Anthropic is heading into Friday in a no-win situation.
The artificial intelligence startup has until 5:01 p.m. ET to decide whether it will agree to allow the Department of Defense to use its models in all lawful use cases without limitation. If it doesn’t, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has threatened to label the company a “supply chain risk” or force it to comply by invoking the Defense Production Act.
Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the DoD in July, and was the first AI lab to integrate its models into mission workflows on classified networks. The company has been negotiating the terms of its agreement with the agency, and has asked for assurance that its technology won’t be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance of Americans.
“In a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who co-founded the company in 2021, wrote in a statement on Thursday. “Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do.”
The DoD has refused to budge, and negotiations have devolved into a stalemate that’s turned into the most high-profile test to date of Anthropic’s stated values. The company has spent years carefully crafting its reputation as the champion of safe and responsible AI deployment, positioning itself in contrast to OpenAI, where Amodei worked before leaving to start Anthropic.
