US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic’s CEO until tomorrow to open the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology for unrestricted military use or risk losing its government contract, a person familiar with their meeting said on Tuesday.
Anthropic makes the chatbot Claude and is the last of its peers to not supply its technology to a new US military internal network. CEO Dario Amodei repeatedly has made clear his ethical concerns about unchecked government use of AI, including the dangers of fully autonomous armed drones and of AI-assisted mass surveillance that could track dissent.
Defense officials warned they could designate Anthropic a supply chain risk or use the Defense Production Act to essentially give the military more authority to use its products even if it does not approve of how they are used, said the person familiar with the meeting and a senior Pentagon official, who both were not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Photo: AP
The development, which was reported earlier by Axios, underscores the debate over AI’s role in national security and concerns about how the technology could be used in high-stakes situations involving lethal force, sensitive information or government surveillance. It also comes as Hegseth has vowed to root out what he calls a “woke culture” in the armed forces.
“A powerful AI looking across billions of conversations from millions of people could gauge public sentiment, detect pockets of disloyalty forming, and stamp them out before they grow,” Amodei wrote in an essay last month.
The person familiar called the tone of the meeting cordial, but said Amodei did not budge on two areas he has established as lines Anthropic would not cross: fully autonomous military targeting operations and domestic surveillance of US citizens.
The Pentagon objects to Anthropic’s ethical restrictions, saying military operations need tools that do not come with built-in limitations, the senior Pentagon official said.
Anthropic has long pitched itself as the more responsible and safety-minded of the leading AI companies, ever since its founders quit OpenAI to form the start-up in 2021.
The uncertainty with the Pentagon is putting those intentions to the test, said Owen Daniels, associate director of analysis and fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
“Anthropic’s peers, including Meta, Google and xAI, have been willing to comply with the department’s policy on using models for all lawful applications,” Daniels said. “So the company’s bargaining power here is limited, and it risks losing influence in the department’s push to adopt AI.”
The Pentagon’s “breakneck” adoption of AI shows the need for greater AI oversight or regulation by US Congress, particularly if AI is being used to surveil Americans, said Amos Toh, senior counsel at the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program at New York University.
“The law is not keeping up with how quickly the technology is evolving,” Toh wrote in a post on Bluesky. “But that doesn’t mean DoD [the Department of Defense] has a blank check.”
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