A senior official in the Department of Defense accused Anthropic of “lying” about how the U.S. military intends to use the private tech firm’s Claude AI system.
The Pentagon wants Anthropic to remove some of the limits on how Claude can be used by the military and has threatened to cut it from their systems and designate the company a “supply chain risk” if it does not accede to the demands by a Friday deadline.
Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei said he will not allow Claude to be used by the military for “mass domestic surveillance” or “fully autonomous weapons”.
He said Anthropic is resisting the Department of Defense’s demand to “remove safeguards” in both those use cases.
“Anthropic is lying,” Under Secretary of War Emil Michael said in a post on X, replying to Amodei’s statement, adding that the military “doesn’t do mass surveillance as that is already illegal.”
“What we are talking about is allowing our warfighters to use AI without having to call Dario Amodei for permission to shoot down…enemy drone swarms that would kill Americans,” Michael said.
In a separate post, Michael accused Amodei of having “a God-complex” and wanting “to try to personally control the US Military and is ok putting our nation’s safety at risk.”
Amodei defended Anthropic’s role, saying it had “worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community.”
The Trump administration rebranded the Department of Defense as the Department of War, though a formal change of name requires an act of Congress.
“I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries,” Amodei said.
He added: “Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.
“However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do.”
This is a developing article. Updates to follow.
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