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By Brendan Cole
Senior Reporter
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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said his artificial intelligence company still wants to work with the U.S. military on its own terms, despite his dispute with the Pentagon and President Donald Trump.
During an interview with CBS News, Amodei addressed a spat with the administration of Trump in which he has ordered a halt to using Anthropic's technology.
"We are still interested in working with them,” Amodei told the outlet, “as long as it is in line with our red lines.”
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Anthropic wants guardrails to stop its Claude AI model to conduct mass surveillance or to power autonomous weapons. But the Pentagon wants to use Claude for "all lawful purposes" and gave Anthropic a Friday deadline to meet its demands or get cut off from Defense Department contracts.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared the company a "supply chain risk," and ordered military contractors to also stop working with the AI startup.
Amodei defended the guardrails his firm is seeking, telling CBS “we're not going to move on those red lines," and that he wanted its AI models for military use because "we are patriotic Americans.”
He outlined his firm’s concerns at the artificial intelligence model being used for mass surveillance in which the government could buy data from private firms and use AI to analyze it. AI could also power fully autonomous weapons to carry out strikes without any human input and that the "the reliability is not there yet" on those kind of weapons, he added.
"We don't want to sell something that could get our own people killed or that could get innocent people killed," he said.
The Pentagon said that federal law already prevents it from mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons are already restricted by internal military policies.
Trump posted on Truth Social Friday that “the Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War.” adding that "their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY."
Amodei said that his firm was a good judge of what its models can do reliably and that lawmakers should have a say on AI safeguards “but Congress is not the fastest moving body in the world. And for right now, we are the ones who see this technology on the front line.”
He called the move by the Pentagon as "retaliatory and punitive” and that Hegseth does not have the legal authority to stop all military contractors from working with Anthropic, but can only stop them from using it for government contracts.
“We have stood up for the values of this country,” Amodei said.
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