Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Thursday the artificial intelligence company “Cannot in good conscience accede” to the Pentagon’s demands to allow unrestricted use of its technology, deepening the unusually public clash with the Trump administration that is threatening to pull its contract and take other drastic steps by Friday.
The firm’s chief executive, Dario Amodei said on Thursday that his company would rather not work with the Pentagon that agrees to use its tech that may “undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”
Dario Amodei said, “These threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”
Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s top authority, said on social media Thursday that the military “has no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal) nor do we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement.”
Anthropic’s policies prevent its models from being used for those purposes. It’s the last of its peers – the Pentagon also has contracts with Google, OpenAI, and Elon Musk’s xAI – to not supply its technology to a new U.S. military internal network.
Amodei said Thursday that “those latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.”
While Pentagon officials say they always will follow the law with their use of AI models, the department has taken steps to change the culture among the military legal ranks.
Also Read / Google CEO Sundar Pichai outlines AI progress at India Summit 2026.
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