What happened
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued an ultimatum to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: open the company's AI technology for unrestricted military use by Friday or risk losing its government contract. Anthropic, developer of the Claude chatbot, remains the sole major AI firm not supplying its technology to the U.S. military's new internal network, GenAI.mil, due to Amodei's ethical concerns regarding autonomous targeting and domestic surveillance. The Pentagon threatened to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk or invoke the Defense Production Act, despite Anthropic being the first AI company approved for classified military networks.
Why it matters
Access to frontier AI models for defence applications will increasingly carry sovereign mandates, forcing AI developers to align product capabilities with national security priorities. For founders and legal teams, this establishes a clear constraint: ethical stances on AI use cases, particularly autonomous systems and surveillance, directly conflict with government contracts worth up to $200 million. Procurement teams must recognise that model availability and feature sets can be dictated by geopolitical pressures, potentially limiting choice and increasing vendor lock-in for specific applications.
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