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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned Anthropic boss Dario Amodei that he has until Friday evening to remove restrictions on how the US military can use the company’s Claude AI chatbot – or potentially face major penalties.
Hegseth, who delivered the ultimatum during a high-stakes meeting in Washington, DC, on Tuesday afternoon, told Amodei that the Pentagon could blacklist Anthropic by declaring it a “supply chain risk,” a source familiar with the meeting told The Post.
Alternatively, the Pentagon could use the Defense Production Act to effectively mandate that Anthropic allow use of Claude for all military purposes. As of the Tuesday meeting, the Claude chatbot was the only AI model approved for use on classified military systems.
A senior Pentagon official said Anthropic has until 5:01 p.m. Eastern Time Friday to comply with the ultimatum.
Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot has received clearance for use in a classified setting, while chatbots offered by other major companies are close — giving the military a plausible alternative to Claude, the senior official added.
“The only reason we’re still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. The problem for these guys is they are that good,” a Defense Department official said of Anthropic to Axios ahead of the meeting.
Amodei reiterated Tuesday that Anthropic would not support the use of its technology to enable mass surveillance of Americans or to power weapons that can fire without human oversight, said a source familiar with the meeting. The Anthropic boss also noted that the company’s red lines have never impacted a military operation.
A senior Defense Department official told Axios that the meeting was “not warm and fuzzy at all.”
Another source with knowledge of the meeting told The Post that the talks were cordial and respectful, with no raised voices.
Hegseth praised the quality of Anthropic’s products and said the Pentagon would like to continue working with the firm, the source added.
An Anthropic spokesperson said the firm had “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.”
“During the conversation, Dario expressed appreciation for the Department’s work and thanked the Secretary for his service,” the spokesperson added.
The meeting marked the culmination of months of tensions between the Pentagon and Anthropic – which has often irritated the Trump administration with its intense focus on safety in AI usage and development.
The feud between the two sides recently escalated in January after Claude was used in the operation to arrest Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.
During the Tuesday meeting, Hegseth referenced the Pentagon’s claim, first reported by Axios earlier this month, that Anthropic had complained to fellow contractor Palantir about how its technology was used in the Maduro raid.
Amodei denied that he or anyone at Anthropic had any communication with Palantir or the Pentagon beyond normal operational discussions.
The Post first reported in November that Anthropic’s ties to the cultlike Effective Altruism movement and Democratic megadonors like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman were on the Trump administration’s radar.
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