AI Leaders Weekly Briefing

February 27, 2026

Anthropic resisted Pentagon demands on AI use while accusing Chinese labs of IP theft; OpenAI expanded operations, and DeepSeek faced scrutiny, and more.

Anthropic faced significant pressure from the Pentagon to allow unrestricted military use of its AI, which the company largely resisted, citing safety concerns and refusal for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. ^{12345678910111213}
Anthropic accused three Chinese AI labs (DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax) of conducting "industrial-scale distillation attacks" to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude models, raising national security concerns. ^{14151617181920}
OpenAI made several strategic moves, including hiring a new Chief People Officer, expanding its London and Silicon Valley offices, and partnering with various organizations like the CFDA and Figma, while also facing scrutiny over its AI's misuse and energy consumption. ^{21222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657}
DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab, was reported to be internally testing its unreleased V4 model, with Huawei reportedly adapting it, and was also accused by Anthropic of intellectual property theft. ^585960616263
Other notable developments include Mistral AI forming partnerships with Team Visma | Lease a Bike and Accenture, Runway announcing new leadership and AI models for room transformations, ElevenLabs partnering with Google Cloud and restricting access from sanctioned countries, and xAI facing a lawsuit dismissal from OpenAI and accusations of noisy power plant operations. ^{6465666768697071727374757677787980818283848586878889909192939495969798}

Sources

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