Pentagon threatens Anthropic punishment

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is “close” to cutting business ties with Anthropic and designating the AI company a “supply chain risk” — meaning anyone who wants to do business with the U.S. military has to cut ties with the company, a senior Pentagon official told Axios.

The senior official said: “It will be an enormous pain in the ass to disentangle, and we are going to make sure they pay a price for forcing our hand like this.”

That kind of penalty is usually reserved for foreign adversaries. Anthropic and the Pentagon have held months of contentious negotiations over the terms under which the military can use Claude. Anthropic is prepared to loosen its current terms of use, but wants to ensure its tools aren’t used to spy on Americans en masse, or to develop weapons that fire with no human involvement. The Pentagon claims that’s unduly restrictive.

Read more at Axios