Pete Hegseth put on notice his efforts to bend AI firm to his commands will backfire

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has tried to strongarm Anthropic, a leading artificial intelligence firm, to suspend its own rules about restricting military use of its technology — but it's bound to blow up in his face, wrote The Washington Post editorial board.

"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave the company a deadline of 5:01 p.m. on Friday to either allow the military to freely use its Claude model or lose a $200 million government contract and be blacklisted as 'a supply chain risk,' which would force defense contractors to drop the company, too," wrote the board. "More troubling, Hegseth is threatening to invoke the Defense Production Act to compel Anthropic to drop its guardrails."

"The blowup follows Anthropic’s concerns about the classified use of its product during the successful operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro," wrote the board. "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. The Pentagon denies that it has any plan to surveil Americans or take humans out of the kill chain."

The fundamental issue, wrote the board, is that the military wants total control of the free market and the ability to commandeer the decisions of businesses as it pleases.

"Invoking the DPA to try taking control of a model would put the government into legally murky waters," wrote the board. "Anthropic could turn this into a drawn-out lawsuit, creating uncertainty. And if the government wins, what then? A court can compel performance, but it cannot compel good performance."

The irony, the board concluded, is that Anthropic is now relaxing its safety rules — not because of military threats, but because of market pressures and what their competitors are doing.

"The government should take heed: Americans benefit from having as many companies as possible vying for government business, not by making Uncle Sam a nightmare customer," the board concluded.