Pentagon and Anthropic in a dispute. In the background there are concerns about mass surveillance of citizens
Anthropic is an American security and artificial intelligence research company that was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives. Their flagship product is the Claude family of language models, which has gained recognition for the high quality of generated texts, the ability to process very long documents and a lower tendency to generate harmful content compared to the competition. Anthropic has attracted huge investments from technology leaders such as Amazon and Google.
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Pentagon: relations with Anthropic are “under review”
The Axios website writes, citing a Pentagon official, that Ministry of Defense threatens to give Anthropic the status of a “threat to supply chains”(supply chain risk), which would force all Pentagon contractors to dissociate themselves from this company's products. This status is usually reserved for foreign adversaries of the US, such as Chinese technology companies.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell confirmed that the ministry's relationship with Anthropic is “under review”.
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The source of the dispute are ongoing negotiations regarding the terms of use of the Claude model by the army. According to the website, Claude is currently the only artificial intelligence model available in classified US military IT systems and was reportedly used during operations against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January this year.
The Axios source admitted that breaking up with the company would be very complicated and that the company offers the best services in the industry, but noted that the ministry wants it to “pay the price for enforcing” the restrictions.
The company's CEO, Dario Amodei, expressed his readiness to ease the current terms of use, but demands a guarantee that its tools will not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or to create fully autonomous weapons systems operating without human intervention.
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The Pentagon finds these restrictions unacceptable and insists that AI can be used for “all lawful purposes.”
Pentagon and Anthropic in a dispute. “Productive conversations in good faith”
An Anthropic spokesperson told Axios that the company is in “good faith, productive discussions” with the ministry. Another company representative pointed out that current law on mass surveillance does not take into account the capabilities of AI.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Amodei noted that using AI for surveillance could radically violate people's privacy and called for a law or even a constitutional amendment to address these risks.
According to Axios, the dispute with Anthropic sets the tone for the Pentagon's negotiations with three other large AI labs — OpenAI, Google and xAI — that have agreed to remove safeguards on classified military systems but do not yet operate on classified systems.
