Anthropic has issued a statement refusing to lower guardrails for Claude at the request of the Department of Justice. The Pentagon gave Anthropic until Friday to comply or have its $200m contract cancelled, along with more serious repercussions like designating it a supply-chain risk. The company let the time run out, and its CEO Dario Amodei, has now said that it "cannot in good conscience" accept the DoD's demands.
There are two main points of contention — mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons — that Anthropic has taken a concrete stance on. It argues that monitoring American citizens at large is inherently undemocratic and undermines individual liberty. The company adds that AI-led surveillance is dangerous and only allowed because the legal precedent has not yet caught up.
