Reports Indicate the Pentagon is Clashing with Anthropic on AI Use

According to unnamed insider sources cited by Reuters, the Pentagon has clashed with AI firm Anthropic regarding the startup’s insistence on safeguards that the Pentagon sees as a roadblock to the use of the artificial intelligence technology of the company in autonomous weapons and for surveillance purposes domestically.

This flashpoint that could determine the extent to which Silicon Valley can influence how the intelligence community and the military can deploy AI for combat purposes.

Extensive discussions have been ongoing with regard to a Pentagon deal that could be worth $200m for Anthropic. This stalemate could jeopardize that deal or cause the AI company to cave and let the U.S. military use its technology as it wishes so that the company can lay its hands on that cash.

Anthropic’s views on the ways in which its technology can be leveraged have ramped up the company’s disagreements with the Trump administration and this latest spat could be an inflection point in the way the two parties relate. The company insists that productive discussions are ongoing to extend the cordial working relationship that Anthropic has enjoyed with the national security arm of the federal government.

The current disagreement couldn’t have come at a worse time. Anthropic has plans to publicly list its shares, and such a step would get considerable traction among investors if the company has sizeable government contracts in its portfolio.

Last year, the Pentagon granted contracts to a number of tech firms that included Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI owned by Elon Musk, and Google. The current discussions between Anthropic and the Pentagon are geared at working out the details of the contract for which the company was selected.

However, representatives of Anthropic are concerned that the Pentagon wishes to use the company’s AI technology for surveillance and enabling autonomous weapons to identify targets without human oversight. The Pentagon insists it shouldn’t be bound by internal company guidelines regarding the use of technology it procures as long as the uses to which that technology is deployed comply with United States law.

A compromise will have to be reached because the AI models developed by Anthropic are trained to sidestep any steps likely to cause harm. The Pentagon therefore needs Anthropic employees to tweak the design of the models so that they can serve the purposes of the Pentagon. This retooling can only be done by the company that developed the AI.

This disagreement brings back memories of the clash between company interests and government interests that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) briefly faced when the UK tried to order the company to create a backdoor that intelligence personnel could use to access data on iPhones owned by residents.

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