AI Firm Anthropic Rejects Pentagon's Ultimatum To Drop Safeguards

WASHINGTON, Feb 27 (Bernama-dpa) -- Artificial intelligence (AI) developer Anthropic said it was rejecting an ultimatum by the United States (US) Department of Defense (DoD) to drop limitations on the use of its Claude AI model, German Press Agency (dpa) reported.

Anthropic boss Dario Amodei on Thursday said that the AI start-up "cannot in good conscience" give into the Pentagon's ultimatum to drop safeguards on the use of its AI system in relation to mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

The Pentagon "has stated they will only contract with AI companies who accede to 'any lawful use' and remove safeguards in the cases mentioned above," Amodei said in a lengthy blog post.

"They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards; they have also threatened to designate us a 'supply chain risk' ... and to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the safeguards' removal," he added.

"These latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security."

Anthropic, a start-up backed by investment from both Google and Amazon, in 2025 signed a US$200 million contract with the Pentagon to "develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in across warfighting and enterprise domains."

DoD spokesman Sean Parnell earlier on Thursday said that the department had "no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal) nor do we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement."

Parnell said that the Pentagon was asking to be allowed "to use Anthropic's model for all lawful purposes."

Parnell said the company had until 5.01 pm (2201 GMT) on Friday to comply. "Otherwise, we will terminate our partnership with Anthropic and deem them a supply chain risk."

US news portal Axios cited Anthropic as saying that new contract language sent by the DoD amid negotiations "was paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will," adding that "these narrow safeguards have been the crux of our negotiations for months."

Axios said that the Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

-- BERNAMA-dpa