The Pentagon is pressuring AI companies to allow the US military to use their technology for “all lawful purposes,” but Anthropic is fighting back, according to a new report in Axios.
The government is reportedly making the same demand of OpenAI, Google, and xAI. An anonymous Trump administration official told Axios that one of those companies agreed, while the other two reportedly showed some flexibility.
Meanwhile, the anthropic is said to have been the most resistant. In response, the Pentagon is apparently threatening to cancel its $200 million contract with the artificial intelligence company.
In January, reported the Wall Street Journal that there was significant disagreement between Anthropic and Department of Defense officials over how their Claude models could be used. The WSJ later stated that Claude was used in the American military operation. to capture the then Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
A company spokesperson told Axios that the company “has not discussed using Claude for specific operations with the War Department,” but is instead “focused on a specific set of usage policy issues, namely our strict limits around fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance.”
