Name: Anthropic AI rejects Pentagon's weapons & surveillance ultimatum
Uploaded: 2026-02-27T21:38:20.000Z
Duration: 8 min 5 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Anthropic is rejecting an ultimatum from the Pentagon to lift the company's AI safeguards or risk being blacklisted.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants to use Anthropic's AI model, Claude, for quote, all lawful purposes.

Transition words & phrases

Anthropic, though, has been very clear it's a hard no when it comes to using its AI technology for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of Americans.

The deadline's later today, but essentially saying what?

We are not playing ball with the Pentagon.

Yeah, so they said that the Pentagon came back to them with some updates to this contract they've been negotiating for months.

And they say that even though they came back with some edits, that the legalese in there still doesn't satisfy their concerns about their two red lines.

Now, as you know, the Pentagon wants to be able to say to Anthropic, we want to use your Claudia system.

That's one of the only systems that's used in the classified military system for any purpose.

They don't want to be in the middle of a war situation, having to go to Anthropic and saying, hey, we need to do this.

But Anthropic says they have two major concerns here, and

it's because they just don't think the AI systems are either reliable enough for this.

These are things like autonomous weapons.

They say it's just not reliable enough yet to be able to aim and shoot a weapon.

They're also concerned about mass surveillance of US citizens, saying just our laws and regulations have not caught up to what AI can do when it comes to mass surveillance.

And they say that the Pentagon's attempted changes did not satisfy that, and

And they say the military is welcome to go elsewhere.

They will help the military off board Anthropic's products.

And Dariel Amadei, the CEO of Anthropic, saying in a statement, regardless, these threats do not change our position.

We cannot in good conscience accede to their requests.

Those threats, of course, being that the Pentagon is going to essentially blacklist Anthropic, calling them a supply chain risk.

This is something that's normally used for companies that are connected to foreign adversaries.

I don't think it's ever been used on an American AI company, not just any American AI company, but

one that's considered one of the best in the industry.

Those Claude systems are loved by programmers.

There's a reason why the Pentagon is using this because it is well used within the Defense Department.

Experts say that it is well within all of the military and the military does enjoy using it.

And that's why the Pentagon wants to continue use this and is probably putting up this fight.

What's really interesting is that the Under Secretary for War on Technology, the one who's been in a lot of these negotiations, Emil Michael, went on a Twitter tear yesterday, posting all of these things about Anthropic, about Dariel Amadei, saying instead of just saying, okay, we're just going to move on to another company, they're accusing Anthropic of trying to rewrite the laws instead of just being a company who wants to uphold its own values in its contract.

I'll read you one of the posts that he said.

He said it's a shame that Dario Amadei is a liar and has a God complex.

He wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US military military and is okay putting our nation's safety at risk.

The Department of War will always adhere to the law, but

not bend to the whims of any one for profit tech company.

And again, you're thinking, well, if you just don't like this AI company, just go use something else.

And part of the reason is Anthropic is one of the only AI systems that's approved to work on the classified military systems.

The other AI companies are in talks to do so as well.

for some people, they say none of them are as good as Claude and that's why you have this fight playing out.

So we got the statement from Anthropic last night.

The deadline is Technically Today, 5:01pm I believe.

What do you make of the response from Anthropic?

I think the response from Anthropic demonstrates something that's been clear from the start, which is they really want to work with it, with the Pentagon.

Anthropic was the first company in the door of the frontier AI labs to do classified work.

And one of the really interesting things about this, this whole dispute is that every single thing that the Pentagon has wanted Anthropic to work on, Anthropic has been happy to work on.

And even the statement last night from, from Anthropic leaders suggested that they're happy to work on something like autonomous weapons.

They just don't think their technology is ready, is ready for it, ready for it right now.

They're saying, to your point, we will work on this.

And as my colleague had asked Gold Our correspondent here was reporting, look, folks in the military, this is seen as the best AI option for them right now.

They would have to then basically off board everything that they already have, bring in something else.

It's interesting that if there is a solution that seemed to somewhat be working and the company is saying, hey, our technology is not even there yet to do this, it would seem that from a national security standpoint, you wouldn't want to use something that wasn't ready for primetime.

One of the interesting things here is this feels to me like a personality dispute dressed up as a policy disagreement in that there's no current thing that the Pentagon wants Anthropic to work on that Anthropic is not willing to work on.

And that suggests to me that this in some ways is a theoretical dispute about future potential use cases.

And really what this reflects is a breakdown in trust in that the Pentagon doesn't trust that Anthropic will be there for future potential uses where it might want to contract with a Frontier AI lab.

And Anthropic, for its part, doesn't seem to trust that the Pentagon will necessarily use its technology responsibly.

This is something that they should be able to work out, given that both sides seem to be benefiting from the arrangement at present.

Anthropic, correct me from our here, Anthropic has also been pushing for some guardrails when it comes to AI technology, which has not necessarily been where the administration stands.

Do you think that could be playing a role here?

I think Anthropic publicly has been very.

They're the frontier lab most known for their stance on on air safety and have been very vocal about these guardrails against mass surveillance and autonomous weapon systems.

But one of the really interesting things is, you know, from the statement by Anthropic last night, it appears as though their objections are less philosophical and more practical.

Technology isn't ready for this kind of task yet.

And frankly, for example, when it comes to autonomous weapons, they're not wrong.

If you were going to train an autonomous weapons system today, you'd probably be better off with a bespoke algorithm trained on a data set of whatever the specific kinds of targets you were trying to hit, rather than a large language model trained on the Internet or something like that.

What Anthropic is saying is that our technology isn't ready yet to do certain things and we need guardrails against using it for those things until it's ready and the Pentagon is saying, we want those guardrails down now.

And we find the idea that you might have guardrails to be the problem in the first place because you're doing business with the Pentagon.

And to be fair to the Pentagon here, Anthropic is in business with the Pentagon and the Pentagon is in the business of war.

And so we can't be surprised in some ways that the Pentagon wants access to technology from one of its contractors to do the things that it wishes to do to try to improve the American military.

Real quickly, before I let you go, for people who are not following every twist and turn here, when you hear Pentagon and mass surveillance, I think it does raise some issues for average Americans.

How concerned should Americans be about mass surveillance from the Department of Defense on them, the average citizen?

I think people have reasons to be concerned about mass surveillance, though it's not clear to me that that concern comes from the Pentagon per se.

The public statements from the Pentagon have suggested that they're not doing mass surveillance, which is one reason they think that anthropics, that anthropics, guardrails here are not necessary, reflecting that lack of trust between Anthropic and the Pentagon I mentioned before.

But yeah, I would be worried about mass surveillance in an age of this technology.

The Pentagon is not necessarily the locust point I'd be most worried about.