Vinod Khosla Backs Autonomous AI Weapons Amid Anthropic-Pentagon Showdown: 'Putin Won't Fight Fair'

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla publicly broke with Anthropic on Friday, arguing the AI safety-focused startup is wrong to resist autonomous weapons development.

“Putin won’t fight fair so we should have autonomous AI weapons for sure,” Khosla posted on X, adding he admires Anthropic for sticking by its principles, just not the principle itself.

Blacklisted While OpenAI Dealt

Khosla's remarks came after an X post reported that Sam Altman had informed employees that a deal with the U.S. Department of Defense was in the works.

Earlier on Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth formally blacklisted Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” — and OpenAI landed the Pentagon deal Anthropic walked away from, agreeing to embed engineers on-site with human oversight over use of force.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had said the company “cannot in good conscience” accept Pentagon terms that failed to block Claude’s use for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons — prompting Under Secretary Emil Michael to publicly call him a “liar.”

A day before the deal, OpenAI and Alphabet Inc. employees jointly signed an open letter titled ‘We Will Not Be Divided,’ demanding leadership resist the Department of War’s terms — the same terms OpenAI just accepted.

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