India, March 4 -- Artificial Intelligence (AI) company Anthropic and the Trump White House had a public rupture last week, unusual for American industry. The company refused to permit the use of its technology for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. The administration designated it a national security threat, placing it in the same bracket as China's Huawei and Russia-linked Kaspersky. But within the day, the US government used Anthropic's tools for its strikes in Iran. Details of the deployment remain unclear, but a similar deployment earlier in the year helped the US military select targets and run battlefield simulations when it captured Venezuela's president Nicolas Maduro.

The confrontation has been read as a tech industry spat...