Anthropic has until Friday evening to grant the U.S. military unrestricted access to its AI model or face consequences, according to reports. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered this ultimatum to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a meeting Tuesday morning. The Pentagon will either declare Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” a designation typically used for foreign adversaries, or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor a version of its model for military needs.
The Defense Production Act gives the president authority to compel companies to prioritize or expand production for national defense. It was recently used during the COVID-19 pandemic to require companies like General Motors and 3M to produce ventilators and masks.
Anthropic has consistently stated it does not want its technology used for mass surveillance of Americans or for fully autonomous weapons, and it is refusing to compromise on these points. Pentagon officials counter that the military’s use of technology should be governed by U.S. law and constitutional limits, not by the usage policies of private contractors.
Using the Defense Production Act in a dispute over AI guardrails would mark a significant expansion of the law’s modern use. It would also reflect an expansion of a broader pattern of executive branch instability that has intensified in recent years, according to Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and a former senior policy advisor on AI in Trump’s White House. “It would basically be the government saying, ‘If you disagree with us politically, we’re going to try to put you out of business,'” Ball said.
The dispute unfolds against a backdrop of ideological friction, with some in the administration, including AI czar David Sacks, publicly criticizing Anthropic’s safety policies. “Any reasonable, responsible investor or corporate manager is going to look at this and think the U.S. is no longer a stable place to do business,” Ball said. “This is attacking the very core of what makes America such an important hub of global commerce. We’ve always had a stable and predictable legal system.”
It is a serious standoff, and Anthropic may not be the one to yield first. According to reports, Anthropic does not plan on easing its usage restrictions. Anthropic is the only frontier AI lab with classified Department of Defense access. The Pentagon currently has no backup option in play, though it has reportedly reached a deal to use xAI’s Grok in classified systems.
That lack of redundancy may help explain the Pentagon’s aggressive posture, Ball argued. “If Anthropic canceled the contract tomorrow, it would be a serious problem for the DOD,” he said, noting the agency appears to be falling short of a National Security Memorandum from the late Biden administration that directs federal agencies to avoid dependence on a single classified-ready frontier AI system. “The DOD has no backups. This is a single-vendor situation here. They can’t fix that overnight.”