A public showdown between the Trump administration and Anthropic is hitting an impasse as military officials demand the artificial intelligence company bend its ethical policies by Friday or risk damaging its business.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei drew a sharp red line 24 hours before the deadline, declaring his company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Pentagon´s final demand to allow unrestricted use of its technology.
Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, can afford to lose a defense contract. But the ultimatum this week from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posed broader risks at the peak of the company’s meteoric rise from a little-known computer science research lab in San Francisco to one of the world´s most valuable startups.
If Amodei doesn’t budge, military officials have warned they will not just pull Anthropic’s contract but also “deem them a supply chain risk,” a designation typically stamped on foreign adversaries that could derail the company’s critical partnerships with other businesses.
And if Amodei were to cave, he could lose trust in the booming AI industry, particularly from top talent drawn to the company for its promises of responsibly building better-than-human AI that, without safeguards, could pose catastrophic risks.
Anthropic said it sought narrow assurances from the Pentagon that Claude won´t be used for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons. But after months of private talks exploded into public debate, it said in a Thursday statement that new contract language “framed as compromise was paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will.”
That was after Sean Parnell, the Pentagon´s top spokesman, posted on social media that “we will not let ANY company dictate the terms regarding how we make operational decisions” and added the company has “until 5:01 p.m. ET on Friday to decide” if it would meet the demands or face consequences.
Emil Michael, the defense undersecretary for research and engineering, later lashed out at Amodei, alleging on X that he “has a God-complex” and “wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US Military and is ok putting our nation´s safety at risk.”
That message hasn’t resonated in much of Silicon Valley, where a growing number of tech workers from Anthropic’s top rivals, OpenAI and Google, voiced support for Amodei’s stand late Thursday in an open letter.
OpenAI and Google, along with Elon Musk´s xAI, also have contracts to supply their AI models to the military.