Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is pressuring Anthropic to give the military broader access to its artificial intelligence technology or lose its Pentagon contract.

AI safety and research company Anthropic has told the Pentagon it will not agree to their demands to drop critical safety precautions and grant the U.S. military full access to their AI capabilities.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the company that owns the AI assistant Claude would be punished unless it drops all ethical guidelines.

These are conflicting threats. The “supply chain risk” punishment would mean that Hegseth is cutting off Anthropic from the government. But invoking the Cold War-era Defense Production Act would be an attempt to force Anthropic to cooperate with the government.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic’s CEO a Friday deadline to open the company’s artificial intelligence technology for unrestricted military use or risk losing its government contract, according to a person familiar with their meeting Tuesday.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang weighed in on a conflict between the Defense Department and its strategic partner on Thursday, saying it's “not the end of the world.”

At the heart of this dispute is how Anthropic’s large language model Claude is being used in a military context.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today, as the Pentagon threatens the AI company with what could amount to a government blacklist.