To Outpace China, America Must Break the AI Duopoly

The fallout from Anthropic’s recent battle with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is still continuing. Though Anthropic is challenging Hegseth’s decision to label the company as a supply chain risk, the Claude creator is already at risk of losing $60 billion in contracts—and has already lost the ability to contract with the government. As Anthropic has fallen, OpenAI, its chief competitor, has risen, happily signing the deal that Anthropic refused. 

The ideological battle—over whether an outside company could have a veto over the Pentagon’s decision-making—is over, for now. But there is a second question that has emerged out of this fight: Is it a good thing that the Pentagon can only choose from two companies?

To be clear, the relationship between Anthropic and OpenAI is nothing like some other duopolies, which only pretend to compete in order to keep prices artificially low. The two clearly do not like one another. To call their relationship acrimonious would be an understatement. Weeks after trading pointed Superbowl ads, where Anthropic bashed OpenAI for incorporating ads into ChatGPT’s answers, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman caused an international stir by refusing to hold hands on stage at the India AI Summit.

Read more at The National Interest.