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

A new exclusive report from Axios reveals that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has given AI company Anthropic an ultimatum: strip the safety guardrails from its Claude AI model by Friday or face severe government retaliation. The Pentagon is demanding unfettered access to Claude, currently the only AI used in highly classified military systems, to allow for domestic surveillance and the development of autonomous weapons, which violates Anthropic's core terms of service. If CEO Dario Amodei refuses, the Department of Defense is threatening to invoke the Defense Production Act to force compliance or officially designate the company as a supply chain risk, effectively blacklisting them from government contracts