The Pentagon now faces unified internal pressure as hundreds of Google and OpenAI employees publicly backed Anthropic’s decision to resist military demands to loosen AI safeguards.
The open letter, titled "We Will Not Be Divided," urges both companies' leadership to "put aside their differences and stand together to continue to refuse the Department of War’s current demands for permission to use our models for domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight."
Those are lines Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said should not be crossed by his or any other AI company.
As of publication the letter has over 450 signatures, almost 400 from Google employees and the remainder from OpenAI. Organisers say roughly half of participants attached their names, the rest chose anonymity, and all signatories were verified as current employees.
The original organisers are not Google or OpenAI staff, and they say they are unaffiliated with any AI company, political party or advocacy group.
The letter escalates a dispute sparked by US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who threatened to label Anthropic a "supply chain risk" if it did not withdraw certain guardrails for classified work.
The Pentagon has been in talks with Google and OpenAI about using their models for classified tasks, and xAI joined those discussions earlier this week. The letter accuses the government of "trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in."
Company reactions have already surfaced. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees the ChatGPT maker will draw the same red lines as Anthropic, according to an internal memo seen by Axios, and told CNBC he does not "personally think the Pentagon should be threatening DPA against these companies."
The immediate question now is whether Google and OpenAI leadership will heed an employee-led demand for coordinated refusal, and how the Pentagon will respond to a widening, public corporate stand against its classified-use requests.
