WASHINGTON — Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to fulfill Tuesday with the CEO of Anthropic, with the synthetic intelligence firm the one considered one of its friends to not provide its expertise to a new U.S. military internal network.
Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, declined to touch upon the assembly however CEO Dario Amodei has made clear his ethical concerns about unchecked authorities use of AI, together with the dangers of fully autonomous armed drones and of AI-assisted mass surveillance that would monitor dissent.
The assembly between Hegseth and Amodei was confirmed by a protection official who was not approved to remark publicly and spoke on situation of anonymity.
It underscores the talk over AI’s position in nationwide safety and issues about how the expertise might be utilized in high-stakes situations involving deadly drive, delicate info or authorities surveillance. It additionally comes as Hegseth has vowed to root out what he calls a “woke culture” within the armed forces.
“A strong AI wanting throughout billions of conversations from tens of millions of individuals might gauge public sentiment, detect pockets of disloyalty forming, and stamp them out earlier than they develop,” Amodei wrote in an essay final month.
The Pentagon introduced final summer season that it was awarding protection contracts to 4 AI firms — Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. Every contract is value as much as $200 million.
Anthropic was the primary AI firm to get authorised for categorised navy networks, the place it really works with companions like Palantir. The opposite three firms, for now, are solely working in unclassified environments.
By early this yr, Hegseth was highlighting solely two of them: xAI and Google.
The protection secretary stated in a January speech at Musk’s area flight firm, SpaceX, in South Texas that he was shrugging off any AI fashions “that received’t can help you struggle wars.”
Hegseth stated his vision for military AI systems implies that they function “with out ideological constraints that restrict lawful navy functions,” earlier than including that the Pentagon’s “AI won’t be woke.”
In January, Hegseth stated Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok would be part of the Pentagon community, referred to as GenAI.mil. The announcement got here days after Grok — which is embedded into X, the social media community owned by Musk — drew world scrutiny for generating highly sexualized deepfake images of individuals with out their consent.
OpenAI introduced in early February that it, too, would be part of the navy’s safe AI platform, enabling service members to make use of a customized model of ChatGPT for unclassified duties.
Anthropic has lengthy pitched itself because the extra accountable and safety-minded of the main AI firms, ever since its founders quit OpenAI to form the startup in 2021.
The uncertainty with the Pentagon is placing these intentions to the check, in line with Owen Daniels, affiliate director of study and fellow at Georgetown College’s Middle for Safety and Rising Know-how.
“Anthropic’s friends, together with Meta, Google and xAI, have been keen to adjust to the division’s coverage on utilizing fashions for all lawful functions,” Owens stated. “So the corporate’s bargaining energy right here is restricted, and it dangers dropping affect within the division’s push to undertake AI.”
Within the AI craze that adopted the discharge of ChatGPT, Anthropic intently aligned with President Joe Biden’s administration in volunteering to topic its AI techniques to third-party scrutiny to protect towards nationwide safety dangers.
Amodei, the CEO, has warned of AI’s potentially catastrophic dangers whereas rejecting the label that he’s an AI “doomer.” He argued within the January essay that “we’re significantly nearer to actual hazard in 2026 than we had been in 2023″ however that these dangers must be managed in a “sensible, pragmatic method.”
This could not be the primary time Anthropic’s advocacy for stricter AI safeguards has put it at odds with the Trump administration. Anthropic needled chipmaker Nvidia publicly, criticizing Trump’s proposals to loosen export controls to enable some AI computer chips to be sold in China. The AI firm, nevertheless, stays a close partner with Nvidia.
The Trump administration and Anthropic even have been on reverse sides of a lobbying push to manage AI in U.S. states.
Trump’s high AI adviser, David Sacks, accused Anthropic in October of “working a classy regulatory seize technique primarily based on fear-mongering.”
Sacks made the remarks on X in response to an Anthropic co-founder, Jack Clark, writing about his try to steadiness technological optimism with “acceptable worry” in regards to the regular march towards extra succesful AI techniques.
Anthropic employed quite a lot of ex-Biden officers quickly after Trump’s return to the White Home, however it’s additionally tried to sign a bipartisan method. The corporate lately added Chris Liddell, a former White Home official from Trump’s first time period, to its board of administrators.
The Pentagon-Anthropic debate is harking back to an uproar a number of years in the past when some tech staff objected to their firms’ participation in Project Maven, a Pentagon drone surveillance program. Whereas some staff give up over the undertaking and Google itself dropped out, the Pentagon’s reliance on drone surveillance has solely elevated.
Equally, “using AI in navy contexts is already a actuality and it isn’t going away,” Owens stated.
“Some contexts are decrease stakes, together with for back-office work, however battlefield deployments of AI entail completely different, higher-stakes dangers,” he stated, referring to using deadly drive or weapons like nuclear arms. “Navy customers are conscious of those dangers and have been fascinated by mitigation for nearly a decade.”
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O’Brien reported from Windfall, Rhode Island.
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