Hegseth to Anthropic: Nice company you got there…
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/02/26/hegseth-anthropic-ai-model-claude/
Hegseth wants Anthropic to modify its contract to allow “any lawful use” of the technology. Anthropic is willing to rewrite its current terms of use but not to include mass surveillance of Americans or accommodate weapons that operate without a person in the loop to make the final decision.
It seems WaPo's Editorial Board reads the situation as I do: it's a contractual "terms of use" issue, not a "product version" issue.
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OpenAI is in negotiations with the DoD to take over for Anthropic. I hope the "supply chain risk" threat is just negotiation hot air. I suspect it will prove to be, but who knows.
In the letter, Anthropic acknowledges that the law is currently ambiguous to non-existent. Their concerns are ethical rather than (currently) legal, and I think the DoD is well within its duties to find a vendor who will not impose their own ethical constraints.
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The threat to classify Anthropic as a supply chain threat is idiotic. The conflicting motivations of a company that brands itself with the highest ethical standards, but who want to provide cutting edge technology to the DoD, seems reasonable and even inevitable.
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https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-bans-anthropic-government-use-rcna261055
... “OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X Friday night that the company had struck a deal with the Department of Defense to deploy its models on the department’s classified networks.”