A statement from our CEO on national security uses of AI
I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.
Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community. We were the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government’s classified networks, the first to deploy them at the National Laboratories, and the first to provide custom models for national security customers. Claude is extensively deployed across the Department of War and other national security agencies for mission-critical applications, such as intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, cyber operations, and more.
Anthropic has also acted to defend America’s lead in AI, even when it is against the company’s short-term interest. We chose to forgo several hundred million dollars in revenue to cut off the use of Claude by firms linked to the Chinese Communist Party (some of whom have been designated by the Department of War as Chinese Military Companies), shut down CCP-sponsored cyberattacks that attempted to abuse Claude, and have advocated for strong export controls on chips to ensure a democratic advantage.
Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.
However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now:
- Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties. To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI. For example, under current law, the government can purchase detailed records of Americans’ movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant, a practice the Intelligence Community has acknowledged raises privacy concerns and that has generated bipartisan opposition in Congress. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale.
- Fully autonomous weapons. Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk. We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer. In addition, without proper oversight, fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day. They need to be deployed with proper guardrails, which don’t exist today.
To our knowledge, these two exceptions have not been a barrier to accelerating the adoption and use of our models within our armed forces to date.
The Department of War has stated they will only contract with AI companies who accede to “any lawful use” and remove safeguards in the cases mentioned above. They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards; they have also threatened to designate us a “supply chain risk”—a label reserved for US adversaries, never before applied to an American company—and to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the safeguards’ removal. These latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.
Regardless, these threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.
It is the Department’s prerogative to select contractors most aligned with their vision. But given the substantial value that Anthropic’s technology provides to our armed forces, we hope they reconsider. Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters—with our two requested safeguards in place. Should the Department choose to offboard Anthropic, we will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider, avoiding any disruption to ongoing military planning, operations, or other critical missions. Our models will be available on the expansive terms we have proposed for as long as required.
We remain ready to continue our work to support the national security of the United States.
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Comments
I used to work at Anthropic, and I wrote a comment on a thread earlier this week about the RSP update [1]. It's enheartening to see that leaders at Anthropic are willing to risk losing their seat at the table to be guided by values.
Something I don't think is well understood on HN is how driven by ideals many folks at Anthropic are, even if the company is pragmatic about achieving their goals. I have strong signal that Dario, Jared, and Sam would genuinely burn at the stake before acceding to something that's a) against their values, and b) they think is a net negative in the long term. (Many others, too, they're just well-known.)
That doesn't mean that I always agree with their decisions, and it doesn't mean that Anthropic is a perfect company. Many groups that are driven by ideals have still committed horrible acts.
But I do think that most people who are making the important decisions at Anthropic are well-intentioned, driven by values, and are genuinely motivated by trying to make the transition to powerful AI to go well.
I've had so much abuse thrown at me on here for saying this very thing over the last few years. I used to be friends with Jack back in the day, before this AI stuff even all kicked off, once you know who people really are inside, it's easy to know how they will act when the going gets rough. I'm glad they are doing the right thing, but I'm not at all surprised, nor should anyone be. Personally I believe they would go to jail/shut down/whatever before they do something objectively wrong.
> I have strong signal that Dario, Jared, and Sam would genuinely burn at the stake before acceding to something that's a) against their values,
I am sure you think they are better than the average startup executive, but such hyperbole puts the objectivity of your whole judgement under question.
They pragmatically changed their views of safety just recently, so those values for which they would burn at the stake are very fluid.
It's good to be driven by ideals, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
I think avg(HN) is mostly skeptical about the output, not that the input is corrupt or ill-meaning in this case. Although with other companies, one can't even take their claims seriously.
And in any case, this is difficult territory to navigate. I would not want to be in your spot.
By MichaelZuo 2026-02-270:442 reply How do you reconcile the fact that many people in Anthropic tried to hide the existence of secret non-disparagement agreements for quite some time?
It’s hard to take your comment at face value when there’s documented proof to the contrary. Maybe it could be forgiven as a blunder if revealed in the first few months and within the first handful of employees… but after 2 plus years and many dozens forced to sign that… it’s just not credible to believe it was all entirely positive motivations.
By ozgung 2026-02-279:48 The problem with companies, you see, is that they are a separate entity than their founders, shareholders or current leadership. A Company has no soul or unchangeable intentions. Claude’s SOUL.md is just an IP that can be edited at any time.
By snickerbockers 2026-02-272:472 reply >I's enheartening to see that leaders at Anthropic are willing to risk losing their seat at the table to be guided by values.
I'm concerned that the context of the OP implies that they're making this declaration after they've already sold products. It specifically mentions already having products in classified networks. This is the sort of thing that they should have made clear before that happened. It's admirable (no pun intended) to have moral compunctions about how the military uses their products but unless it was already part of their agreement (which i very much doubt) they are not entitled them to countermand the military's chain of command by designing a product to not function in certain arbitrarily-designated circumstances.
By peyton 2026-02-2712:46 “AI chips are like nuclear weapons” (paraphrasing [1]) and “I should be in charge of it” (again paraphrasing) is just not a serious position regardless of intentions.
[1]: https://www.axios.com/2026/01/20/anthropic-ceo-admodei-nvidi...
There's a simpler explanation than "billionaires with hearts of gold" here. If:
(1) this is a wildly unpopular and optically bad deal
(2) it's a high data rate deal--lots of tokens means bad things for Anthropic. Users which use their product heavily are costing more than they pay.
(3) it's a deal which has elements that aren't technically feasible, like LLM powered autonomous killer robots...
then it makes a whole lot of sense for Anthropic to wiggle out of it. Doing it like this they can look cuddly, so long as the Pentagon walks away and doesn't hit them back too hard.
This last development is much to the honor of Anthropic and Amodei and confirms what you're saying.
What I don't get though is, why did the so-called "Department of War" target Anthropic specifically? What about the others, esp. OpenAI? Have they already agreed to cooperate? or already refused? Why aren't they part of this?
By SecretDreams 2026-02-274:04 > Many groups that are driven by ideals have still committed horrible acts.
Sometimes, it's even a very odd prerequisite.
By cue_the_strings 2026-02-2713:21 Don't attribute to ideals what is simple self-preservation.
No sane person wants to become a legitimate military target. They want to sleep in their own beds, at home, without risking their families lives. Just like the rest of us.
> Something I don't think is well understood on HN is how driven by ideals many folks at Anthropic are
After 20 years of everyone in this industry saying "we want to make the world a better place" and doing the opposite, the problem here is not really related to people's "understanding".
And before the default answer kicks in: this is not cynicism. Plenty of folks here on HN and elsewhere legitimately believe that it's possible to do good with tech. But a billion dollar behemoth with great PR isn't that.
By keybored 2026-02-2712:16 As a complete bystander I put so incredibly little weight to what friends and former employees think about the persons and figureheads behind tech companies that aim to change the world.
Why would I care. All people with at least some positive or negative notoriety have friend and associates that will, hand to their heart, promise that they mean well. They have the best intentions. And any deviations from their stated ideals are just careful pragmatic concerns.
Road to Hell and all that.
By Yizahi 2026-02-279:49 Exactly which values they are "going to burn at a stake for"? Making as many people homeless as they can in the shortest possible time? Befuddling governments and VCs into creating an insane industry-wide debt which would either lead to a "success" in replacing jobs or an industry-wide crisis? Or maybe a value of stealing intellectual property of every human on the planet under the guise of "fair use" and then deliberately selling the derivative product? Or the value of voluntarily working with "national security customers" when it suits them financially and crying foul when leopards bite their faces? Or the value of ironically calling a human replacement machine "anthropic" as in "for humanity"?
Yeah, I totally see Anthropic execs defending them to their last dollar in the wallet. Par for the course for megacorps. It's just I personally don't value those values at all.
By bertylicious 2026-02-277:575 reply "They're driven by values" is meaningless praise unless you qualify what these values are. The Nazis had values too, you know. They were even willing to die for them. One of the core values of the Catholic church is probably compassion. Except for the victims of sexual abuse perpetrated by their clergy.
So what core values led "Dario, Jared, and Sam" to work with a government that just tried to rename the DoD to "department of war" and is acting aggressively imperialist in a way like the US hasn't in a long time.
And who exactly are these "autocratic adversaries" they are mentioning? Does this list include the autocrats the US government is working together with?
By comandillos 2026-02-278:021 reply To me this is just another marketing stunt where the company wants to build a public image so their customers trust them (see Apple), but then as always who knows what will happen behind the scenes. Just see when most major US companies had backdoors on their systems providing all data to the NSA, i.e. PRISM.
By FeloniousHam 2026-02-2715:01 > Something I don't think is well understood on HN is how driven by ideals many folks at Anthropic are, even if the company is pragmatic about achieving their goals.
Jonah Goldberg (speaking of foreign policy): "you've got to be idealistic about the ends and ruthlessly realistic about means."
By yayr 2026-02-279:37 There are well intentioned people everywhere, also at Google or OpenAI...
But the final decisions made usually depend on the incentive structures and mental models of their leaders. Those can be quite different...
By zer0gravity 2026-02-2715:22 The probability is high that major AI development companies are already using an AI instance internally for strategic and tactical decisions. The State power institutions, especially intelligence, are now having a real competitor in the private sector.
By learingsci 2026-02-2715:01 I remember when people said the exact same thing about Google. Youth is wasted on the young.
By dpweb 2026-02-274:21 I wouldn't underestimate this as a good business decision either.
When the mass surveillance scandal, or first time a building with 100 innocent people get destroyed by autonomous AI, the company that built is gonna get blamed.
As a complete outsider, I genuinely believe that Dario et al are well-intentioned. But I also believe they are a terrible combination of arrogant and naive - loudly beating the drum that they created an unstoppable superintelligence that could destroy the world, and thinking that they are the only ones who can control it.
I mean if you sign a contract with the Department of War, what on Earth did you think was going to happen?
By jwlarocque 2026-02-274:411 reply Oh hey Noah
Glad to hear you say some moral convictions are held at one of the big labs (even if, as you say, this doesn't guarantee good outcomes).
By whatever1 2026-02-272:16 Let us think how OpenAI responded to this.
Google, OpenAI Employees Voice Support for Anthropic in Open Letter. We Will Not Be Divided https://notdivided.org/
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The Department of War is threatening to
- Invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to serve their model to the military and "tailor its model to the military's needs"
- Label the company a "supply chain risk"
All in retaliation for Anthropic sticking to their red lines to not allow their models to be used for domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight.
The Pentagon is negotiating with Google and OpenAI to try to get them to agree to what Anthropic has refused.
They're trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in. That strategy only works if none of us know where the others stand. This letter serves to create shared understanding and solidarity in the face of this pressure from the Department of War.
We are the employees of Google and OpenAI, two of the top AI companies in the world.
We hope our leaders will put aside their differences and stand together to continue to refuse the Department of War's current demands for permission to use our models for domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight.
Signed,
I was reading halfway thru and one line struck a nerve with me:
> But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.
So not today, but the door is open for this after AI systems have gathered enough "training data"?
Then I re-read the previous paragraph and realized it's specifically only criticizing
> AI-driven domestic mass surveillance
And neither denounces partially autonomous mass surveillance nor closes the door on AI-driven foreign mass surveillance
A real shame. I thought "Anthropic" was about being concerned about humans, and not "My people" vs. "Your people." But I suppose I should have expected all of this from a public statement about discussions with the Department of War
