A former senior Air Force official is weighing in on the growing dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon.
Retired Air Force Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, who led Project Maven and previously clashed with Google over defense AI work, says on LinkedIn he understands the Defense Department’s desire for access to the best technology.
But he notes that he finds Anthropic’s redlines reasonable.
“Anthropic is committed to helping the government. Claude is being used today, all across the government, to include in classified settings. MSS (Maven Smart System) uses Claude, and you won’t find a system with wider & deeper reach across the military. Take away Claude, and you damage MSS.
No LLM, anywhere, in its current form, should be considered for use in a fully lethal autonomous weapon system. It’s ludicrous even to suggest it. So making this a company redline seems reasonable to me. Despite the hype, frontier models are not ready for prime time in national security settings. Over-reliance on them at this stage is a recipe for catastrophe.”
MSS is a Palantir-developed defense platform used by the Defense Department, designed to analyze massive datasets—such as drone video, satellite imagery, and radar data—to provide real-time battlefield intelligence, targeting and LLM-powered workflows.
Shanahan also rejects the idea of mass surveillance using frontier models.
“Mass surveillance of US citizens? No thanks. Seems like a reasonable second redline.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been grabbing headlines as of late due to his stance that the Defense Department must be able to deploy Anthropic’s Claude model without restrictions, as long as the purpose is lawful.
But Anthropic continues to push back, standing its ground against the use of AI for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
“We cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”
CBS reports that the Pentagon sent its best and final offer to Anthropic on Wednesday night, in an effort to settle the dispute. But an Anthropic spokesperson says that the Pentagon did not address the AI startup’s concerns.
“The contract language we received overnight from the Department of War made virtually no progress on preventing Claude’s use for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons. New language framed as a compromise was paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will. Despite DOW’s recent public statements, these narrow safeguards have been the crux of our negotiations for months. We remain ready to continue talks and committed to operational continuity for the Department and America’s warfighters.”
Hegseth said that Anthropic has until 5:00 PM on Friday to accept the Pentagon’s demands. Otherwise, he said he will invoke the Defense Production Act and label the firm as a supply chain risk.
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