Anthropic sets up for tense Pentagon showdown as Friday deadline looms

Anthropic has said it will not back down in a fight with the US Department of Defense (DoD) over how its artificial intelligence (AI) technology is used.

The startup’s rivals OpenAI, Google, and xAI were also granted contract awards of up to $200 million from the DoD last year. Those companies have agreed to let the DoD use their models for all lawful purposes within the military’s unclassified systems.

Anthropic signed its own $200 million contract with the DoD in July, and it was the first lab to integrate its models into mission workflows on classified networks.

However, the artificial intelligence startup has been engaged in tense negotiations with the Pentagon in recent weeks. A person familiar with the negotiations said tensions “go back several months,” before it was publicly known that Claude was used as part of a US operation to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The core dispute over surveillance and autonomous weapons

Anthropic wants assurance that its models will not be used for fully autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance of Americans, while the DoD wants to be able to use the models without those restrictions.

Regarding these specific risks, Dario Amodei said in his statement: “in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do.”

Expanding on the surveillance concerns, Dario Amodei said in his statement that powerful AI makes it possible to “assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life, automatically and at massive scale.”

He noted that while Anthropic supports the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence, “using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values.”

Threats, deadlines, and a war of words

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who met with Amodei at the Pentagon on Tuesday, has threatened to label Anthropic a “supply chain risk” or to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to comply with its demands. The DoD sent Anthropic its “last and final offer” on Wednesday night, giving the company until 5:01 pm ET on Friday to decide.

An Anthropic spokeswoman said that while the company received updated wording on Wednesday night, it represented “virtually no progress” and that “new language framed as compromise was paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will.”

Addressing these pressures, Dario Amodei said in his statement: “The Department of War has stated they will only contract with AI companies who accede to ‘any lawful use’ and remove safeguards in the cases mentioned above. They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards; they have also threatened to designate us a ‘supply chain risk’ … Regardless, these threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”

Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell said on Thursday that the DoD has “no interest” in using Anthropic’s models for fully autonomous weapons or to conduct mass surveillance of Americans, which he noted is illegal. He emphasized that the agency wants the company to agree to allow its models to be used for “all lawful purposes,” calling it a “simple, common-sense request.”

However, US Undersecretary for Defense Emil Michael personally attacked Amodei on Thursday night, writing on X that the executive “wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US Military.” Michael added, “It’s a shame that Dario Amodei is a liar and has a God-complex.”

On the other hand, in an open letter, over 200 workers from Google and OpenAI supported Anthropic’s stance. A former DoD official also told the BBC that Hegseth’s justifications for using the “supply chain risk” term were “extremely flimsy.”

Despite the conflict, Dario Amodei stated in his statement that he is “deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States.” The organization is still “ready to continue talks and committed to operational continuity for the Department and America’s warfighters,” a representative for Anthropic said.

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