Hegseth and Anthropic CEO set to meet as debate intensifies over the military’s use of AI

Defense Secretary Hegseth to Meet with Anthropic CEO as AI Ethics Debate Intensifies

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is scheduled to meet Tuesday with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, as tensions grow over the AI company’s reluctance to fully participate in a new U.S. military internal network. Anthropic, creator of the chatbot Claude, remains the only major AI firm that has not supplied its technology to the Pentagon’s GenAI.mil platform.

The meeting, confirmed by a defense official speaking anonymously, highlights growing friction between the military’s push for advanced AI capabilities and Anthropic’s ethical reservations about government uses of artificial intelligence.

Amodei has publicly expressed concerns about potential military applications of AI technology, particularly regarding autonomous armed drones and mass surveillance systems that could monitor dissent. In a recent essay, he warned that “a powerful AI looking across billions of conversations from millions of people could gauge public sentiment, detect pockets of disloyalty forming, and stamp them out before they grow.”

The standoff comes amid the Pentagon’s broader initiative to incorporate AI into military operations. Last summer, the Department of Defense awarded contracts worth up to $200 million each to four leading AI companies: Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Elon Musk’s xAI. Notably, Anthropic was the first to receive clearance for classified military networks, where it collaborates with partners like Palantir. The other companies currently operate only in unclassified environments.

Secretary Hegseth has been explicit about his vision for military AI systems, emphasizing they should operate “without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications.” In a January speech at SpaceX in South Texas, Hegseth stated he was dismissing AI models “that won’t allow you to fight wars” and declared that the Pentagon’s “AI will not be woke.”

During the same period, Hegseth announced that Musk’s AI chatbot Grok would join the Pentagon network, despite recent controversy surrounding Grok’s generation of unauthorized sexualized deepfake images. Shortly after, OpenAI revealed it would also join the military’s secure AI platform, providing service members with a custom version of ChatGPT for unclassified tasks.

Anthropic has positioned itself as the more responsible player in the AI sector since its founding in 2021 by former OpenAI employees. This stance now faces a critical test, according to Owen Daniels, associate director at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

“Anthropic’s peers, including Meta, Google and xAI, have been willing to comply with the department’s policy on using models for all lawful applications,” Daniels noted. “So the company’s bargaining power here is limited, and it risks losing influence in the department’s push to adopt AI.”

The company previously aligned itself with the Biden administration’s AI safety initiatives, volunteering for third-party scrutiny to mitigate potential national security risks. Amodei has consistently warned about AI’s potential dangers while advocating for pragmatic risk management strategies.

This is not Anthropic’s first clash with Trump administration policies. The company has criticized proposals to loosen export controls on AI computer chips to China, despite its ongoing partnership with chipmaker Nvidia. The company and the administration have also found themselves on opposing sides of efforts to regulate AI at the state level.

Trump’s top AI adviser, David Sacks, accused Anthropic in October of “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering” in response to comments from Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark about balancing technological optimism with “appropriate fear” regarding increasingly capable AI systems.

In an apparent effort to build bridges, Anthropic has recently added Chris Liddell, a former White House official from Trump’s first term, to its board of directors, while simultaneously hiring several ex-Biden officials following Trump’s return to the White House.

The current debate evokes memories of the controversy surrounding Project Maven, a Pentagon drone surveillance program that sparked employee protests at several tech companies. Google eventually withdrew from the project, though military drone surveillance has only expanded since then.

“The use of AI in military contexts is already a reality and it is not going away,” Daniels observed. “Some contexts are lower stakes, including for back-office work, but battlefield deployments of AI entail different, higher-stakes risks. Military users are aware of these risks and have been thinking about mitigation for almost a decade.”