Anthropic at loggerheads with US military over AI use

Anthropic is at risk of losing a lucrative Pentagon contract over its policy that its technology should never be used for the mass surveillance of US citizens or in fully autonomous weapons systems.

AI giant Anthropic is at risk of losing a lucrative Pentagon contract over its policy that its technology should never be used for the mass surveillance of US citizens or in fully autonomous weapons systems.

A US official told AFP on Monday that Anthropic executives would meet with Pentagon officials on Tuesday to discuss the matter, with a $200 million contract on the line. The meeting was first reported by Axios.

Anthropic is one of the world's most advanced AI companies, alongside OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and Google, whose powerful Gemini models rival both.

The three companies, along with Elon Musk's xAI, were contracted last year to supply AI models for a wide variety of military uses, including what the Pentagon called frontier AI projects.

As those projects have been deployed, the Pentagon has insisted that all four companies make their models available for any usage that falls within US law.

Anthropic has pushed back, drawing red lines around certain specific applications.