(Jen Golbeck/Getty Images)

Anthropic doesn’t want Claude controlling autonomous weapons. The Pentagon may not give them a choice.

A looming Friday deadline to get onboard with the Pentagon’s demands could lead to an unraveling of years of the company’s work with the government.

Jon Keegan

2/25/26 12:40PM

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Anthropic faces a difficult decision by Friday after a tense meeting this week between CEO Dario Amodei and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon.

After it was revealed that Anthropic’s Claude was used to help plan the attack on Venezuela that led to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, Amodei reportedly reached out to its partner Palantir to push back on the defense contractor’s use of its AI to plan the deadly attack. Anthropic has stood alone as the only major AI vendor that prohibits using its tools for surveillance or “battlefield management,” causing the White House to grow increasingly frustrated with the company.

According to reporting from the New York Times, “Anthropic told defense officials that it did not want its A.I. used for mass surveillance of Americans or deployed in autonomous weapons that had no humans in the loop.”

During the meeting this week, Hegseth allegedly gave Amodei a Friday deadline to get onboard with the Pentagon. Per the report, if the company does not yield on its restrictions, Hegseth threatened two possible penalties: Hegseth could declare Anthropic’s Claude essential to national security and force the company to make changes under the Defense Production Act, or Anthropic could be declared a “supply chain risk,” effectively blacklisting the company for national security use.

Anthropic finds itself in this unenviable position after a year of actively seeking out government work, including in national security applications.

Here’s a timeline of the announcements that show the effort Anthropic has made to push Claude for use by the Pentagon and other government agencies.

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5