Anthropic has drawn a hard boundary with the Pentagon. CEO Dario Amodei said on Tuesday that the company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Defense Department’s request that it agree to the military’s terms for the use of its model, Claude.
Amodei’s blog post came after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave the company an ultimatum: Cave and cooperate with the military on Claude, or be blacklisted.
Here’s what smart people are saying about Anthropic’s public spat with the Pentagon.
Jack Shanahan
Shanahan, a former USAF Lt. Gen., served for 36 years in the military and worked on the Pentagon’s AI efforts. He is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, where he consults on AI for national security.
Shanahan said Anthropic isn’t “trying to play cute here” — and that it’s “committed to helping the government.”
In his words:
Palmer Luckey
Luckey, who founded and runs the weapons and defense software startup Anduril, pointed to a previous White House decision to compel private companies to work with the US government.
Posting on X several hours before Amodei’s statement, he referenced a 1948 statement by then-President Harry S. Truman that ordered railway companies to allow the US military to run their operations amid a workers’ strike.
“The President can’t make private companies work with the military, it would be unprecedented!”
May 10, 1948
I HAVE today by Executive order taken over the country’s railroads and directed the Secretary of the Army to operate them in the name of the United States Government.— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) February 26, 2026
Later that evening, Luckey said that Silicon Valley executives should not influence military policy.
“This idea, that military policy must be in the hands of elected leaders vs corporate executive, is a foundational principle for Anduril,” he wrote.
Since Luckey founded Anduril in 2017, the company has clinched a rapidly growing list of Defense Department contracts, providing drone, counter-drone, and AI software systems to the military.
Anduril is also in the running to build the US Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft, which are drone wingmen for crewed fighter jets.
Dean Ball
Former Trump administration AI advisor Dean Ball did not mince words in an interview with Politico.
“You’re telling everyone else who supplies to the DOD you cannot use Anthropic’s models, while also saying that the DOD must use Anthropic’s models,” Ball told Politico.
Ball, who helped write Trump’s AI Action Plan, added that it was “a whole different level of insane” for the Pentagon to “do both of those things” — designate Anthropic a security risk, while making the case for how essential Anthropic is for military AI.
Michael McFaul
McFaul, a political science professor at Stanford University and director of its Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, praised Amodei’s statement as “strong, principled, and very reasonable.”
“Bravo,” wrote McFaul, who was also the US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014.
Thomas Wright
“Many firms folded for a lot less money than what Anthropic stands to lose here,” wrote Wright in a social media post on Thursday evening.
Wright was the senior director for strategic planning at the US National Security Council for the Biden administration.
As a top-ranking member of the council, he was a key architect of the 2022 US National Security Strategy, which was the framework for the administration’s defense priorities and threat assessments.
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