WASHINGTON: The Pentagon has issued an ultimatum to Anthropic, the only artificial intelligence company currently working on classified military systems, ordering the company to comply with its demands by Friday.
If the company fails to agree by 5.01pm on Friday (local time), Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Trump administration would invoke the Defense Production Act, forcing the military to use its model and classifying the company as a supply chain risk, according to a senior Pentagon official. The move would put Anthropic’s government contracts at risk. The two threats are fundamentally opposite: one would prevent the government from using the company’s products, while the other would force the company to allow the government to use the products.Although contradictory, the threats reflect the level of anger in the Pentagon’s upper ranks at Anthropic for resisting its demands and how important the company’s model is to the military. Hegseth summoned Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, to the Pentagon on Tuesday for a meeting. The tone of the discussion was civil, but when Anthropic did not agree to Hegseth’s demands, he made threats against it, according to people familiar with the meeting.
Anthropic said it was seeking reasonable assurances that its model would not be used to surveil Americans or in autonomous weapons operations, such as drone operations, that do not involve human supervision. Anthropic’s supporters asserted that the company was being punished for being the first in the underground system and creating a proprietary model, the Claude Joffe, that did not have the same barriers and restrictions as its publicly available models.
Pentagon officials said using the software and weapons legally is their responsibility, and they take it seriously. But officials say they can’t let all of their contractors decide how to use the equipment they sell to the Pentagon. While the Defense Production Act gives the Pentagon broad powers, it is typically invoked in manufacturing contexts. It would be unusual for this act to be used on a software company, forcing Anthropic to make its product available for free. An Anthropic spokesman said the company wanted to support the government but needed to ensure its models were used in line with what they could do “reliably and responsibly”.