Anthropic has until Friday night to choose between giving the U.S. military unrestricted access to its AI models or face the consequences, Axios reports.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei during a Tuesday morning meeting that the Pentagon will either designate Anthropic as a “supply chain risk,” a designation typically reserved for foreign adversaries, or invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) to force the company to tailor a version of its model to the military’s needs.
The DPA gives the president the power to force companies to prioritize or expand production for national defense. The law was recently invoked during the COVID-19 pandemic to force companies like General Motors and 3M to produce ventilators and masks, respectively.
Anthropic has long said it doesn’t want its technology to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons, and refuses to compromise on those points.
Pentagon officials argue that the military’s use of technology should be regulated by U.S. law and constitutional limits, not by private contractors’ usage policies.
The use of the DPA in disputes over AI guardrails would mark a significant expansion of the law’s modern use. It may also reflect a broader pattern of executive branch instability that has intensified in recent years, said Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the American Innovation Foundation and former senior policy adviser on AI in the Trump White House.
“It would basically be the government saying, ‘If you don’t agree with us politically, we’re going to put you out of business,'” Ball said.
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The dispute is playing out against a backdrop of ideological friction, with some in the administration, including AI czar David Sachs, publicly criticizing Anthropic’s security policies as “woke.”
“Any reasonable, responsible investor or business owner would look at this and think that the United States is no longer a stable place to do business,” Ball said. “This attacks the very foundations of what makes America such a key hub for world trade. We’ve always had a stable and predictable legal system.”
This is a serious game of chicken, and Anthropic might not be the first one to blink. According to Reuters, Anthropic has no plans to ease usage restrictions.
According to several reports, Anthropic is the only frontier AI lab that is classified and has access to the Department of Defense. Although the Pentagon currently has no backup options, the Pentagon has reportedly reached an agreement to use xAI’s Grok on classified systems.
A lack of redundancy may help explain the Pentagon’s aggressive posture, Ball argued.
“If Anthropic canceled the contract tomorrow, it would be a serious problem for the Department of Defense,” he told TechCrunch, noting that the Pentagon appears to be failing to meet a late Biden administration national security memorandum that directed federal agencies to avoid relying on a single classified frontier AI system.
“The Department of Defense has no backup. It’s a single-vendor situation here,” he continued. “They can’t solve it overnight.”
TechCrunch has reached out to Anthropic and the Department of Defense for comment.
