\n Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei a Friday deadline to comply with demands to peel back safeguards on its AI model or risk losing a Pentagon contract.\n <\/p>\n
\n He \ufeffalso threatened to put the AI company on what could amount to a government blacklist.\n <\/p>\n
\n At issue is the guardrails Anthropic placed on its AI model Claude. The Pentagon, which has a $200 million contract with Anthropic, wants the company to lift its restrictions for the military to be able to use the model for \u201call lawful use,\u201d according to a source familiar with the discussions.\n <\/p>\n
\n But Anthropic has concerns over two issues that it isn\u2019t willing to drop, the source said: AI-controlled weapons and mass domestic surveillance of American citizens. According to a source familiar, Anthropic believes AI is not reliable enough to operate weapons, and there are no laws or regulations yet that cover how AI could be used in mass surveillance.\n <\/p>\n
\n A source familiar with the Tuesday meeting says the Pentagon said it would terminate Anthropic\u2019s contract by Friday if the company does not agree to its terms. Pentagon officials also warned they would either use the Defense Production Act against Anthropic, or designate Anthropic a supply chain risk if the company didn\u2019t comply with their demands.\n <\/p>\n
\n The DPA<\/a> is a law <\/a>that gives the government the ability to influence businesses in the interest of national defense, recently invoked by the Trump administration during the COVID pandemic. The supply chain risk designation is usually reserved for companies seen as extensions of foreign adversaries like Russia or China. It could severely impact Anthropic\u2019s business because enterprise customers with government contracts would have to make sure their government work doesn\u2019t touch Anthropic\u2019s tools.\n <\/p>\n \n During the meeting, the tone was cordial and respectful and there were no raised voices, the source said, adding that Hegseth praised Anthropic\u2019s products and said they want to work with them.\n <\/p>\n \n But Amodei reiterated Anthropic\u2019s redlines on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, and a source familiar said Anthropic has no plans to budge and adhere to the Pentagon\u2019s demands.\n <\/p>\n \n An Anthropic spokesperson described the meeting to CNN as a \u201cgood-faith\u201d conversation about usage of the company\u2019s technology.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cAnthropic CEO Dario Amodei met with Secretary Hegseth at the Pentagon this morning. During the conversation, Dario expressed appreciation for the Department\u2019s work and thanked the Secretary for his service,\u201d Anthropic said in a statement to CNN. \u201cWe continued good-faith conversations about our usage policy to ensure Anthropic can continue to support the government\u2019s national security mission in line with what our models can reliably and responsibly do.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n The negotiations have been ongoing for a couple months, the source said, but in recent weeks reports<\/a> began surfacing about the tensions between the two sides.\n <\/p>\n \n Then last week, Axios reported<\/a> Hegseth was close to cutting the Pentagon\u2019s contract with Anthropic and designating the company a \u201csupply chain risk.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cAnthropic is committed to using frontier AI in support of US national security,\u201d the Anthropic spokesperson said. \u201cThat\u2019s why we were the first frontier AI company to put our models on classified networks and the first to provide customized models for national security customers.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n A Pentagon official confirmed to CNN the meeting with Anthropic was taking place, but did not comment further.\n <\/p>\n \n Anthropic has long positioned itself as the AI company most concerned with AI safety. Its founders were all former OpenAI employees who left the company over disagreements about the ChatGPT maker\u2019s direction, approach to safety and pace of AI development. Anthropic also recently announced\u202fit is giving $20 million<\/a>\u202fto a political group campaigning for more regulation of AI.\n <\/p>\n \n CNN\u2019s Kaanita Iyer\u202fcontributed to this report.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei a Friday deadline to comply with demands to peel…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488411,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-488410","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"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488410","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=488410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488410\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}