WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s Chief Technology Officer today weighed in on a reported clash between the Department of Defense and AI giant Anthropic, publicly rejecting what he called attempts by the company to limit military use of its Claude AI as undemocratic.
“Congress writes bills, the president signs them, agencies write regulations, and people comply, and we’ve always complied,” Under Secretary Emil Michael told reporters after his remarks to the Microelectronics Commons consortium.
“What we’re not going to do is let any one company dictate a new set of policies above and beyond what Congress has passed,” Michael said. “That is not democratic. That is giving any one company control over what new policies are, and that’s for the president, that’s for Congress, and that’s for the agencies to determine how to implement those rules.”
Last summer, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital & AI Office awarded Anthropic, Google, xAI, and OpenAI contracts worth up to $200 million apiece to customize their popular generative AI applications for military use. Classified versions of Anthropic’s Claude AI are also available to Defense Department personnel through Amazon and Palantir, Semafor has reported.
But, according to a January report in the Wall Street Journal, Anthropic’s policies forbidding Claude’s use in weapons or surveillance programs had created a rift with the Pentagon that put its contract at risk. The Journal also reported that least one instance of Claude was used to help plan the raid that captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro.
In the Journal’s report on the Maduro raid, an Anthropic spokesperson declined to discuss that specific operation but said, “Any use of Claude — whether in the private sector or across government — is required to comply with our Usage Policies, which govern how Claude can be deployed.”
Those policies prohibit using the AI to “produce, modify, design, or illegally acquire weapons” or to “track a person’s physical location, emotional state, or communication without their consent, including using our products for … battlefield management applications.” (Note the prohibition covers any person, not just US citizens).
The disagreement has reportedly risen to the attention of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who’s pushed the Pentagon to embrace AI but also chafes against outside restrictions on the military. An unnamed senior Pentagon official even told Axios that Hegseth was “close” to designating the company a “supply chain risk,” a draconian measure which could require any company doing business with the Defense Department — including giant corporations like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon — to cut all ties with Anthropic, including any use of Claude.
An official statement from Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell was more restrained, telling The Hill that “The Department of War’s relationship with Anthropic is being reviewed.”
Michael today refrained from making threats and said he hoped for Anthropic’s success, even while emphasizing current government safeguards should be enough.
“We have a robust set of laws about surveillance in this country that have been run through the democratic process,” he said. “In terms of autonomy, again, [there] are] lots of regulations that have been promulgated for years in the Department,” he added, covering such questions as, “if a drone swarm is coming at a military base, what are your options to take it down if the human reaction time is not fast enough?”
Anthropic did not immediately respond to Breaking Defense’s request for a response to Michael’s remarks.
‘We Want Guardrails,’ But …
Despite the impasse over usage polices, Michael explicitly said that he considered Anthropic one of America’s “national champions” in AI and he hoped the company would drop its restrictions and keep working with the military, much as Google did after an internal revolt led it to withdraw from the military’s Project Maven in 2018.
“The great news in AI is that the United States is leading,” Michael told the annual meeting of the Microelectronics Commons, a public-private consortium of chipmakers, academics, and others that work with the Defense Department. “We have at least four — no, probably more — true national champions that are investing, between them, a trillion dollars over the next several years in facilities, in R&D.”
When a reporter asked him after those remarks about the future of Anthropic’s Pentagon contracts, Michael swiftly pivoted to the positive: “The Secretary has said the relationship is under review, so it’s under review. We want all our American champion AI companies to succeed. I want Anthropic, xAI, OpenAI, Google to succeed.”
“We want to take advantage of all the capabilities that … I believe will be world changing,” he went on. “And if you think back to 2018 where Google didn’t want to have the Department of War use its cloud business, this is a similar moment.”
AI should include appropriate safeguards against misuse, even by the Defense Department, Michael added — but the definition of “misuse” can’t be so broad as to block lawful military functions.
“We want guardrails,” he said. “We need the guardrails tuned for military applications. You can’t have an AI company sell AI to the Department of War, and don’t let it do Department of War things, because we’re in the business of defending the country and defending our troops.”