President Donald Trump‘s second term started with a carefully maintained truce between the administration and Silicon Valley. Tech giants donated to Trump’s inauguration, their CEOs made visits to Mar-a-Lago and the White House. But a report by The Financial Times suggests that the truce appears to be shaking because of certain decision. These include tariffs on supply chains, complicated work visas, flip-flopped on chip export rules, and most recently and probably the biggest: The Pentagon’s decision to blacklist Anthropic.The showdown between Anthropic and the Pentagon that led to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk” crossed a line that even those who were close to Trump could not ignore. The designation, which placed a $380 billion American AI startup in the same category as Chinese and Russian entities, came after Anthropic refused to give the US military unconstrained access to its AI models, particularly for use in domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons.
The Silicon Valley reacted swiftly
The reaction from within the industry was immediate. The dissent started from within with notably, the first significant pushback coming from Dean Ball, a former Trump official who last year wrote much of the administration’s own AI Action Plan. Ball criticised the decision publicly, calling it “by a profoundly wide margin the most damaging policy move I have ever seen.” It was followed by a coordinated and public show of solidarity from across the tech industry with companies like Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft coming together to condemn the decision. Microsoft wrote directly to the president urging a reversal. Moreover, Anthropic’s fiercest rival, OpenAI, also offered support. “We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk and we’ve made our position on this clear to the Department of War,” OpenAI said last month.Meanwhile, trade groups representing Apple, Meta, OpenAI, Amazon and Google signed legal briefs urging US courts to side with Anthropic. “A lot of the tech industry is waking up and realising we have to draw a line in the sand here, before it affects the rest of us,” Alec Stapp, co-founder of the Institute for Progress, a pro-innovation think-tank in Washington that co-signed one of the briefs, was quoted as saying. Lobbyists and think-tanks that had previously supported many of Trump’s tech policies added their names to the growing chorus of opposition. A coalition of industry groups also wrote to a federal judge this week, warning that the broad designation against Anthropic was “causing immediate and substantial harm to the technology industry.”
