U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has issued an ultimatum to artificial intelligence company Anthropic, saying it would remove the company from his agency’s supply chain if it declined to allow the use of its technology across military applications.
According to a report by the Financial Times, Hegseth summoned Anthropic Chief Dario Amodei to the Pentagon on Tuesday to press the issue, threatening to cut the company out of the defense supply chain or invoke the Defense Production Act to compel cooperation.
READ: Why the US-Venezuela crisis matters to India’s energy and global strategy? (
“We continued good-faith conversations about our usage policy to ensure Anthropic can continue to support the government’s national security mission in line with what our models can reliably and responsibly do,” Anthropic said in a statement. According to the BBC, the tone of the discussion between Hegseth and Amodei was cordial, but Amodei laid out what Anthropic considers to be its red lines. They include involvement in autonomous kinetic operations in which AI tools make final military targeting decisions without human intervention, and the use of tools for mass surveillance.
Anthropic, along with Google, OpenAI and xAI had been awarded contracts with the Pentagon in summer of 2025. Anthropic’s Claude AI has reportedly been pivotal to Pentagon’s work. Anthropic was the first tech company approved to work in the Pentagon’s classified military networks and has partnerships with companies including Palantir. A recent report revealed that Claude was used by the U.S. while capturing Nicolas Maduro, the then-president of Venezuela.
Anthropic representatives have previously raised concerns during discussions with government officials that its tools could be used to spy on Americans or assist weapons targeting without sufficient human oversight. The Pentagon opposed the tech company’s guidelines, saying they should be able to deploy commercial AI technology regardless of companies’ usage policies, so long as they comply with U.S. law.
The Pentagon’s position, according to the BBC, is that Anthropic should have no say in how the Pentagon uses its products. Observers state that the dispute between Anthropic and Pentagon comes from a breach of trust from both sides. “They need to get to a resolution,” according to Emelia Probasco, Senior Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. “In my opinion, we should be giving the people we ask to serve every possible advantage. We owe it to them to figure this out,” Probasco said.