Lisbon, March 22, 2026 (Lusa) - Joao Leitao Figueiredo, a lawyer at CMS Portugal, one of the country's leading law firms, said in an interview with Lusa that problems between the state and strategic technology had always existed, and the Anthropic case revealed a dispute between power centres.
"Pandora's box had been open for a long time, and I think it cannot, and rightly so for us Europeans, be passing us by," as this theme "had been present for several years" and the Anthropic case "only made it much more visible and politically unavoidable," he said.
He noted that "the problems resulting from the relationship between the state and strategic technology have always existed and have always been marked by high tension," with periods of more or less alignment, "depending on the context" of government leadership.
This is "because there is a strategic interest on the part of governments, particularly in the countries where these companies are operating (...), carrying out development, where at certain times, they have been instrumentalised, but also at more critical moments, as I acknowledge we may be experiencing today in the United States, where there is government imposition for a certain control over the way technology is developed and used," he explained.
"What changes is not this existence of conflict (...) or tension between private business freedom and the state and the state's interests," he pointed out, but "the object upon which this tension falls".
He said that "we spent many years worried about who could [have] the best materials for building weaponry, access to energy, telecommunications, for a new reality, which are Artificial Intelligence [AI] models, which have the capacity to be used for dual purposes with great ease".
João Leitão Figueiredo highlighted the "dangerous romanticism" that concerned him above all "in the way this episode has been framed".
"As we are innately opposed to the logic of this US administration, under [Donald] Trump, we are somehow trying to romanticise a tech company's ability to fight that line of thought that we call MAGA (Make America Great Again)," he said, classifying this as a simplification.
"If we stick too closely to the fight between the US government, the presidency and Anthropic, we are seriously simplifying reality. What we are talking about is a company operating in one of the sectors most deeply interconnected with national defence and security, which benefits from huge public contracts and which also grows by being part of that ecosystem," he said.
Therefore, "there is a bilateral interest here; this tension is not just between ethics and, somehow, the excessive military use of these technologies, but a true dispute between power centres," he emphasised.
He said the question was "whether we will continue to have (...) private power centres regarding this type of technology, or regarding the use of this technology, or whether, somehow, states will have the capacity to transfer those power centres to their core".
He insisted that "there is nothing new" in this tension between private individuals who develop technologies that "could be crucial for a state's defence or for its military use," but "there is indeed greater visibility because Anthropic is disputing its autonomy from the US state".
In short, "this is not an opening of Pandora's box," but "a need for us all to become much more pragmatic and recognise that this box was never closed".
The phrase Pandora's box refers to the Greek myth of Pandora, who opened a forbidden box, releasing all the evils of the world.
"The social evolution we feel also leads us to be more attentive to these matters and to worry more" especially because "we are talking about a technology that is used in both the military/defence and civilian spheres," he concluded.
ALU/LYT // ADB.
Lusa
