Comment by roughly
1 day ago
It feels like Sam's playing chess against an opponent who's playing dodge ball. He's leveraged this situation to get OpenAI in with the DoD in a way that's going to be extremely lucrative for the company and hurt his biggest rival in the process, but I think he's still seeing DoD as Just Another Customer, albeit a big government one. This administration just held a gun to the head of Anthropic and (if the "supply chain risk" designation holds and does as much damage as they're hoping) pulled the trigger, because Anthropic had the gall to tell them no. One thing this administration's shown is you cannot hold lines when you're working with them - at some point the DoD's going to cross his "red lines" and he's going to have to choose whether he's going to risk his entire consumer business and accede to being a private wing of the government like Palantir or if he wants to make a genuine tech giant. There's no third choice here.
I do not see this as any mastermind play, but fully compromising principles. Which is a play.
"Donations" to a corrupt regime + signing a deal that says DoD can do whatever they want is not out maneuvering so much as rolling in the pig stye.
So is the theory that OpenAI believes it can’t compete on the open market or that they don’t know this will eventually cost them their consumer business?
I doubt most consumers pay enough attention that they would be aware of something like this. Even if they did, few companies have clean hands these days that is just falls into the general haze of, "everything is awful."
For OpenAI, it is likely a huge contract which gives them immediate cash today. Plus the event can be repackaged in further financing deals. "Good enough for the DoD, with N year contracts for analysis of the hardest problems"
The reality is that all data we have created and will create that is accessible on the public Internet will be used to train autonomous weapons systems used to kill humans. So the consumer business will be lost eventually, no matter what OpenAI believes.
Everyone already knows what he is going to do when it comes to that.
It also doesn't matter because Claude 4.6 is so much better at writing code that nobody cares what OpenAI is doing.