Defense Undersecretary Emil Michael: Anthropic’s Claude would ‘pollute’ defense supply chain

Good to see you, Becky.

Yeah. What happened is we were in the middle of negotiations with all the frontier lab companies to more widely deploy their models across the department for all the various use cases: enterprise intelligence, warfighting. And then after the Maduro raid, one of the senior executives from Anthropic had called Palantir, who is the prime contractor, and Anthropic, a subcontractor in a contract with the Department of War, and asked if their software was used, which is classified information, and implying that if they didn't like the way it was used in that raid, that we might have a problem and have violated the terms of the contract, which meant that they could shut us off at any time, which was the "whoa" moment. Because then we realized we are dependent on this one provider who wants to insert their policy preferences in the middle of an operation, potentially, and harm the warfighter. And that was something that we took extremely seriously at the time.

I can't say. It's not okay for me to say here. Yeah, still classified. But the mere asking of the question, and then the mere relaying of that question to other executives at the company who have since commented that they were asking different kinds of questions and they didn't have clearances, really posed a big problem. But really the substance of problems there was that they were worried about their software being used in a raid. And remember, they've sold their product into what's called a combatant command that engages in combat, and their terms of service, trying to restrict how that combat is conducted. And that means they're inserting themselves in the chain of command. And that was very worrisome to us at the Pentagon.