outcome could set a major precedent for how future administrations regulate advanced AI systems, impacting everything from federal R&D contracts to the competitive landscape for models like GPT-4o and Llama 3.