Anthropic refuses Pentagon’s new terms, standing firm on lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance
Less than 24 hours before the deadline of an ultimatum issued by the Pentagon, Anthropic refused the Department of Defense’s requests for unrestricted access to its AI.
It’s the culmination of a dramatic exchange of public statements, social media posts and behind-the-scenes negotiations, culminating in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desire to renegotiate all AI labs’ current contracts with the military. But Anthropic, so far, has refused to back down on its two current red lines: no mass surveillance of Americans and no lethal autonomous weapons (or weapons allowed to kill targets without any human oversight). OpenAI and xAI have reportedly already agreed to the new terms, while Anthropic’s refusal reportedly led to CEO Dario Amodei being summoned to the White House this week for a meeting with Hegseth himself, during which the secretary reportedly issued an ultimatum to the CEO to back down by the end of the business day Friday or elsewhere.
In a statement Thursday evening, Amodei wrote: “I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries. Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the War Department and the Intelligence Community.”
He added that the company “has never raised objections to particular military operations or attempted to limit the use of our technology on an ad hoc basis,” but that in “a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than uphold, democratic values” — then specifically mentioning mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. (Amodei mentioned that “partially autonomous weapons… are vital to the defense of democracy” and that fully autonomous weapons could eventually “prove critical to our national defense,” but that “today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.” He did not rule out Anthropic accepting the military’s use of fully autonomous weapons in the future, but mentioned that they were not ready now.)
The Pentagon has already reportedly asked major defense contractors to assess their reliance on Anthropic’s Claude, which could be seen as the first step toward designating the company a “supply chain risk” — a public threat the Pentagon had recently made (and a classification usually reserved for national security threats). The Pentagon also reportedly considered invoking the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic into compliance.
Amodei wrote in his statement that the Pentagon’s “threats do not change our position: we cannot, in good conscience, grant their request.” He also wrote that “if the Department chooses to withdraw from Anthropic, we will work to enable a smooth transition to another supplier, avoiding any disruption to ongoing military planning, operations, or other critical missions. Our models will be available on the extended terms we have proposed for as long as necessary.”
