Exclusive: Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards

[highplainsdem]

Source: Axios

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday evening to give the military unfettered access to its AI model or face harsh penalties, Axios has learned.

The big picture: Hegseth told Amodei in a tense meeting on Tuesday that the Pentagon will either cut ties and declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk," or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military's needs.

-snip-

Anthropic has said it is willing to adapt its usage policies for the Pentagon, but not to allow its model to be used for the mass surveillance of Americans or the development of weapons that fire without human involvement.

-snip-

Hegseth told Amodei he won't let any company dictate the terms under which the Pentagon makes operational decisions, or object to individual use cases.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.axios.com/2026/02/24/anthropic-pentagon-claude-hegseth-dario

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This conflict has been brewing for a while, but this is the first time Anthropic has been given a deadline for capitulation.

Earlier stories mentioned the threat of declaring Anthropic a supply side risk, so companies doing business with the government wouldn't be able to use Anthropic's Claude AI.

The threat to use the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to do what Hegseth wants is rarely used, and is being made because Anthropic has the best.AI.

Musk has already offered to do what the government but xAI isn't good enough to replace Claude.

Google and OpenAI have been discussing letting their AI be used for classified systems but that isn't definite yet. Google's Gemini would be the Pentagon's choice but is considered inferior to Anthropic's Claude.

EDITING to add that if the Trump regime is willing to go this far bullying Anthropic, expect similar bullying of other AI companies.

Which means, for instance, that if you wear Meta's smart glasses, which are probably recording more that Meta saves than you're aware of, don't expect Zuckerberg to stand up against threats like this from a government very interested in mass surveillance.

[Miguelito Loveless]

1. Anyone who didn't see this coming is an idiot

Any tech given to the Pentagon will be used against citizens and to murder people.

[mahina]

6. um

Last edited Tue Feb 24, 2026, 09:26 PM - Edit history (1)

or maybe not in our info ecosystem, or really old, or young and working two jobs and no luxury of time to browse the web, too busy surviving

dang

Someone I respect once told me respectfully and kindly to check my priviledge

I am reminded of him in this convo

anyway

have a good day

[Dave Bowman]

2. Captain Morgan can go to hell.

[pat_k]

3. Take a stand against the felon's regime, for the sake of the nation.

Entities that fight back, win.

I have no confidence they won't capitulate, but hope against hope they refuse and sue the shit out of the regime.

[ChicagoTeamster]

5. Hegseth is an idiot. He probably doesn't know what LLMs are or how they work.

Anthropic has multiple models. Models have to be trained. They are usually specific to a behavior or task so there is diminished benefit to the military using Anthropic's Claude model instead of having Anthropic build and train custom models. They could call it Don.

[SomewhereInTheMiddle]

10. He loves things named after him ...

Call it Trump AI Because he certainly has no real intelligence.

[Demixs]

7. Forcing Anthropic to change ethic, rules would violate the first amendment

They can’t force them to change their ethics.
Even for war.

[SomewhereInTheMiddle]

11. They can't force them to change their ethics but ...

... they can refuse to do business with them if they don't.

Only contract with the DoD if you are willing to have your products/services used in war.

And I say this as a former 8-year DoD civilian employee.

[LudwigPastorius]

8. "If you refuse to make your product to our unethical specifications, I will seize your company or destroy it."

Yeah, that's not like something the mafia would do to at all.

[Skittles]

12. nice little company you have there

it would be a shame if anything happened to it............

[jfz9580m]

9. Dario Modei has no ethical qualms

There are some things I am close minded to- one of them is the humanity of our present billionaire/ceo and elite class. But he may be less stupid than the rest if he does want some safeguards.
The least stupid, blinded by greed humans in ai need not expect this stealth Jan 6 the billionaires are trying to get away with.

These guys don’t care about anything or anyone, but the least stupid and mentally ill of them somewhere still have some notion of consequences, that we as the global public can reinforce more.

It is the reason I shitpost* (not a side of me I ever wanted to share….seems risky under normal circumstances..for some reason it is a reflex in this fine society to try to seem stupider and more naive than you actually are…and I discovered that I find mimicry of tough talking bosses as repellant a pose as any sane human does. It is why I liked the academic sciences till Hennessy decided to orchestrate his lunatic “save the world” spiel. Well then this is a compliment to Hennessy! He hired my pi and I like my pi, so I can’t really attack Hennessy. Trust Hennessy to try to use the genuinely decent parts of academic cooperativity to fuel his foul ai scams. That guy is not entirely doltish anymore than I am a fool).

I try to forgive a lot, but there is a reason Jesus Christ could start a religion, whereas even the smallest cult is out jfz9580m’s reach.

Unless you are a genuine reformer like Christ (the real Jesus Christ who said “turn the other cheek”, “love thy neighbor as thine own self”, that mote-beam thing..), it is not easy to forgive things that affected you badly.

*I seem to be borrowing my style from chapotraphous. I don’t know enough about them to know if they are cool the way Yasha Levine/Troy Farah etc are.

I watched a bit of this show called “Billionaire’s Bunker” and I lumped it when this sort of robinhood spiel about how “they have all these luxuries whereas we have to eat pasta not sushi and fly first class” started up. I think it is obscene that old people cannot afford healthcare and are expected to die since they are not valuable to some billionaire parasites. I think homelessness and poverty are obscene.

This tacky wish to wear whatever the hell designer clothes are and to fart into gold toilets like Vinod Khosla’s family probably does in between nudie pics (I said “probably” so that is not libel..that sounds more like Bill Maher) is not very sympathetic to me.

The reason I am so insistent about not being in any ai project is not that I mind voluntary work. But it is one thing when it is a genuine concept of global fucking (that doesn’t sound like me) community. It is another if it is an automated machine run by billionaires and politicians. No one with democratic instincts is going to let this rogue’s gallery control their lives. And one reason I joke about throwing people from turrets (who wants to be a serf? I want to throw Mark Cuban from turrets) is that the public’s mood is angry and it is safer to be rabble than a bunker-free billionaire in this unequal hellscape and they get it and it is why they set us at each others’ throats.

I for instance almost never blame medical professionals because: a) most are pretty decent and overworked and underpaid relative to the real risk/workload. I have decided to forgive one nurse who I was angry about and blame PRS hospital admin most. b) working with more and more surveillance is hell and it should not be doctors (not any of mine -if it is a sleazy doctor who wants to be an influencer etc that is bogus, but my doctors are cool) who are blamed for any additional errors that result from all this junk tech.

But all the mutual cooperativity becomes a sham if people like me have no say in things because I don’t herd with morons like Vinod Khosla chasing the latest trends or bogus “tech critics” like Tristan Harris (he is pompous and dead on the inside and wants to be loved and respected! He should be avoided like the plague of insipid douches who pretend to care! Why are people so bad at detecting kayfabe and insincerity? I am trying out more personas than Roger’s Alien from American Dad, which I protest altogether as overly broad. But I am definitely not letting Hennessy paint me as a mentally ill nut in denial).

The billionaires are the problem and they are pushing ai solely to take away all our personhood as humans, property etc and pretending that if someone is anonymous they are a bot/crazy or a disinfo agent. I will interact and explain what I saw more clearly so that some traction against these guys is possible.

I liked my old life..And so far I have not seen much to justify this. Instead of collecting more and more data fueled by advertising for junk no one will ever buy, the data that already exists should be used skilfully by actual damn scientists not “I am a moron and I love billionaires and question nothing/everything or all the wrong things”.


(Sorry highplainsdem..You post about ai and end up getting various confusing rants in your threads. We are on the same side. But you come as a genuinely serious person and I used to think I was, but I am not. I am a real person though and I plan to exploit that to pushback hard against these tech companies and do my sadly almost certainly paltry and inconsequential bit to foster to what community spirit I can so that in at least 5-6 years from now we can try to change the public mind.

I am generally dubious that anything can work against this goliath of stupidity and malice that is a small group of really stupid billionaires who thought democracy could be gamed with bullshit about what the “real world” is. Things carry on as usual where they are usual.

But they need not expect to make huge changes and expect predictably crass or stupid responses. Hennessy that was for you. Is he still around? I dread looking him up and finding out that he retired. Unlike Stanford which sucked aside from the scientists I met, who were all really cool, I did like my earlier school Vanderbilt.

This is a bit like …I am leery of analogies by now that use scientific metaphors..There are dynamics you can find throughout the natural world or in biology that can explain the world better than a forced game world which treats every living thing like a pawn on a chessboard.

This is not up to spec is my guess and is unlikely to get up to spec this way.
Society will not force bad science using my home and me. I tried to cooperate till I saw that this is stupid. I am still trying to correct a 17 year old paper..a paper this isn’t Epstein files thread, which is at this point pretty much its sole relieving feature. Well at least there weren’t any pedophiles..These guys can do the minimum whoever they are. And I had a cool interaction with a DUer Scrivener7…it is a strong instinct to not discuss anything personal with people like me..I am an only child and a loner. People are generally nice in my experience irl. But I do find it hard to open up unless it is valuable for you all. Or it is just a bore boring everyone.
I am like a group of people with some privilege, but not so much that I want to contribute to that parasite Vinod Khosla.

But this is political so I should draft my posts better..but I feel they lose something without some libel risk, which I don’t want to do to EarlG. Hennessy is not that stupid. Vinod Khosla would sue over allegations that he and his family fart into gold toilets. That guy is the face of everything wrong with immigration. Elon Musk would as well…one reason bashing him or Vinod Khosla rather than Hennessy is risky is that they are entirely humorless and Musk at least has shuttered small entities.

I would be fine with EarlG banning me over DU having legal ills because I can no longer pretend to be a random poster. I should take my cues from community members.

Well I am putting criminal liability locally for ai companies that behave like Elon Musk or Vinod Khosla. It is not directly about them so much as local entities that clearly did and continue to behave as sleazily and imperiously.
I hope the govt of India and the state of kerala support a citizen over profit still and that no one harasses my medical mj co/Du etc.
That is likelier than mob violence.

Why bother with violence when the war of economic attrition wiping out the middleclass and confusing people about where the problems in society are.
I have to think about it. I don’t mind taking risks where I can use my resources to fend for myself as needed. I don’t like exposing other people to risk.
I may just have my own blog for rants and then, only I am liable and this isn’t an income stream for me. And locally at least my gamble is that it is not worth it to get fascistic.

Lol..layered human communication..Frankenstein’s monster alright. Anyway, it would be widely accepted that I am a schizophrenic! So clearly I am not responsible for the stuff I have posted thus far.
EarlG cannot be blamed for the fact that a random DUer has a nightmarish blog posted on their profile.

And then i cannot be accused of weighing in on American politics as a non-American. Besides then I won’t be breaking my TOS by inadvertently getting drafted (going by the timing) into Hawley’s press packet ;-/ and any populist insights will be on my blog.
Chris Hayes had a piece in Salon a while.

And I can go back to engaging with DU like a normal person would.

I will be more careful in my shitposting going forward. But until billionaires are shamed proportionately way more than some random this divide and rule society Facebook etc want will be what we are stuck with.


Due to the legal risks involved, I am taking down my entire journal and making my own blog I will post on my profile

I was disoriented between Dec 2012 and Feb 25, 2026. No seriously..

It finally dawned on me..oh..the salient things are: Ai; Immigration (the mental health thing is because you can’t come and “open up” people like me and expect to find someone who behaves like a person JD Vance or for that matter a dem girlboss would consider sane..)

I am actually genuinely grateful to DU for having hosted me in this period and it would be really mean spirited to harass DU or my medical mj co or my labs or doctors.

——————————————————————————-
I started writing this earlier and then got distracted:
I really don’t buy the so-called ethics and conscience etc of these CEO types.
The real No Kings should be about every parasitic billionaire out there affecting events around the globe.

We really need to organize against those guys not only politicians. That is also a group where there is clearly a lot of delusion of grandeur and what seems like real mental illness that in these sick societies of bullies and sycophants is just never called out.

They really come off as genuinely disgusting humans when they are not mentally ill, but these parasites with delusions of grandeur like Vinod Khosla and Jeff Bezos..that guy should stick to taking his family’s nudie pics off the web and collectively farting into gold toilets.

The ugly face of American immigration is parasites like Vinod Khosla, shilling garbage no one wants or needs. The fix to the global immigration problem (and there needs to be one) is :1) not sabotaging family planning the world over, 2) moving away from fossil fuels and 3) regulating guys like Vinod Khosla as Lina Khan was trying to do. Not throwing 70,000 of the poorest immigrants into hells. Throw Vinod Khosla into prison (joke! Joke! I am sorry sir..I am extremely mentally ill! bows like Guildea’s parrot)..

I solved the 3-Trolley problem!!!!

I actually get some utility of these guys like Vinod Khosla. I try to forgive as much as I can and this imperious ass as such a detestable human being.
————/———

I will be taking a lot of my DU journal down to mitigate any legal risks caused by truthiness - the only solution to this much human stupidity (hey that is very much also me..That is the one thing we all have in common! My guess is that is more common than malice in workaday life The malice is mostly concentrated at the top.

Directed malice by billionaires.

Sorry highplainsdem..it is not a usual situation and I have to figure out how to proceed as I definitely absolutely refuse to take stuff on trust with this crew..my lab at stanford and an adjacent one had some decent scientists one of whom was someone one could actually be friends with and would have been the sole recipient of these endless rants..but instead they are online. I rarely talk honestly entirely except to very very close friends..could be cultural in complicated ways. And my doctors are all cool with a few exceptions.

I should go surf the legal guidelines on what constitutes libel before I post. The jerks at SIL here and predators like to shut MeToo complainants down with bullshit defamation cases. Priya Ramani faced one..it is their way of telling the rabble that if you make life difficult for us, we will make life difficult for you and since every fucking private sector company that impacted and impacts me is invited to go fuck itself (this I mean) and I am planningto take this to court. One person who was recovering is already dead.

I will find local support slowly. I couldn’t tell what I was dealing with due to this bioreactor vat, everything but the kitchen sink approach which can only work with honest and good human science.
And a human brain can beat these dumb things..it is not even a contest. Apparently trollishness is one of the few aspects of my personality it learnt to mimic as something that is universal enough..at least going by my autocorrect which is nothing like Adam Becker’s description of really good autocorrect but rather looks like a troll suggesting words. And that aside the kind of ghastly connection making I protest defines how I think.
According to cleverbot “it refused to jaywalk”…


It is starting to make vague sense..how a brain like mine can adapt to this, while continuing to protest everything! Not everything…just many things.

I am taking most of my journal down and saving it in case it has scientific relevance later. At the very least life is sort of a self-directed scientific experiment. Access to free will is made difficult.

I do miss science..not the sort of thing one likes to talk about tbh..because most times one would rather give up, get high and watch tv..That should give Harpending’s ghost a boner. He was a creepy, racist guy

But it isn’t white supremacy imo. It is eugenics. Chamath Palihapitiya/Balaji Srinivasan/Vivek Ramaswamy/Sundar Pichai etc. After some disgraceful attempts to hijack black history for some middleclass douchebags (as if it is even remotely the same thing) of the specific type I listed, they come out as the nonwhite fascists they are. That’s a type that swings this way ans that but ultimately herds with fascists using inequality to justify it..and that is just wrong.
I know guys like that..They are not like genuine anti-racists. And I am not offended by someone who is white and rural etc not knowing all sorts of crap about these entitled brats.
As Chauncey DeVega wrote white-black solidarity are possible and I would argue essential. But human-disingenuous creep solidarity mediated by shitty bots (my light just went out and came back..it is 1:11 pm here in Kerala) is not gonna happen.


Anyway…I will save it for my blog. I hope my family doesn’t find this. If they do..well..dammit..it would be so nice if I could remain anonymous..Oh well..
I don’t know why people have such a completely wrong impression of marijuana use.

[BradBo]

13. The second they bend the knee their toast