Name: What's behind the Anthropic-Pentagon dispute? | DW News
Uploaded: 2026-02-25T23:05:25.000Z
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AI Co. Anthropic is getting under pressure from the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has given the AI company an ultimatum until Friday to agree to give the military full access to the company's AI models or face cuts of up to $200 million in government contracts.

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Hegseth reportedly demanded the AI company drop its safeguards.

Anthropic, a breakaway from OpenAI, has restricted military use of its models.

That includes autonomous lethal targeting and surveillance.

The Pentagon is considering invoking the Defense Production act, which could force Anthropic to allow unrestricted military use on national security grounds.

Let's bring in Vanessa Voels, who's a researcher at the Bundeswehr University in Munich.

The Pentagon wants to use AI for what it's calling, quote, unquote, all lawful purposes.

From a defense perspective, what does that, or could that actually mean in practice?

So it seems like the Pentagon wants to go beyond the actually agreed terms from last year, which was set not to use autonomous weapons systems without human control.

So basically it seems that now it wants to use those technologies that go beyond ISR purposes, so not only for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance purposes, but

So maybe this could lead to selecting and engaging targets with drones across all military domains and eventually having no human operator to control that.

However, it is long standing US Policy to only use autonomy weapon systems with quote, appropriate levels of human judgment.

Therefore, we should not expect like Terminator scenarios where machines are fighting machines, but

certainly to enhance and to enhance those technologies going more towards the kinetic end.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the military use of artificial intelligence for battlefield applications?

You know, you've mentioned there we're talking about spanning autonomous drone swarms, robots, cyber attacks, for example.

You know, what are, what are the big concerns here and why does Anthropic have these safeguards in particular?

So basically when we talk about military purposes, we obviously want the armed forces to control their own technologies and their own systems.

When it comes to AI, they might sort of develop a life that goes beyond what was programmed and what was intended.

Therefore, we have long standing international discussions on regulations.

There's no international treaty yet, but we certainly want to make sure that we have appropriate human control.

Therefore, we don't want the machine to decide and select on targets, but

And that's what is being discussed here and which is developing not only in democratic states, but

Of course, we are hearing that the Pentagon is negotiating with other large language models.

And through that lens I'd like to ask you, because I mean Anthropic, it is holding firm right now to its red lines around autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.

I'm thinking about Google, OpenAI XAI, what is their position on military use cases in comparison?

So the DoD signed contracts with all these companies last year and summer where they also agreed on certain red lines, as we mentioned before.

However, now there seems to be a new development, but

so far only Anthropic is being threatened with being listed as a supply chain risk and the others are not.

So this seems to lead to the conclusion that only Anthropic is really focusing on these safeguards.

And that makes sense because in the early days of Anthropic, they were actually breaking away from OpenAI in order to put a bigger focus on safeguarding safety, reliability.

Therefore, it seems that Anthropic is leading in this regard and this is important for the DoD because so far this is actually the only company that has been included in classified U.S.

So there is a big competition between those companies going on.

You know, the Pentagon is pushing this issue very aggressively.

They've set this deadline now on Friday and I'd like to ask you, what do you think happens after that deadline expires and what are you thinking, you know, as an expert in this space, looking at what is, what is unfolding right here.

So in order to understand Anthropic, we need to understand that this idea of safety and reliability was really the founding principle of the company.

So personally I don't think that they can actually go beyond those self set red lines.

Therefore I think think that they need to have certainly more discussions and will not directly follow this pressure by the dod.

Vanessa Vaux with the Bundeswehr University in Munich.

Unfortunately, we have to leave it there.

I could ask you many more questions about this topic, of course, but