It feels voyeuristic to read someone’s breakup texts, but usually the parties involved in the split aren’t an AI lab with a billion-dollar valuation and the biggest agency in the federal government, so you can be forgiven for being interested in taking a peek. On Tuesday, court documents were released that include the emails that led to Anthropic and the Department of Defense falling out earlier this year, and they read just about as you’d expect based on the public accounting of the situation. In the back-and-forth, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made clear that his primary concern was that the Department of Defense would use his lab’s AI models for purposes that he and the company weren’t comfortable with—namely, integrating the technology into autonomous weapons systems and domestic surveillance tools. As has been noted previously, the Pentagon’s position is that it could utilize the technology for “all lawful uses,” which creates a considerable amount of wiggle room. The emails do reveal that the seeds for the split were planted in January, when the Department of Defense’s undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, Emil Michael, reached out to Amodei after radio silence for several weeks. In it, Michael said he was “hoping that we are closer to engaging with your revised POV”—basically, hoping that Anthropic is ready to play ball with the Pentagon’s demands. Amodei responded by reiterating his position that there need to be guardrails in place for the use of AI, including barring its use for fully autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance.