The Trump administration has severed ties with Anthropic. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invoked a national security law to blacklist the company from doing business with the Pentagon after CEO Dario Amodei refused to allow Claude to be used for mass surveillance of U.S. citizens or for autonomous armed drones that could select and kill targets without human input.
The Fallout
Anthropic stands to lose a contract worth up to $200 million. President Trump posted on Truth Social directing every federal agency to immediately cease all use of Anthropic technology. The company has said it will challenge the Pentagon in court.
The Bigger Picture
MIT physicist Max Tegmark, who has spent years warning about uncontrolled AI development, sees this as a trap of the industry's own making. His argument: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and xAI have all talked about safety but none supported binding regulation. Now, without rules in place, there's nothing to protect them from government pressure.
The timing is damning. Anthropic recently dropped a central tenet of its own safety pledge, its promise not to release increasingly powerful AI systems until confident they would not cause harm. Meanwhile, OpenAI swooped in to sign its own Pentagon deal with "technical safeguards," accepting terms Anthropic refused.
As Tegmark put it: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Here we are now where the U.S. government is pissed off at this company for not wanting AI to be used for domestic mass surveillance of Americans, and also not wanting to have killer robots."
