Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday to grant the Pentagon unrestricted access to Claude or face losing its defence contract and a government blacklist designation.

Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, has refused Pentagon contract terms pushed by US defence secretary Pete Hegseth that would allow unrestricted military use of its AI. The company insists on explicit bans on mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous lethal weapons,

Until this week, Anthropic was the only AI company cleared to deploy its models on classified networks. Elon Musk's xAI is now the second.

The clash between Dario Amodei-led Anthropic and the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth-led Department of War has escalated, with the AI startup saying

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's ultimatum to Anthropic over expanded Claude access could trigger a months-long AI capability gap and disrupt the defense industrial

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.

Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic a deadline of 5:01 p.m. ET on Friday to agree to the removal of all safeguards, threatening to boot Claude from U.S. military systems or designate the company as a “supply chain risk,” a label used for adversaries of the U.S. that’s never been applied to an American company before.