WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic\u2019s CEO a Friday deadline to open the company\u2019s artificial intelligence technology for unrestricted military use or risk losing its government contract, according to a person familiar with their meeting Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Anthropic makes the chatbot Claude and is the last of its peers to not supply its technology to a new U.S. military internal network<\/a>. CEO Dario Amodei repeatedly has made clear his ethical concerns<\/a> about unchecked government use of AI, including the dangers of fully autonomous armed drones<\/a> and of AI-assisted mass surveillance that could track dissent.<\/p>\n 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 doesn\u2019t approve of how they are used, according to 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.<\/p>\n The development, which was reported earlier by Axios, underscores the debate over AI\u2019s role in national security and concerns about how the technology could be used in high-stakes situations<\/a> involving lethal force, sensitive information or government surveillance. It also comes as Hegseth has vowed to root out what he calls a \u201cwoke culture\u201d<\/a> in the armed forces.<\/p>\n \u201cA 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,\u201d Amodei wrote in an essay last month.<\/p>\n The person familiar called the tone of the meeting cordial but said Amodei didn\u2019t budge on two areas he has established as lines Anthropic won\u2019t cross \u2014 fully autonomous military targeting operations and domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n The Pentagon objects to Anthropic\u2019s ethical restrictions because military operations need tools that don\u2019t come with built-in limitations, the senior Pentagon official said. The official argued that the Pentagon has only issued lawful orders and stressed that using Anthropic\u2019s tools legally would be the military\u2019s responsibility.<\/p>\n Anthropic has been the only AI company approved for classified military networks<\/p>\n The Pentagon announced last summer that it was awarding defense contracts to four AI companies \u2014 Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk\u2019s xAI. Each contract is worth up to $200 million. <\/p>\n Anthropic was the first AI company to get approved for classified military networks, where it works with partners like Palantir. The other three companies, for now, are only operating in unclassified environments.<\/p>\n By early this year, Hegseth was highlighting only two of them: xAI and Google. He said in a January speech at Musk\u2019s space flight company, SpaceX, in South Texas that he was shrugging off any AI models \u201cthat won\u2019t allow you to fight wars.\u201d<\/p>\n Hegseth said his vision for military AI systems<\/a> means that they operate \u201cwithout ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications,\u201d before adding that the Pentagon\u2019s \u201cAI will not be woke.\u201d<\/p>\n The defense secretary said Musk\u2019s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok<\/a> would join the Pentagon network, called GenAI.mil. The announcement came days after Grok \u2014 which is embedded into X, the social media network owned by Musk \u2014 drew global scrutiny for generating highly sexualized deepfake images<\/a> of people without their consent.<\/p>\n OpenAI announced in early February that it, too, would join the military\u2019s secure AI platform, enabling service members to use a custom version of ChatGPT for unclassified tasks. <\/p>\n Anthropic calls itself more safety-minded<\/p>\n 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 startup in 2021<\/a>.<\/p>\n The uncertainty with the Pentagon is putting those intentions to the test, according to Owen Daniels, associate director of analysis and fellow at Georgetown University\u2019s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.<\/p>\n \u201cAnthropic\u2019s peers, including Meta, Google and xAI, have been willing to comply with the department\u2019s policy on using models for all lawful applications,\u201d Daniels said. \u201cSo the company\u2019s bargaining power here is limited, and it risks losing influence in the department\u2019s push to adopt AI.\u201d<\/p>\n In the AI craze<\/a> that followed the release of ChatGPT, Anthropic closely aligned with President Joe Biden\u2019s Democratic administration in volunteering to subject its AI systems to third-party scrutiny to guard against national security risks.<\/p>\n Amodei, the CEO, has warned of AI\u2019s potentially catastrophic dangers<\/a> while rejecting the label that he\u2019s an AI \u201cdoomer.\u201d He argued in the January essay that \u201cwe are considerably closer to real danger in 2026 than we were in 2023\u2033 but that those risks should be managed in a \u201crealistic, pragmatic manner.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic has been at odds with the Trump administration<\/p>\n This would not be the first time Anthropic\u2019s advocacy for stricter AI safeguards has put it at odds with President Donald Trump\u2019s administration. Anthropic needled chipmaker Nvidia publicly, criticizing Trump\u2019s proposals to loosen export controls to enable some AI computer chips to be sold in China<\/a>. The AI company, however, remains a close partner with Nvidia<\/a>.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s Republican administration and Anthropic also have been on opposite sides of a lobbying push to regulate AI in U.S. states.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s top AI adviser, David Sacks, accused Anthropic in October of \u201crunning a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.\u201d <\/p>\n Sacks was responding on X to Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, writing about his attempt to balance technological optimism with \u201cappropriate fear\u201d about the steady march toward more capable AI systems.<\/p>\n Anthropic hired a number of ex-Biden officials soon after Trump\u2019s return to the White House, but it\u2019s also tried to signal a bipartisan approach. The company recently added Chris Liddell, a former White House official from Trump\u2019s first term, to its board of directors.<\/p>\n The Pentagon\u2019s \u201cbreakneck\u201d adoption of AI shows the need for greater AI oversight or regulation by Congress, particularly if AI is being used to surveil Americans, said Amos Toh, senior counsel at the Brennan Center\u2019s Liberty and National Security Program at New York University. <\/p>\n \u201cThe law is not keeping up with how quickly the technology is evolving,\u201d Toh wrote in a post on Bluesky. \u201cBut that doesn\u2019t mean DoD has a blank check.\u201d<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n O\u2019Brien reported from Providence, R.I.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic\u2019s CEO a Friday deadline to open the company\u2019s artificial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488360,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[4613,23,15959,181,28,224325,76529,12289,12,11,793,3138,851,11382,224324,3319,1683,1576,3,3487,22997,1572,111,1513,74,12955,21,792,19,22,20,25,24,800],"class_list":{"0":"post-488359","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-alphabet","9":"tag-america","10":"tag-anthropic-pbc","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-business","13":"tag-chris-liddell","14":"tag-dario-amodei","15":"tag-david-sacks","16":"tag-donald-trump","17":"tag-elon-musk","18":"tag-general-news","19":"tag-government-and-politics","20":"tag-inc","21":"tag-information-technology","22":"tag-jack-clark","23":"tag-joe-biden","24":"tag-meta-platforms","25":"tag-military-and-defense","26":"tag-news","27":"tag-nvidia-corp","28":"tag-openai-inc","29":"tag-pete-hegseth","30":"tag-politics","31":"tag-spacex","32":"tag-technology","33":"tag-u-s-department-of-defense","34":"tag-united-states","35":"tag-united-states-government","36":"tag-united-states-of-america","37":"tag-unitedstates","38":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","39":"tag-us","40":"tag-usa","41":"tag-washington-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488359\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}