Anthropic won’t budge as Pentagon escalates AI dispute

Source: TechCrunch

Anthropic has until Friday evening to either give the U.S. military unrestricted access to its AI model or face the consequences, reports Axios.

Deadline and Pentagon Demands

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a meeting Tuesday morning that the Pentagon will either:

• Declare Anthropic a “supply chain risk” – a designation usually reserved for foreign adversaries, or
• Invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) to force the company to tailor a version of the model to the military’s needs.

The DPA gives the president authority to compel companies to prioritize or expand production for national defense. It was recently used during the COVID‑19 pandemic to require firms such as General Motors and 3M to produce ventilators and masks.

Anthropic’s Position

Anthropic has long stated that it does not want its technology used for mass surveillance of Americans or for fully autonomous weapons, and it is refusing to compromise on these points.

Pentagon’s Legal Argument

Pentagon officials argue that the military’s use of technology should be governed by U.S. law and constitutional limits, not by the usage policies of private contractors. Using the DPA in a dispute over AI guardrails would mark a significant expansion of the law’s modern use.

Broader Context

Dean Ball, senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and former senior policy advisor on AI in the Trump White House, says the move reflects a broader pattern of executive‑branch instability:

“It would basically be the government saying, ‘If you disagree with us politically, we’re going to try to put you out of business.’”

Ball added:

“Any reasonable, responsible investor or corporate manager is going to look at this and think the U.S. is no longer a stable place to do business. This is attacking the very core of what makes America such an important hub of global commerce. We’ve always had a stable and predictable legal system.”

Ideological Friction

The dispute unfolds against ideological friction within the administration. AI czar David Sacks has publicly criticized Anthropic’s safety policies as “woke” (TechCrunch).

Reuters Report

According to Reuters, Anthropic does not plan to ease its usage restrictions.

DOD Dependence on Anthropic

Anthropic is the only frontier AI lab with classified Department of Defense (DoD) access, according to several reports. The DoD currently lacks a backup option, though the Pentagon has reportedly reached a deal to use xAI’s Grok in classified systems (Axios).

Ball argued that this lack of redundancy explains the Pentagon’s aggressive posture:

“If Anthropic canceled the contract tomorrow, it would be a serious problem for the DoD.”

He noted that the agency appears to be falling short of a National Security Memorandum from the late Biden administration, which directs federal agencies to avoid dependence on a single classified‑ready frontier AI system.

“The DoD has no backups. This is a single‑vendor situation here. They can’t fix that overnight.”

TechCrunch Outreach

TechCrunch has reached out to Anthropic and the DoD for comment.