In late February, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on X that Anthropic, the AI firm behind the LLM Claude, had been designated a “supply chain risk to national security.” It’s a designation previously reserved for foreign adversaries, and never once applied to an American company.

Within the hour, President Trump ordered every federal agency to stop using Anthropic’s AI immediately. The charge? Anthropic had refused to let the Pentagon use its Claude models without explicit protections against mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. The company wouldn’t budge, so the government brought the hammer down.

Hours later, Sam Altman announced OpenAI had signed the deal.

What happened next is one of the most striking market reactions in recent tech history, and a live demonstration of something that Federico Frattini, Dean of POLIMI Graduate School of Management at Politecnico di Milano, has spent years arguing from academic research: that purpose isn’t a values poster on a wall, it’s a competitive moat. And it’s built, or destroyed in exactly these moments.

By the following morning, ChatGPT’s App Store rating was in freefall. One-star reviews spiked 775 percent overnight, flooding in from users who felt betrayed. Day-over-day uninstalls of the ChatGPT app surged 295 percent. Protesters surrounded OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, chalking messages on the pavement urging employees to resist.

Inside the company, the head of hardware and robotics resigned publicly, saying that mass surveillance without judicial oversight and autonomous lethal weapons “are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.” Nearly 900 employees across OpenAI and Google DeepMind signed an open letter calling on their own leadership to refuse the same terms Anthropic had rejected.

Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Claude app hit number one in the App Store, and has stayed there for the past two weeks.

This is a lesson in the importance of purpose, and it reaches far beyond Silicon Valley.

The Purposeful Organisations Project

Frattini’s thinking on purpose has been shaped by rigorous academic research as much as philosophical conviction. As a Full Professor of Strategic Management and Innovation, with over 200 international publications and recognition among the top 50 technology and innovation management researchers worldwide, he brings an empirical lens to what might otherwise sound like idealism.

Under his leadership since 2020, POLIMI GSoM has made purpose a structural pillar of its educational model. It’s not a module or an elective, but a framework that runs through the school’s redesigned MBA, its culture, and its institutional identity. And the school became the first Italian business school to achieve B Corp Certification, signalling that its commitment to purposeful business is meant to be externally verifiable, not self-declared.

The “New Generation MBA” launched under Frattini’s direction embodies this approach most fully. As he has explained it, the traditional business school model rested on two pillars: technical hard skills and the maximisation of shareholder value. Both, he argues, are necessary but insufficient. The reimagined programme adds what POLIMI GSoM calls “life skills” – drawing on psychology, philosophy, art and social science – precisely because Frattini believes that great leadership requires a quality of human awareness that management textbooks have long failed to cultivate.

“We want to put the individual and their awareness at the centre,” Frattini says, describing the philosophy behind the New Generation MBA. Profit and financial results, in this model, are not the ultimate goal but rather the instrument for achieving something higher, a genuine contribution to a better society.

The school’s own purpose statement captures this: POLIMI GSoM aims to “nurture innovators to shape a better future for all.” Frattini is explicit that this is a strategic commitment from which all other decisions flow.

Purpose Is Built in the Trade-Offs

Here is where Frattini’s thinking becomes most useful for leaders, including Open AI’s Sam Altman.

Purpose, he argues, is not declared. It is demonstrated. And it is demonstrated most powerfully not in the easy moments but in the hard ones: when a profitable opportunity arrives, and leadership chooses to decline it because it conflicts with the organisation’s core and value-laden commitments. Every time a company bypasses its values to grab a deal, culture erodes. Every time it holds the line, culture compounds.

This is what makes the Anthropic story so instructive.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had drawn two explicit red lines: the company’s AI would not be used for domestic mass surveillance and would not power fully autonomous weapons systems. When the Pentagon demanded an “all lawful purposes” standard that would remove those restrictions, Amodei refused. “We cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” he wrote publicly. The decision came at a concrete cost: a $200 million contract, the loss of federal government business, and a supply chain risk designation that blocked Anthropic from working with all US military contractors.

That is a trade-off measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. And it is the kind of trade-off Frattini has argued in his research and teaching is a credible test of genuine purpose.

The OpenAI Contrast

The counterpoint arrived with startling speed, and the market’s verdict was unambiguous.

Altman had previously supported Anthropic’s position publicly. Many of his own employees had signed letters backing Amodei. When the critical moment arrived – a government contract made suddenly available after a competitor was sanctioned for refusing it – the company chose the contract. 

The announcement dropped on a Friday evening. By Saturday morning, the App Store was on fire. One-star reviews surged and the uninstall spike persisted. Google chief scientist Jeff Dean was among more than 30 employees of OpenAI and Google DeepMind who filed a legal amicus brief in support of Anthropic’s lawsuit, warning that blacklisting the company would “undoubtedly have consequences for the United States’ industrial and scientific competitiveness in AI.”

By Monday, Altman was in damage-control mode. At an all-hands meeting he described the backlash as “really painful,” while publicly acknowledging that the launch “just looked opportunistic and sloppy.” He published a revised agreement adding new language – the AI system “shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons” – but the admission that the original deal had loopholes only deepened the credibility problem. You cannot un-see a company that rushed to pick up a rival’s discarded contract within hours of that rival being government-sanctioned.

From the perspective of Frattini’s framework, this was not primarily a communications failure. It was a values failure that became visible in the one moment that matters: when holding to purpose was genuinely costly and abandoning it was financially rewarding. That is the moment Frattini identifies as demonstration of authentic organisational culture, and OpenAI failed it publicly, in real time, in front of its own employees and millions of users.

Culture Compounds

There is a powerful business case here, and Frattini has never shied away from making it explicitly. The POLIMI GSoM research on purposeful organisations consistently finds that companies which genuinely embed higher purpose into their decision-making tend to attract more loyal customers, retain more talented employees, build stronger stakeholder relationships, and ultimately generate more durable financial performance. This is not despite their willingness to forgo short-term opportunities, but because of it.

The mechanism is trust. In a world where AI is rapidly commoditising technology capabilities, trust becomes the rarest and most defensible competitive asset. Customers and employees cannot evaluate an AI model’s architecture. They cannot audit its safety systems. What they can evaluate is whether an organisation behaved consistently with its stated values when it was genuinely costly to do so. 

In the days following the Pentagon announcement, Anthropic’s position in the consumer market strengthened dramatically. The supply chain risk designation designed as punishment acted in the consumer market almost as an endorsement. Being blacklisted by the government for refusing to enable mass surveillance turned out to be excellent brand positioning among users who care about those questions.

Implications for Business Education

The reason Frattini is building purpose into the core of management education rather than treating it as a peripheral topic is precisely that these moments cannot be improvised. Leaders who face an opportunity that conflicts with their values do not have time to convene a philosophy seminar. They draw on habits of mind, frameworks of decision-making, and a clarity of conviction that must have been developed long before the critical moment arrives.

This is why POLIMI GSoM draws on disciplines “historically distant from business schools,” as Frattini describes them – psychology to cultivate self-awareness, philosophy to develop ethical reasoning, history to understand how organisations and societies change over time. The school’s Shaping Purposeful Futures initiative asks students to generate ideas that create genuine community value, practising the integration of commercial thinking and social purpose while the stakes are still educational.

“It is up to us to teach tomorrow’s leaders that the pursuit of profit is not in contradiction with our genuine commitment to building a better society for all,” Frattini has said. The Anthropic case is perhaps the sharpest recent illustration of why getting this right matters.

Purpose in an Age of AI Commoditisation

There is one final dimension to this story that Frattini’s framework illuminates with force.

The AI industry is entering a phase of accelerating commoditisation. Models are improve rapidly as costs fall and competitors multiply. In such an environment, the strategies that once built competitive moats – superior technology, faster iteration, lower prices – become increasingly temporary advantages. If the underlying technology is effectively a commodity, what remains as a source of durable differentiation?

Character. Culture. Purpose.

What Anthropic demonstrated in late February was that a company with genuine purpose – one expressed not in marketing but in the $200 million decision it made under duress – possesses something that cannot be replicated quickly by a competitor. It cannot be copied in a product update or a renegotiated contract. It is built, as Frattini argues, through accumulated decisions made consistently over time.

For every leader watching this story unfold, the question it poses is the same one that Frattini has been asking in his classrooms and research for years: when your moment of trade-off arrives – and it will – what will your organisation actually choose? And have you built the culture, the clarity, and the conviction to make the choice that your stated values demand?

Purpose, as Federico Frattini has long insisted, changes everything. Recent events have simply made the proof impossible to ignore.

About the author

Matt Symonds is Chief Editor of BlueSky Thinking, and host of BlueSky Media Connect, bringing together b-schools and universities to meet editors from FT, BBC, Bloomberg, WSJ, The Economist, NYTimes and other global / regional media.

He is the S of QS, co-founding QS Quacquarelli Symonds, publishers of the QS World University Rankings. Matt I also co-Founder and Director of Fortuna Admissions, a coaching dream team of former business school and university admissions professionals from top-tier institutions, including Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, INSEAD, LBS, Chicago Booth, Columbia, Northwestern Kellogg, Berkeley Haas.

Matt co-host the CentreCourt MBA & Masters Festivals with John A. Byrne and Poets & Quants. Author of the international bestseller, “Getting the MBA Admissions Edge” sponsored by Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Bain, BCG, he writes about Higher Education and management for BBC, Times of India and formerly Forbes, The Economist and Bloomberg.

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