Amid intense pressure from the Trump administration, Pentagon officials have summoned the chief executive of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic to Washington for a meeting on Tuesday to discuss how its technology is used on classified systems.
The Defense Department and Anthropic agreed to a $200 million pilot contract last year. But a Jan. 9 memo by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth calling on A.I. companies to remove restrictions on their technology led the two sides to renegotiate their contract.
The Pentagon has signed an agreement with one company, Elon Musk’s xAI, and is getting close to making a deal with Google, which makes the Gemini model, according to people briefed on the discussions. Defense Department officials hope to use those agreements to pressure Anthropic to allow its model to be used more broadly, they said.
Google and xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A Defense Department official declined to comment on any future announcements but confirmed that Mr. Hegseth would meet with Dario Amodei, the Anthropic chief, at the Pentagon.
Anthropic, the official said, will be asked to agree to the same guardrails that the Defense Department is negotiating with the other artificial intelligence companies. In those negotiations, the Pentagon has said the contracts must allow the department to use the models as it sees fit, as long as those activities are lawful. But the department is allowing the companies to build safety provisions into their models, which the companies call “the safety stack.”
Anthropic was the first company authorized to work on the military’s classified networks. The company said that it was willing to loosen its restrictions but has demanded that guardrails are put in place that stop its A.I. from being used for mass surveillance of Americans or deployed in autonomous weapons that had no humans in the loop, people involved in the discussions said.
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People close to Anthropic have argued that the company has taken more care than its rivals to keep its technologies out of the hands of Chinese companies. In November, the start-up said that it had banned a Chinese-state-sponsored group that was using its technologies in a hacking campaign that targeted large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies and government agencies.
But earlier last year, OpenAI, another leading artificial intelligence company whose model is used on unclassified military networks, said it had discovered and worked to stop two different Chinese campaigns to use A.I. for surveillance. (The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, its partner.)
Ahead of the meeting with Mr. Hegseth on Monday, Anthropic published a blog post stating that three Chinese A.I. companies siphoned information from Anthropic to try to improve their own A.I. models.
Pentagon officials have acknowledged that removing Anthropic from the classified system would cause short-term disruptions. And experts say that military service members regularly use Anthropic along with technology from Palantir, a data analytics company, to analyze classified data, and that cutting the military off from Anthropic’s s A.I. chatbot, Claude, would be counterproductive.
Pentagon officials hope that the pending deals will give them some leverage. The xAI model is not considered as advanced or as reliable as Anthropic’s, while Google’s Gemini is considered a rival to Anthropic and OpenAI. People briefed on the talks say Google is eager to strike a deal. The company has spent heavily on data centers to be used exclusively by the government, but that computing capacity so far has been underused.
Officials from Google and xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
OpenAI is not close to a deal. People briefed on the negotiations say that the company believes it needs to continue to work on its safety technology before its model is used on classified networks.
The meeting between Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Amodei was reported earlier by Axios.
Cade Metz contributed reporting from San Francisco.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
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