Prof. Alan Rozenshtein (Minnesota) has a very interesting item on this today at Lawfare; I'm not an expert on the subject, so I can't offer an independent evaluation, but I thought it was worth passing along. (Let me know, please, if you can suggest some contrary views that are also credible and worth passing along.) An excerpt, but you should read the whole thing:
On Tuesday, Feb. 24, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) if Anthropic doesn't agree to the Pentagon's terms by Friday. The DPA, Hegseth warned, would let the government compel Anthropic to provide its technology on the Pentagon's terms. Anthropic is resisting allowing its artificial intelligence (AI) to be used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance—two red lines that the company has maintained since entering the defense market.
I argued last week that Congress—not the Pentagon or Anthropic—should set the rules for military AI. The DPA threat makes that case stronger. But first, it's worth understanding what the DPA can actually do here, because the answer depends entirely on what the government is demanding. The legal analysis is genuinely complicated: Different demands raise very different legal questions, and a statute whose core compulsion powers were designed for steel mills and tank factories maps awkwardly onto a dispute about AI safety guardrails….
The DPA is a Korean War-era statute that gives the president broad authority to direct private industry in the name of national defense. It has been extended many times since its enactment, most recently through September 2026.
The DPA already applies to AI. The Biden administration's since-rescinded Executive Order 14110, Section 4.2, invoked the DPA to require AI companies to report on training activities, red-team results, and model weights. But President Biden used Title VII, which contains the DPA's information-gathering authority. Based on the available reporting, Hegseth is likely threatening Title I—the statute's core compulsion power. That's an enormous escalation.
Biden's precedent cuts both ways for Anthropic. It makes it harder for the company to argue the DPA doesn't reach AI at all. But establishing that AI falls within the statute's scope doesn't mean every demand is lawful. The range of possible demands under Title I is enormous, and the legal analysis is different for each….
