The Pentagon has demanded Anthropic remove the contract limitations it objects to by 5:01 p.m. Friday or face having its $200 million contract with the U.S. military canceled or, in a more extreme move, be labeled “a supply-chain risk,” which would effectively bar any company doing business with the military from using Anthropic’s technology.
“Using it against a domestic company for reasons of them not being willing to bend on some principles of this sort is really quite escalatory and unprecedented,” Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, a research professor at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, told Fortune.
The Department of War has also threatened to invoke the Cold War–era Defense Production Act, using the law to compel Anthropic to hand over an unrestricted version of Claude on the grounds that the government deems it essential to national security. If the Pentagon does go down this route, it will be using powers intended only for emergencies to resolve a contract dispute during peacetime. There is some precedent for this: The Biden administration also invoked the DPA in 2023 to compel frontier AI labs to hand over information about the safety of their AI models. But compelling a company to produce a product, as opposed to simply provide information, comes closer to nationalization of a leading technology company.
“If they are being effectively coerced into allowing their technology to be used in ways that even they themselves say is not reliable in high-stakes life and death situations like on the battlefield,” Ó hÉigeartaigh said, “that sets a very dangerous precedent.”
The Department of War has publicly stated it has no intention of conducting mass surveillance or removing humans from weapons-targeting decisions, but the dispute could rest on how each side is defining “autonomous” or “surveillance” in practice. Representatives for the department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.
An Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune that the company was continuing “to engage in good faith” with the Department of War. However, the spokesperson said that contract language received overnight had made “virtually no progress” on the core issues. New language “framed as compromise” was “paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will,” they said. Amodei has called the threats from the Department of War “inherently contradictory” as “one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.”
Anthropic has won praise from some corners for its willingness to stand firm. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig praised the company’s statement as “a beautiful act of integrity and principle” and called it “incredibly rare for our time.”
Ó hÉigeartaigh said that the outcome of the dispute could extend well beyond Anthropic itself. “If the Pentagon comes out on top of this,” he said, “it will establish precedents that will not be good for the independence of these companies, or their ability to hold to ethical standards.”
