Pentagon Gives Anthropic Friday Deadline on AI Access
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- Anthropic has until Friday evening to grant the U.S. military unrestricted access to its AI model or face consequences, per Axios.
- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told CEO Dario Amodei in a Tuesday meeting the Pentagon will either label Anthropic a 'supply chain risk' — a designation usually reserved for foreign adversaries — or invoke the Defense Production Act to force a military-tailored model.
- The Defense Production Act grants presidential authority to compel companies to prioritize defense production, and was most recently invoked during COVID-19 to force GM and 3M to manufacture ventilators and masks.
- Anthropic is refusing to relax its long-standing prohibitions on mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons, and per Reuters has no plans to ease its usage restrictions.
- Anthropic is the only frontier AI lab with classified DOD access, and the Pentagon currently has no backup in place — though it has reportedly reached a deal to use xAI's Grok in classified systems.
- Dean Ball, a former Trump White House AI policy advisor, warned the DOD is already falling short of a Biden-era National Security Memorandum requiring agencies to avoid dependence on a single classified-ready frontier AI system.
- AI czar David Sacks has publicly attacked Anthropic's safety policies as 'woke,' highlighting ideological friction driving the confrontation.
Why it matters: Invoking the DPA over AI guardrails would mark a significant expansion of the law's modern use, with Ball warning it would signal to global investors that the U.S. is 'no longer a stable place to do business' for companies that politically disagree with the government. The Pentagon's aggressive posture also exposes a single-vendor vulnerability: Anthropic is the only frontier lab with classified DOD access, the xAI deal isn't yet operational, and the agency is already out of compliance with its own single-vendor avoidance memo.
