{"id":449797,"date":"2026-02-28T06:05:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-28T06:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/449797\/"},"modified":"2026-02-28T06:05:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T06:05:12","slug":"openai-and-pentagon-reach-deal-after-anthropic-row-boils-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/449797\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI and Pentagon reach deal after Anthropic row boils over"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenAI has reached an agreement with the Pentagon to provide its artificial intelligence systems hours after President Trump ordered US government agencies to cease all use of Anthropic\u2019s products, following a simmering row with the technology company.<\/p>\n

Announcing the decision to halt the use of Anthropic on Friday, Trump said on Truth Social: \u201cLeftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War\u201d. There will be a six-month phase-out for agencies such as the US Department of War that use the company\u2019s products, he added.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic\u2019s technology. We don\u2019t need it, we don\u2019t want it, and will not do business with them again!\u201d Trump wrote.<\/p>\n

Later that evening, the head of OpenAI \u2014 the makers of ChatGPT and Anthropic\u2019s primary commercial rival \u2014 said the company had agreed a deal with the Pentagon, respecting red lines that appeared similar to those that Anthropic had insisted on, and which the Trump administration previously denounced as \u201cwoke\u201d.<\/p>\n

Anthropic\u2019s AI software, Claude, had been the only advanced model that was approved for US classified systems. But as it renegotiated a contract with the US Department of War, Anthropic baulked at the Pentagon\u2019s demand that the government can make \u201cany lawful use\u201d of its AI.<\/p>\n

According to Anthropic, the move would remove safeguards in Claude\u2019s policy that prevent it being used to facilitate violence, develop weapons or conduct surveillance.<\/p>\n

\"President<\/p>\n

Pete Hegseth, left, with John Ratcliffe, director of the CIA, and President Trump at Mar-a-Lago last month<\/p>\n

MOLLY RILEY\/THE WHITE HOUSE\/AP<\/p>\n

The disagreement has been public for several weeks<\/a>. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, designated Anthropic a \u201csupply-chain risk to national security\u201d on Friday.<\/p>\n

Supply-chain risk is a status given to firms linked to foreign adversaries, such as the Chinese company Huawei<\/a>, and has never been applied to a US entity. It will prevent Anthropic from working with the government and jeopardise its contracts, worth about $200 million.<\/p>\n

Anthropic vowed to challenge the decision in court, adding in a statement: \u201cNo amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company said it refused to give in to the Pentagon\u2019s demands for \u201ctwo reasons\u201d: because it \u201cdoes not believe that today\u2019s frontier AI models are reliable enough to be used in fully autonomous weapons\u201d and because the \u201cmass domestic surveillance of Americans constitutes a violation of fundamental rights\u201d.<\/p>\n

Posting about OpenAI\u2019s agreement with the Trump administration, Sam Altman, the company\u2019s chief executive, posted on X on Friday night: \u201cTwo of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems.\u201d<\/p>\n

In what could represent a major concession, Altman said the government agreed \u201cwith these principles, and we put them into our agreement\u201d.<\/p>\n

Replying to Altman\u2019s social media post, the under secretary of war Emil Michael said his department was looking forward to working with a \u201creliable and steady partner that engages in good faith\u201d.<\/p>\n

Hegseth had given Anthropic a deadline of 5pm on Friday to comply, after tense meetings at which US officials apparently questioned whether the company would assist the military in the event of a hypothetical nuclear strike against the United States. According to The Washington Post, the two sides also clashed over how Claude had been used by US forces in last month\u2019s capture of the Venezuelan leader Nicol\u00e1s Maduro<\/a>, through its partnership with Palantir, another AI company.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration\u2019s feud with Anthropic had initially united two of the most prominent AI leaders.<\/p>\n

Altman backed his rival, Dario Amodei, the co-founder of Anthropic, after the latter accused the Trump administration of wanting to exploit the company\u2019s technology for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.<\/p>\n

\"Prime<\/p>\n

India\u2019s prime minister, Narendra Modi, with Sam Altman and Dario Amodei \u2014 refusing to hold hands \u2014 at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi last week<\/p>\n

LUDOVIC MARIN\/AFP\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

On Friday, Amodei received unlikely backing from Altman, 40, who told CNBC: \u201cI don\u2019t personally think that the Pentagon should be threatening DPA against these companies. For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company and I think they really do care about safety, and I\u2019ve been happy that they\u2019ve been supporting our war fighters. I\u2019m not sure where this is going to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Altman\u2019s intervention threatened to escalate the row into one between the Trump administration and the American AI industry, as Google, which produces Gemini, is also considering the Pentagon\u2019s terms. <\/p>\n

Hundreds of employees from OpenAI and Google<\/a> signed an open letter backing Anthropic\u2019s stance and urging their companies to do the same.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Data and drones will win future wars \u2014 can Britain keep up?<\/a><\/p>\n

Late on Thursday, Amodei, 42, released an 800-word statement rejecting the government\u2019s position.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values,\u201d he said. \u201cSome uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today\u2019s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now: mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Dario<\/p>\n

Amodei is standing firm against the Pentagon<\/p>\n

BHAWIKA CHHABRA\/REUTERS<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cRegardless, these threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael, the under-secretary of defence, posted in response on X that Amodei was a \u201cliar\u201d, had \u201ca God complex\u201d and \u201cwants nothing more than to try to personally control the US military and is OK putting our nation\u2019s safety at risk\u201d.<\/p>\n

Amodei and his company have previously fallen foul of the Trump administration for supporting the Democratic Party and for pursuing a cautious approach to the ethics around AI development<\/a>. David Sacks, Trump\u2019s \u201cAI and crypto\u201d tsar, has branded the company woke for its pro-safety positioning.<\/p>\n

\"President<\/p>\n

David Sacks and Trump in January. Sacks has criticised Anthropic<\/p>\n

BEN CURTIS\/AP<\/p>\n

Altman wrote an email to staff, seen by The Wall Street Journal<\/a>, saying on Thursday: \u201cWe have long believed that AI should not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons and that humans should remain in the loop for high-stakes automated decisions. These are our main red lines.\u201d<\/p>\n

By contrast, Elon Musk\u2019s xAI company has agreed to the \u201call lawful uses\u201d policy<\/a>, but is so far the only developer to do so. Musk posted on X that \u201cAnthropic hates Western Civilisation\u201d in reaction to Amodei\u2019s statement.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Anthropic AI boss summoned to Pentagon showdown in weapons row<\/a><\/p>\n

Anthropic was set up by Amodei, his sister Daniela and others after they left OpenAI because of disputes with Altman over safety. That rift persisted at the recent India AI Impact summit, where Altman and Amodei refused to hold hands.<\/p>\n

Anthropic has always portrayed itself as a leader in \u201cresponsible AI\u201d, but recently the shine has come off that image. This week it dropped a commitment to stop developing its software unless specific safety guidelines were met. It has previously been criticised for Project Panama, its secret plan to train Claude by digitising millions of books. It proposed buying them up, slicing off the spines and scanning them before they were destroyed. Legal papers unsealed in January said: \u201cWe don\u2019t want it be be known we are working on this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last week an Anthropic researcher working on safety quit to become a poet, hinting in a cryptic post on X that the company\u2019s values were not being followed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The developments have reinforced fears from campaigners that safety and checks are being sacrificed in the AI race. Jack Shanahan, a former US Air Force general who ran the Pentagon\u2019s AI unit from 2018 to 2020, posted on X that \u201cyou won\u2019t find a system with wider & deeper reach\u201d across America\u2019s military than Claude, but he criticised the Pentagon\u2019s apparent goals.<\/p>\n

\"Aerial<\/p>\n

The Pentagon is trying to negotiate with other AI companies. Only one \u2014 xAI, owned by Elon Musk \u2014 has agreed to its terms on \u201call lawful uses\u201d of the technology<\/p>\n

GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

\u201cNo LLM [large language model], anywhere, in its current form, should be considered for use in a fully lethal autonomous weapon system. It\u2019s ludicrous even to suggest it,\u201d he said. \u201cSo making this a company red line seems reasonable to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael told CBS that the administration had offered to put in writing that federal laws restricted the military from surveillance on Americans and that final targeting decisions without human involvement were barred by law.<\/p>\n

However, he added: \u201cAt some level, you have to trust your military to do the right thing. But we do have to be prepared for the future. We do have to be prepared for what China is doing. So we\u2019ll never say that we\u2019re not going to be able to defend ourselves in writing to a company.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI has reached an agreement with the Pentagon to provide its artificial intelligence systems hours after President Trump…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":449798,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-449797","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449797\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/449798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}