The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic

Anthropic faces a Friday deadline to allow domestic surveillance and automated killer robots.

This post originally appeared in Understanding AI.

“One Defense Department official told Axios that the government might try to ‘force Anthropic to adapt its model to the Pentagon’s needs, without any safeguards.’”

Since late 2024, Anthropic’s models have been approved for classified US government work thanks to a partnership with Palantir and Amazon. In June, Anthropic announced Claude Gov, a special version of Claude that’s optimized for national security uses. Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the Defense Department in July.

Claude Gov has fewer guardrails than the regular versions of Claude, but the contract still places some limits on military use of Claude. These include prohibitions on using Claude to spy on Americans or to build weapons that kill people without human oversight.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to the Pentagon to demand that he waive these restrictions. If Anthropic doesn’t comply by Friday, the Pentagon is threatening to retaliate in one of two ways.