Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, said he does not know whether his company’s artificial intelligence model was involved in the missile strikes against Iran.
The admission lands in the middle of an escalating confrontation between one of the world’s most prominent AI safety companies and the US Department of Defense, a conflict that has already resulted in Anthropic being banned from Pentagon systems and labeled a supply-chain risk.
The Pentagon ultimatum and Anthropic’s refusal
The sequence of events that led to this moment started on February 24, 2026, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued an ultimatum to Anthropic demanding unrestricted access to its Claude AI model. At that point, Claude had already been integrated into US military intelligence workflows used for target identification.
Two days later, on February 26, Anthropic publicly drew its red lines. The company stated it would exclude mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems from its defense contracts. That’s a notable stance from a company that had already been working with the military, suggesting the Pentagon was pushing for capabilities that crossed those boundaries.
