AI company Anthropic is facing perhaps the biggest crisis in its five-year existence as it stares down a Friday deadline to remove restrictions on how the U.S. Department of War can use its technology or face the possibility that the Pentagon will take action that could cripple its business.
Pete Hegseth, the U.S. secretary of war, has demanded that Anthropic remove restrictions it currently stipulates in its contracts that prohibit its AI models being used for mass surveillance or from being incorporated into lethal autonomous weapons, which can make decisions to attack without human intervention. Instead, Hegseth wants Anthropic to stipulate that its technology can be used for “any lawful purpose” that the Department of War wishes to pursue.
If the company does not comply by Friday, Hegseth has threatened to not only cancel Anthropic’s existing $200 million contract with his department, but to have the company labeled a “supply-chain risk,” meaning that no company doing business with the Department of War would be allowed to use Anthropic’s models. That could eviscerate Anthropic’s growth—just as the company, which is currently valued at $380 billion, has been seeing significant commercial traction and is contemplating an initial public offering as soon as next year.
A Tuesday meeting between Hegseth and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in Washington, D.C., failed to resolve the conflict and ended with Hegseth reiterating his ultimatum.
The dispute comes against a backdrop of sometimes overt hostility toward Anthropic from other Trump administration officials. AI czar David Sacks in particular has publicly attacked the company on social media for representing “woke AI” and the “doomer industrial complex.” Sacks has accused the company of engaging in a “sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fearmongering.” His argument is basically that Anthropic executives disingenuously warn of extreme risks from AI systems in order to justify regulations on the technology with which only Anthropic and a few other AI companies can easily comply.
Anthropic’s Amodei has called such views “inaccurate” and insisted that the company shares many policy goals with the Trump administration, including wanting to see the U.S. remain at the forefront of the development of AI technology.
Nonetheless, Sacks and others within the administration may be hoping Hegseth makes good on his threats to blacklist Anthropic from the national security supply chain.
