Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is "close" to cutting business ties with Anthropic and designating the AI company a "supply chain risk" — meaning anyone who wants to do business with the U.S. military has to cut ties with the company, a senior Pentagon official told Axios.
The senior official said: "It will be an enormous pain in the ass to disentangle, and we are going to make sure they pay a price for forcing our hand like this."
That kind of penalty is usually reserved for foreign adversaries.
Anthropic's Claude is the only AI model currently available in the military's classified systems, and is the world leader for many business applications. Pentagon officials heartily praise Claude's capabilities.
As a sign of how embedded the software already is within the military, Claude was used during the Maduro raid in January, as Axios reported on Friday.
Anthropic is prepared to loosen its current terms of use, but wants to ensure its tools aren't used to spy on Americans en masse, or to develop weapons that fire with no human involvement.
The Pentagon claims that's unduly restrictive, and that there are all sorts of gray areas that would make it unworkable to operate on such terms. Pentagon officials are insisting in negotiations with Anthropic and three other big AI labs — OpenAI, Google and xAI — that the military be able to use their tools for "all lawful purposes."
A source familiar with the dynamics said senior defense officials have been frustrated with Anthropic for some time, and embraced the opportunity to pick a public fight.
Posted by John3262005
1 Comment
Barring mass domestic surveillance makes sense, but prohibiting the development of fully autonomous AI weapons will obviously not be acceptable to the Pentagon.