US military leaders, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, met with executives from artificial intelligence firm Anthropic on Tuesday to resolve a dispute over what the government will be able to do with the company’s powerful AI models. Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until the end of the day on Friday to agree to the department’s terms or face penalties, Axios Informed.
Anthropic, which bills itself as the most security-minded of leading AI companies, has been locked in a disagreement with the Pentagon for weeks over how the military is allowed to use its big language model, the cloud. US defense officials have emphasized uninterrupted access to the capabilities of the cloud, while Anthropic allegedly opposed Allowing your product to be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons systems that can use AI to kill people without human input. The Department of Defense (DOD) has integrated the cloud into its operations, but its top officials view these as barriers erected by Anthropic and have threatened to break the relationship.
At stake in the negotiations is the question of whether the AI ​​industry will resist government demands for military use of its products, which has long been controversial among researchers and ethical AI advocates. Defense officials have already threatened with punitive action against Anthropic if it does not comply, including canceling a major contract with the company and designating it a “supply chain risk.”
The DoD struck deals with several major AI firms including Anthropic, Google and OpenAI in July last year, offering them contracts worth up to $200m. However, until this week Anthropic’s cloud product was the only model approved for use in the military’s classified systems. DOD signed an agreement on Monday Which allowed the use of Elon Musk’s XAI chatbot in classified systems by military personnel, which has faced recent backlash over the creation of non-consensual sexual images of children.
xAI and OpenAI both agree to government conditions on the use of their AI, According In the Washington Post, a defense official said that OpenAI had given permission to use its models for “all lawful purposes”. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its agreement with the government.
The meeting between Anthropic and the Pentagon comes a month after the US military reportedly used the cloud to help capture Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. There has been widespread pressure from the Trump administration to integrate AI into the military, while Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed that the US will win the global AI arms race to dominate the technology.
Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer and former Uber executive, has publicly campaigned for Anthropic to “cross the Rubicon” and agree to the government’s terms.
“I think if someone wants to make money from the government, from the U.S. War Department, those guardrails should be designed for our use cases — as long as they’re legitimate,” Michael told Defense Scoop last week.
Anthropic’s Amodei, meanwhile, has long spoken out in favor of greater regulation on AI, while his company has backed a political action committee advocating for stronger safeguards on artificial intelligence. Amodei opposed Trump during the 2024 US presidential campaign and Anthropic has hired several former Biden employees, who The Wall Street Journal reported Trump support was a contributing factor to the venture capital firm’s withdrawal from investing in Anthropic earlier this year.
The Pentagon has spent billions of dollars in recent years pursuing AI-enabled technologies, from unmanned aerial drones to automated targeting systems. The advancement of these technologies has intensified ethical questions about how much decision-making power AI should be given when it comes to lethal force. These debates are no longer ideological, including the fighting in Ukraine deadly semi-autonomous drone Which can work without human control.
