The Pentagon has called Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to Washington as the Defense Department pushes to expand how artificial intelligence models can be used on classified systems.
The meeting follows a Jan. 9th memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth urging AI companies to remove restrictions on their technology, prompting a renegotiation of Anthropic’s existing $200 million pilot contract with the department, The New York Times reports.
The Defense Department and Anthropic reached that pilot agreement last year, making the company the first AI firm authorized to operate on military classified networks.
But Pentagon officials now want broader usage rights.
In negotiations with multiple AI companies, the department has said contracts must allow it to use the models as it sees fit, so long as the activities are lawful. At the same time, officials have indicated that companies may embed internal safeguards, referred to as a “safety stack,” into their systems.
Anthropic has signaled willingness to loosen some restrictions, according to people involved in the discussions, but has pushed for explicit guardrails preventing its models from being used for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons systems without human oversight.
The Pentagon is also pursuing agreements with Elon Musk’s xAI and Google, which produces the Gemini model. Officials hope those parallel negotiations will create leverage in talks with Anthropic.
The xAI model is not widely viewed as advanced as Anthropic’s Claude, while Gemini is considered a direct rival to both Anthropic and OpenAI. People briefed on the discussions say Google is eager to secure a deal, having invested heavily in government-dedicated data center capacity that remains underutilized.
Defense officials have acknowledged that removing Anthropic from classified systems would cause short-term disruptions. Military personnel are said to regularly use Claude alongside Palantir’s data analytics tools to process and analyze classified information.
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