Artificial intelligence (AI) development company Anthropic has said it is rejecting an ultimatum from the US Department of Defense to lift restrictions on its use of the Claude AI model.
Anthropic chief Dario Amodei said Thursday that his artificial intelligence startup “cannot in good conscience” bow to the Pentagon’s ultimatum to lift safeguards on the use of its AI system for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
The Pentagon “has stated that it will only contract with AI companies that agree to use their tools in ‘all lawful ways’ and that remove safeguards in that case,” Amodei said in a lengthy blog post.
– They threaten to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards; they also threatened to declare us a ‘supply chain risk’… and to invoke the Defense Production Act to force us to remove safeguards, he added.
Those last two threats are at their core opposite to each other: one marks us as a security risk; the other marks Claude as crucial to national security.
Anthropic, a startup backed by Google and Amazon, signed a $200 million contract with the Pentagon in 2025 to develop prototypes of new artificial intelligence capabilities to address critical national security challenges in the areas of warfare and business.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said earlier Thursday that the department has no interest in using artificial intelligence to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal), nor does it want to use artificial intelligence to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human intervention.
Parnell said the Pentagon is asking to be allowed to use Anthropic’s model for all lawful purposes.
A spokesman says the company has until 17:01 local time on Friday to comply.
Otherwise, we will end our partnership with Anthropica and consider them a supply chain risk.
American news portal Axios quoted Anthropic as saying that the new contract text sent by the Pentagon in the middle of negotiations “was paired with legal language that allows those safeguards to be ignored at will,” adding that “for months, those narrow safeguards have been at the heart of our negotiations.”
The Pentagon has not yet responded to a request for comment, reports Axios.
(Vijesti.ba)
