AI firm Anthropic rebuffs Pentagon
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Thursday the artificial intelligence (AI) company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Pentagon’s demands to allow unrestricted use of its technology, deepening the unusually public clash with the Trump administration that is threatening to pull its contract and take other drastic steps by Friday.
The maker of the AI chatbot Claude said in a statement that it’s not walking away from negotiations, but that new contract language received from the Department of Defense “made virtually no progress on preventing Claude’s use for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons.”
Last of its peers
Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s top spokesperson, said on social media Thursday that the military “has no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal) nor do we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement.”
Anthropic’s policies prevent its models from being used for those purposes. It’s the last of its peers—the Pentagon also has contracts with Google, OpenAI, and Elon Musk’s xAI—to not supply its technology to a new US military internal network.
“It is the Department’s prerogative to select contractors most aligned with their vision,” Amodei wrote in a statement. “But given the substantial value that Anthropic’s technology provides to our armed forces, we hope they reconsider.”
Sweeping authority
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic an ultimatum on Tuesday after meeting with Amodei: open its artificial intelligence technology for unrestricted military use by Friday, or risk losing its government contract.
Military officials warned that they could go even further and designate the company as a supply chain risk, or invoke a Cold War-era law called the Defense Production Act to give the military more sweeping authority to use its products.
Amodei said Thursday that “those latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.”
Parnell reiterated that the military wants to use Anthropic’s artificial intelligence technology in legal ways and will not let the company dictate any limits ahead of the Friday deadline.
Substantial value
The talks that escalated this week began months ago. Amodei said that given “the substantial value that Anthropic’s technology provides to our armed forces, we hope they reconsider.” But if they don’t, he said Anthropic “will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who is not seeking reelection, said Thursday that the Pentagon has been handling the matter unprofessionally while Anthropic is “trying to do their best to help us from ourselves.”
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said he was “deeply disturbed” by reports that the Pentagon is “working to bully a leading US company.”
