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Less than 24 hours before the deadline in an ultimatum issued by the Pentagon, Anthropic rejected Defense Department demands for unfettered access to its AI.
that it The culmination of a dramatic exchange From public statements, social media posts, and behind-the-scenes negotiations, dating back to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desire to renegotiate all existing AI lab contracts with the military. But Anthropic has, so far, refused to back down from its two current red lines: no mass surveillance of Americans, and no lethal autonomous weapons (or weapons licensed to kill targets without human supervision at all). It had OpenAI and xAI It is said Anthropic has already agreed to the new terms, while Anthropic’s refusal led to CEO Dario Amodei being summoned to the White House this week for a meeting with Hegseth himself, where the minister was It is said Issued an ultimatum to the CEO to back down by the end of the business day on Friday or otherwise.
In a statement Late Thursday, Amodei wrote: “I believe strongly in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and defeat our authoritarian adversaries. So Anthropic has worked proactively to deploy our models across the War Department and the Intelligence Community.”
He added that the company “has never raised objections to specific military operations nor attempted to limit the use of our technology in an ad hoc manner” but that in “a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine rather than defend democratic values” — and went on to specifically point to mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. (Amodi stated that “partially autonomous weapons…are essential to the defense of democracy” and that fully autonomous weapons may “ultimately prove critical to our national defense,” but that “today, frontier AI systems are not reliable enough to operate fully autonomous weapons.” He did not rule out Anthropists approving the military’s use of fully autonomous weapons in the future, but stated that they are not ready yet.)
The Pentagon had already done so It is said I asked major defense contractors to rate their reliance on Anthropic’s Claude, which could be seen as a first step toward designating the company as a “supply chain risk” — the general threat the Pentagon recently called out (a designation typically reserved for… Threats to national security). And so was the Pentagon It is said Consider invoking the Defense Production Act to bring the human into compliance.
“The Pentagon’s threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience comply with their request,” Amodei wrote in his statement. He also wrote that “if the Department chooses to retire Anthropic, we will enable a smooth transition to another provider, avoiding any disruption to ongoing military planning, operations, or other critical missions. Our models will be available on the expanded terms we have proposed for as long as required.”