Pentagon to question Anthropic chief in row of use of its AI tech
The chief executive of Anthropic has been summoned to the Pentagon amid a row between the artificial intelligence start-up and the US government over the use of its technology by the military.
Dario Amodei, 43, is scheduled to meet Pete Hegseth, the war secretary, today, a source confirmed.
The US Department of War is reviewing its relationship with Anthropic over the company’s attempts to impose limits on the use of its technology, including the mass surveillance of Americans, and the development of lethal autonomous weapons.
The Pentagon is understood to have become concerned that Anthropic did not support its military aims after hearing it had questions about how its AI was used during the US raid last month that captured the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.
The Pentagon wants AI companies to make their models available for all lawful uses.
Anthropic is the maker of Claude, the only large language model that can be used in classified settings. It agreed a partnership with Palantir, the data analytics company, in 2024, and won a military contract worth up to $200 million last summer.
Rival companies including OpenAI, Google and xAI have agreed in principle for their models to be deployed in any lawful-use cases, Emil Michael, the undersecretary of war for research and engineering, told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month. “If any one company doesn’t want to accommodate that, that’s a problem for us,” he said.
Anthropic, which was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, has pitched itself as a safety-first AI firm and says it has more than 300,000 business customers. It has also spent significant resources courting US national security business and has sought an active role in shaping government AI policy.
However, Anthropic’s caution has drawn conflict with the Trump administration.
David Sacks, the White House AI tsar, accused the company last year of “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fearmongering”.
In an essay on his personal blog last month, Amodei warned that AI should support national defence “in all ways except those which would make us more like our autocratic adversaries”.
Amodei was among Anthropic’s cofounders critical of fatal shootings of US citizens protesting against immigration enforcement actions in Minneapolis, which he described as a “horror” in a post on X. The deaths have heightened concerns among some in Silicon Valley about government use of their tools for potential violence.
A senior defence official told Axios, which first reported the planned meeting between Amodei and Hegseth, that Anthropic knows this is not a “get-toknow-you meeting ... This is not a friendly meeting. This is a shit-or-getoff-the-pot meeting.”
An Anthropic official told Axios: “We are having productive conversations, in good faith.”
Anthropic raised $30 billion in its latest funding round, more than doubling its valuation to $380 billion.
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