On March 4, the US Department of Defense took an unprecedented move against an American company: designating the frontier AI start-up Anthropic a “supply chain risk”. Typically, this designation is applied to technology from foreign-adversary countries. In this instance, it was invoked over a contract dispute.The conflict, which was largely blocked by a judge in California last week, centred on the question of where control over AI should rest. Neither side had the answer quite right.
