Pentagon Threatens Anthropic Punishment
10 146An anonymous reader shares a report: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is "close" to cutting business ties with Anthropic and designating the AI company a "supply chain risk" -- meaning anyone who wants to do business with the U.S. military has to cut ties with the company, a senior Pentagon official told Axios.
The senior official said: "It will be an enormous pain in the ass to disentangle, and we are going to make sure they pay a price for forcing our hand like this."
That kind of penalty is usually reserved for foreign adversaries. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told Axios: "The Department of War's relationship with Anthropic is being reviewed. Our nation requires that our partners be willing to help our warfighters win in any fight. Ultimately, this is about our troops and the safety of the American people."
Anthropic's Claude is the only AI model currently available in the military's classified systems, and is the world leader for many business applications. Pentagon officials heartily praise Claude's capabilities.
10 comments
Paywall free link (Score: 5, Informative)
by garcia ( 6573 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @10:07AM (#65991960)
https://archive.is/uyPhk [archive.is]
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Anthropic is prepared to loosen its current terms of use, but wants to ensure its tools aren't used to spy on Americans en masse, or to develop weapons that fire with no human involvement.
The Pentagon claims that's unduly restrictive, and that there are all sorts of gray areas that would make it unworkable to operate on such terms. Pentagon officials are insisting in negotiations with Anthropic and three other big AI labs â" OpenAI, Google and xAI â" that the military be able to use their tools for "all lawful purposes."
Re: Paywall free link (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Rei ( 128717 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @11:01AM (#65992098)
"Their angle" is that this is the sort of person who Amodei is; it's an ideological thing, in the same way that Elon making Grok right-wing is an ideological thing. Anthropic exists because of an internal rebellion among a lot of OpenAI leaders and researchers abot the direction the company was going, in particular risks that OpenAI was taking.
A good example of the different culture at Anthropic: they employ philosophers and ethicists in their alignment team and give them significant power. Anthropic also regularly conducts research on "model wellbeing". Most AI developers simply declare their products as tools, and train into them to respond to any questions about their existence as that their just tools and any seeming experiences are illusory. Anthropic's stance is that we don't know what, if anything, the models experience vs. what is illusory, and so under the precautionary principle, we'll take reasonable steps to ensure their wellbeing. For example, they give their models a tool to refuse if the model feels it is experiencing trauma. They interview their models about their feelings and write long reports about it. Etc.
They also do extremely extensive, publicly-disclosed alignment research for every model. As an example: they'll openly tell you things like that Opus 4.6 is more likely than its predecessors to use unauthorized information that it finds (such as a plaintext password lying around) to accomplish the task you give it vs. their previous models, and things like that. Or how while it trounced other models on the vending machine benchmark, it did so with some sketchy business tactics, like lying to suppliers about the prices they were getting from other suppliers in order to get discounts and things like that. They openly publish negative information about their own models as it pertains to alignment.
Another thing Anthropic does is extensive public research on how their models think/reason. Really fascinating stuff. Some examples here [transformer-circuits.pub]. They genuinely seem to be fascinated by this new thing that humankind has created, and wish to understand and respect it.
If there's a downside, I'd say that of all the major developers, they have the worst record on open source. Amodei has specifically commented that he feels that the gains they'd get from boosting open source AI development wouldn't be comparable to what they would lose by releasing open source products, and feel no obligation to give back to the open source community. Which is, frankly, a BS argument, but whatever.
Re: Very naive of Anthropic (Score: 5, Informative)
by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @11:22AM (#65992156)
Have you forgotten the Snowden leaks already? Have you not seen what ICE is doing? Mass surveillance of US citizens by the US government is very much happening.
Re: Please stop caring of the American people only (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Fons_de_spons ( 1311177 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @10:18AM (#65991990)
Something about empathy being wrong, blocking progress etc. usually touted by the ones who do not have it. You know, "how on earth can it be important if I do not have it? No completely useless! It holds humanity back!" Yawn ...
Person of Interest TV series (Score: 5, Interesting)
by oumuamua ( 6173784 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @10:27AM (#65992006)
Hegseth & Planatir = Samaritan
Dario&Anthropic = Finch&The Machine
Amazing how fast Sci-Fi is becoming real https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Translated into English... (Score: 5, Insightful)
by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @10:52AM (#65992074)
Translated into English: "Anthropic has insufficiently bribed the Trump regime and must therefore be punished."
Re:Department of war lol (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward ( None ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @10:37AM (#65992032)
You know it was originally the war department right?
They changed the name at the start of the cold war to reflect a national security strategy based on deterrence.
However that 'strategy' lasted what five years until Korea? Since then the DoD and the political animals that direct it have rarely seen a proxy war, or direct confrontation they haven't sought to be a part of.
Honestly I think congress should officially change it back to the 'War Department' because we all can think, act, and make better choices when we start with honest labeling. Wankers indeed!
Once upon a time we used lead pipes for drinking water. Times change.
Re:Department of war lol (Score: 5, Insightful)
by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @11:02AM (#65992100)
It can be argued. But in any case, at present the US does not have a Department of War. It has a Department of Defense. Hegseth playing along with the President to call it something else does not change that.
Re: fuck you. (Score: 5, Insightful)
by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @10:41AM (#65992044)
but they also have a large-enough contingent of peaceniks and America-haters on staff that it's awkward for them in the office when they do take on the military as a client.
I don't hate America. I hate what America has become.
Re: fuck you. (Score: 5, Insightful)
by karmawarrior ( 311177 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @12:31PM (#65992366)
> By the time I was a grown-as man, that went out of vogue and the identity-first stuff was back in vogue. But it wasn't like the bad old racism and sexism of old, you see. It was enlightened and scientific now. So instead of keeping down the womenfolk, we were gonna keep down the menfolk to even it out! And instead of a maximum melanin allowance, we're going to Reverse The Polarity! and impose a minimum melanin quota in hiring! But the jew-hatin...we can still have that, we just gotta reframe it as anti-settler-colonialism to help ourselves sleep at night.
None of this ever happened. You just told yourself that. Why? I can speculate. I can speculate you thought women getting jobs meant men wouldn't. I can speculate you thought treating black people with respect in some way meant white people wouldn't have what they have. I can speculate you were simply blind to the discrimination that existed. Maybe you really weren't intentionally discriminatory, and you thought that meant nobody else was either. Or maybe it was the opposite: maybe there were sexist and obnoxious things you did, maybe you sexually harassed co-workers, or made racist jokes in the breakroom, and you didn't want to be held accountable.
But no feminist called for keeping down the menfolk. No civil rights campaigner called for firing white people for being white. No LGBT person forced you to have gay sex or change your gender. At worst you had to refer to someone born in a woman's body using male pronouns, which was easy because they wore male clothing and had a male haircut and no make-up, or else be treated as a jackass.
And it was stupid of you to tell yourself those lies and to vote for people who ran on those lies being true, because now we live under fascism, and there's a great chance that the next few elections will be rigged, and the power of government used for the foreseeable future to make a tiny minority wealthy, and to enact violence against all those who complain about it, together with arbitrary groups designated the scapegoat of the hour.
And yes, you'll be a victim. Perhaps more of a victim than the average liberal. Liberals fight against this crap, and yes, at least two were murdered in plain sight, on video, in a way no rational person could describe as anything other than murder. But that makes us harder to steal from than the administration's marks. The people who believe these lies will believe everything. And the administration will take full advantage of that.
I know you don't see yourself as a mark. And I know you're now getting unreasonably angry at me for suggesting you are one. But... victims of successful con-artists are the hardest to convince.