The Trump administration has repeatedly condemned AI safeguards as “woke AI.” During a fiery speech at SpaceX in January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth railed against AI systems with ideological restrictions. “Department of War AI will not be woke,” he said. “It will work for us. We’re building war-ready weapons and systems, not chatbots for an Ivy League faculty lounge.”
With just days left before Hegseth’s reported deadline for Anthropic to drop its seemingly woke demands for AI safety and guarantees of nonmilitary use, Anthropic told Fortune that it “continued good-faith conversations” with the Pentagon.
