Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei drew a sharp red line 24 hours before the deadline, declaring his company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Pentagon’s final demand to allow unrestricted use of its technology.
Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, can afford to lose a defense contract. But the ultimatum this week from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posed broader risks at the peak of the company’s meteoric rise from a little-known computer science research lab in San Francisco to one of the world’s most valuable startups.
If Amodei doesn’t budge, military officials have warned they will not just pull Anthropic’s contract but also “deem them a supply chain risk,” a designation typically stamped on foreign adversaries that could derail the company’s critical partnerships with other businesses.
And if Amodei were to cave, he could lose trust in the booming AI industry, particularly from top talent drawn to the company for its promises of responsibly building better-than-human AI that, without safeguards, could pose catastrophic risks.
Anthropic said it sought narrow assurances from the Pentagon that Claude won’t be used for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons. But after months of private talks exploded into public debate, it said in a Thursday statement that new contract language “framed as compromise was paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will.”
That was after Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s top spokesman, posted on social media that “we will not let ANY company dictate the terms regarding how we make operational decisions” and added the company has “until 5:01 p.m. ET on Friday to decide” if it would meet the demands or face consequences.
OpenAI and Google, along with Elon Musk’s xAI, also have contracts to supply their AI models to the military.
“The Pentagon is negotiating with Google and OpenAI to try to get them to agree to what Anthropic has refused,” the open letter says. “They’re trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in.”
Also raising concerns about the Pentagon’s approach were Republican and Democratic lawmakers and a former leader of the Defense Department’s AI initiatives.
“Painting a bullseye on Anthropic garners spicy headlines, but everyone loses in the end,” wrote retired Air Force Gen. Jack Shanahan in a social media post.
“Since I was square in the middle of Project Maven & Google, it’s reasonable to assume I would take the Pentagon’s side here,” Shanahan wrote Thursday on social media. “Yet I’m sympathetic to Anthropic’s position. More so than I was to Google’s in 2018.”
He said Claude is already being widely used across the government, including in classified settings, and Anthropic’s red lines are “reasonable.” He said the AI large language models that power chatbots like Claude are also “not ready for prime time in national security settings,” particularly not for fully autonomous weapons.
“They’re not trying to play cute here,” he wrote.
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,” Parnell wrote.
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.” He said he hopes the Pentagon will reconsider given Claude’s value to the military, but, if not, Anthropic “will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider.”
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AP reporter Konstantin Toropin contributed to this report.
