Good morning. Andrew here. The soap opera between the Pentagon, Anthropic and OpenAI continues. And an emerging question is whether the fight is less about A.I. safety and more about politics. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s C.E.O., said the quiet part out loud in a leaked internal memo, suggesting the company was being targeted by the Pentagon because “we haven’t donated to Trump” and that “we haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has).” That OpenAI has sought to add stricter terms to its own contract with the Pentagon, a move that also appears to undermine the government’s argument about why it refused a deal with Anthropic. More below. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
Back to the negotiating table?Less than a week after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatened to essentially blacklist the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, the Pentagon has resumed talks about using its models, The Financial Times and Bloomberg report. Any renewed talks carry high stakes for Anthropic. Its business faces a dire threat if Hegseth’s original threat comes to pass. Stakes are high for the Pentagon, too. It’s unclear how the two sides can compromise. The Pentagon has stressed that it believes it should be allowed to employ A.I. tools for “any lawful use,” though it could agree to some safeguards on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. It points to a deal it reached with OpenAI — one that Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O., said addressed concerns like Anthropic’s. But in a blistering memo sent to Anthropic employees on Friday, first reported by The Information, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s C.E.O., argued that the OpenAI contract appeared to have left the Pentagon plenty of loopholes. OpenAI and the Pentagon’s descriptions of their deal sounded like “80 percent safety theater,” he wrote, adding that it basically gave the department what it wanted. Altman acknowledged flaws in OpenAI’s original contract this week, and announced that his company had negotiated what he called stronger safeguards. Will cooler heads prevail? After Hegseth cut off talks with Anthropic last week, Emil Michael, the Pentagon official who led the negotiations, called Amodei a “liar” with a “God complex.” And Amodei may have to explain strong language in that internal memo, notably his assertions that the Pentagon’s animus was because “we haven’t donated to Trump” and that “we haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has).” Anthropic has a lot on the line. The company’s annual revenue run rate has reportedly hit $20 billion, more than doubling where it was in late December, after a surge in business adoption of its Claude models. But the prospect of being barred from any business with government contractors — which Anthropic has said it will fight in court — could decimate those gains. (Several defense contractors are already dropping Claude.) It’s a big deal for the Pentagon, too. Until recently, Claude was the only A.I. tool allowed into its classified systems, and it was reportedly used in the military operations in Venezuela and Iran. Government officials have said Claude is better than some alternatives, and have acknowledged that removing Anthropic tools from their operations will be a messy task.
China expects its growth to slow. Beijing said today that its economy would grow between 4.5 percent and 5 percent this year, its least ambitious projection in decades. Its leader, Xi Jinping, is planning for a summit with President Trump in a month's time in which both leaders may seek deals to ease trade-war tensions. Trump steps into a crypto feud. Shares of Coinbase rallied nearly 15 percent yesterday (and were up in premarket trading) after Trump urged banks to resolve their differences with the crypto sector over the Clarity Act, a bill that would advance stablecoins. Also, the S.E.C. and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission presented the White House with a long-awaited plan for how to regulate crypto and prediction markets. Reid Hoffman’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein come under new scrutiny. Documents released by the Justice Department showed how Jeffrey Epstein used his relationship with Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn and a major Democratic Party donor, to build a network in Silicon Valley. (Hoffman once hosted Epstein at a dinner with Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.) Also, a House committee subpoenaed Attorney General Pam Bondi over the department’s handling of the files. The Iran toll climbsGlobal markets have been rebounding today. Investors are betting that the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran won’t drag on despite little sign of Tehran capitulating. Businesses, though, are watching the toll mount. The latest:
Airlines have been especially hit hard. The number of canceled flights to the Gulf region’s biggest airports has exceeded 23,000. (Shares in Emirates, the Middle East’s largest airline, have slumped roughly 10 percent this week.) Meanwhile, companies looking to evacuate employees and their families from major business centers like Dubai are facing eye-watering fares. Rising energy prices remain a major focus. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said today that it struck a U.S. tanker in the northern Persian Gulf; another tanker anchored off Kuwait was hit, too. Iran’s targeting of commercial vessels has paralyzed shipments of crude oil and natural gas in and around the Strait of Hormuz and pushed up insurance prices. Gasoline prices in the U.S. hit $3.20 a gallon yesterday, the highest level since September. President Trump has promised measures to restart energy shipments, including naval escorts and insurance guarantees. Marsh and Aon, two large brokers, are in discussions with the U.S. over a plan to insure tankers. But an official at Marsh told Bloomberg that such a plan could take weeks to go into action. The view from Washington: Nearly every Republican voted to block a Senate measure that would have limited his Iran war powers. But the public is not supportive of the campaign, according to polls taken by CNN, Reuters/Ipsos and The Washington Post soon after the strikes. Another blow to Trump on tariffsPresident Trump shows little sign of backing off from his tariff barrage. But corporate America may be closer to winning some relief. A federal judge ruled yesterday that the Trump administration must begin refunding importers who paid levies that the Supreme Court struck down last month. Judge Richard Eaton of the U.S. Court of International Trade also ordered the government to stop adding the levies to importers’ customs paperwork. A recap: Hundreds of companies, including Costco and FedEx, have sued to claw back more than $100 billion they paid out on the tariffs. Refund claims have piled up since the Supreme Court found that levies imposed using the 1977 law known as IEEPA were unlawful. “All importers of record” that paid these levies are “entitled” to relief, Eaton ruled. Pro-business groups, including the Cato Institute think tank, called his ruling a major win for importers. Trade experts still expect a protracted legal fight. After initially sounding open to refunding companies, the Trump administration has adopted a more defiant stance. Tariffs remain a key part of Trump’s trade policy, providing revenue meant to help with the country’s huge fiscal deficit. Eaton set another hearing for tomorrow, instructing the Justice Department to lay out how it would handle refunds. He said he believed the process could go “pretty smoothly.” The refund battle is growing costly. The U.S. would have to pay companies back with interest. (The Cato Institute calculated that the government will owe an additional $700 million in interest for every month it delays payment.) The administration is moving ahead with other options. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC yesterday that Trump’s new global tariff rate, imposed shortly after the Supreme Court ruling and rooted in different laws, would rise to 15 percent from 10 percent. (That said, the European Union has received assurances that it would be exempt from the higher rate, Bloomberg reports, citing unnamed sources.) “It’s my strong belief that the tariff rates will be back to their old rate within five months,” Bessent said. But by law, the new tariffs expire unless Congress renews them after 150 days. Given how unpopular the levies are, that puts Republican lawmakers in a bind. “I tweet what’s on my mind and the market decides if it’s material.”— Elon Musk, testifying yesterday in a trial over whether he used social media posts to drive down the value of Twitter (which he has since renamed X) before buying it for $44 billion. The billionaire played down his posts’ importance: “If this was a trial about whether I made stupid tweets, I would say I’m guilty,” he said later.
Revolut’s next big U.S. moveOver nine years, the banking app Revolut has become Europe’s most valuable start-up, appraised at $75 billion, with its sights set on becoming a global banking force. That includes becoming bigger in the U.S. — which the company is taking a step toward achieving, Michael de la Merced reports. Revolut said today that it has applied for a U.S. national bank charter. The approval process involves major banking regulators: the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the F.D.I.C. and, ultimately, the Fed. Revolut is already available in the U.S., but has to partner with an American bank, Lead Bank. A license of its own would let Revolut start taking insured customer deposits, making it easier to offer lending products like credit cards that the company sees as vital for gaining U.S. customers. (To offer those right now, it would have to borrow from the capital markets.) Revolut would also gain access to payment systems including Fedwire and ACH. “For our long-term ambitions, the best thing for us is to be directly regulated,” Sid Jajodia, the company’s chief banking officer, told DealBook. Revolut had considered other paths to a national charter, Jajodia said, including buying a lender. Several rivals have acquired or considered buying a U.S. bank. But Revolut concluded that applying for a new license made the most sense, giving it a clean start to a balance sheet and no need to integrate another business’s systems, Jajodia said. It has already set aside $500 million to expand in the U.S., some of which will help capitalize its bank. The U.S. is key to Revolut’s global ambitions. By the end of the decade, the company wants to enter more than 30 new markets, and by the middle of 2027 it hopes to have 100 million customers. (It currently has 70 million.) In January, Revolut said that it had gained a full banking license in Mexico, its first outside Europe. Of note: Revolut still doesn’t have a full-fledged banking license in the U.K. British banking authorities approved the company’s application in 2024, but the start-up remains in a “mobilization” phase that limits it to £50,000 in total deposits. (Regulators’ concerns reportedly include Revolut’s global financial controls.) Jajodia didn’t give a timeline for when the mobilization phase would conclude. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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