Tug of war between Hegseth and artificial intelligence. Now comes the ultimatum

The United States Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegsethgave time to the CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei until Friday evening to allow the Pentagon Unconstrained access to the AI ​​model Claudethreatening “heavy penalties” otherwise. Axios writes it, which talks about a meeting defined as “tense” between the two, which took place today. According to Axios, Hegseth presented two options: cut ties with Anthropic and declare it a “supply chain risk”, or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to adapt the model to military needs. Anthropic would have said it was willing to review its policies for the Pentagon, but not to allow uses like the mass surveillance of Americans or the development of weapons that operate without human supervision.

The clash over operational use

Axios writes that Claude it is currently the only model used for the most sensitive jobs armed forces. In the meeting, Hegseth reiterated that he will not accept a company dictating operating conditions or contesting individual use cases. The secretary also reportedly cited the Pentagon’s contention that Anthropic raised concerns with Palantir about using Claude during an operation in Venezuela; Amodei reportedly denied doing so, arguing that the company’s “red lines” did not prevent field activity. After the meeting, an Anthropic spokesperson spoke of “good faith” talks to continue supporting ‘s mission national security “in line with what the models can do reliably and responsibly.”

The alternatives being examined by the Pentagon

On the table, we read, there is also the hypothesis of accelerating the alternatives: xAI Of Elon Musk he just signed a contract to carry Grok in classified environments, while the Pentagon is reportedly intensifying contacts with OpenAI e Google to push their models – now used in unclassified contexts – also into classified systems. A source cited by Axios claims that Claude is still ahead in several applications of military interest, including offensive cyber capabilitiesand indicates Gemini as a possible replacement if an agreement were reached that would allow the Pentagon to use the model “for all lawful purposes”, the formula that Anthropic would have rejected.