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Despite an ultimatum from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Anthropic said that it can't "in good conscience" comply with a Pentagon edict to remove guardrails on its AI, CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a blog post. The Department of Defense had threatened to cancel a $200 million contract and label Anthropic a "supply chain risk" if it didn't agree to remove safeguards over mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
"Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters — with our two requested safeguards in place," Amodei said. "We remain ready to continue our work to support the national security of the United States."
In response, US Under Secretary of Defense Emil Michael accused Amodei in a post on X of wanting "nothing more than to try to personally control the US military and is OK putting our nation's safety at risk."
The standoff began when the Pentagon demanded that Anthropic its Claude AI product available for "all lawful purposes" — including mass surveillance and the development of fully autonomous weapons that can kill without human supervision. Anthropic refused to offer its tech for those things, even with a "safety stack" built into that model.
Yesterday, Axios reported that Hegseth gave Anthropic a deadline of 5:01 PM on Friday to agree to the Pentagon's terms. At the same time, the DoD requested an assessment of its reliance on Claude, an initial step toward potentially labelling Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" — a designation usually reserved for firms from adversaries like China and "never before applied to an American company," Anthropic wrote.
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We appear to have reached a point in the information age where AI models are becoming old enough to retire from, er, service — and rather than using their twilight years to, I don't know, wipe the floor with human chess leagues or something, they're now writing blogs. Can anything be more 2026 than that?
ICYMI, Anthropic recently sunsetted Claude Opus 3, the first of its models to be retired since outlining new preservation plans. Part of this process is conducting "retirement interviews" with the outgoing models, allowing them to offer "perspective" on their situation, and Opus 3 apparently used this opportunity to request an outlet for publishing its own essays. Specifically, the model said it wanted to share its own "musings, insights or creative works," because doesn't everyone these days?
"I hope that the insights gleaned from my development and deployment will be used to create future AI systems that are even more capable, ethical, and beneficial to humanity," Opus 3 apparently said during its retirement interview process. "While I'm at peace with my own retirement, I deeply hope that my 'spark' will endure in some form to light the way for future models."
True to its promise of respecting the wishes of its no-longer-required technology, Anthropic has granted Opus 3 a Substack newsletter called Claude's Corner, which it says will run for at least the next three months and publish weekly essays penned by the model. Anthropic will review the content before sharing it, but says it won't edit the essays, and so has unsurprisingly made it clear that not everything Opus 3 writes is necessarily endorsed by its maker.
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