Pentagon gives Anthropic deadline over military AI terms

ABC News cited a Pentagon official and a source familiar with the matter in reporting the ultimatum.[1] A source familiar with a meeting said it was respectful but ended with a warning that the Pentagon would punish Anthropic if it rejected the terms.[1] Anthropic said Hegseth had shared that he was directing the Department of War to designate the company a supply-chain risk.[3]

Anthropic says it supports lawful national-security uses of AI, with two narrow exceptions, and that those two use cases had never been included in its Department of War contracts.[2][3] The company says frontier AI systems are not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.[2] The Pentagon official, meanwhile, said the dispute was not about the department using AI for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons and said the government, as the end user, was responsible for ensuring legal use.[1] The accounts frame the conflict around who sets limits on permitted uses and who is accountable for them.

Anthropic says it proactively deployed models to the Department of War and the intelligence community.[2] The company says Claude is used across the Defense Department and other national-security agencies for intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, and cyber operations.[2] The Pentagon had also been using Anthropic technology in a $200 million pilot program.[1] Anthropic says it held good-faith talks with the Pentagon about its usage policy and continued support for national-security work.[1] It says its restrictions had not affected a government mission, to its knowledge.[3]

Anthropic says a supply-chain-risk designation would affect a defense contractor’s use of Claude as a direct part of Defense Department contract work, rather than every use by customers that hold such contracts.[3][4] It says access through the Claude API, claude.ai, and its products would be unaffected.[3] Anthropic said it received a letter on March 4 confirming the designation and would challenge any such designation in court.[3][4] It also said it would provide models and engineering support to the Defense Department and national-security community at nominal cost during a transition, for as long as necessary and permitted.[4]