India, April 15 -- Cognitive warmup. If you hear about Anthropic more than once in our conversation this week, it is purely because there are a few things that need to be cleared up about the AI company. First, a federal appeals court in Washington turned down a plea to pause the "supply-chain risk" designation by the US Department of War. This means Anthropic's defence contracts will remain restricted. (Second, later in our conversation this week.)

This came about after the company, in February, refused to allow government use of Claude AI for what it claims are fully autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance applications. Anthropic maintains that current frontier AI systems are not reliable enough to make life-or-death decisions wit...