Best Podcast Episodes About Pentagon and Anthropic Clash Over Claude's Role in Nuclear Scenarios

“The Pentagon wants to punish Anthropic as the feud over AI safeguards grows increasingly nasty, but officials are also worried about the consequences of losing access to its industry-leading model, Claude. Anthropic has said it is willing to adapt its usage policies for the Pentagon, but not to allow its model to be used for the mass surveillance of Americans or the development of weapons that fire without human involvement.”

“"The Pentagon wants to punish Anthropic as the feud over AI safeguards grows increasingly nasty, but officials are worried about the consequences of losing access to its industry-leading model, Claude. The only reason we're still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. The problem for these guys is that they are good, a defense official told Axios ahead of the meeting."”

“Anthropic faces intense competition from rivals which regularly release cutting edge models. It's also locked in a battle with the defense department over how it's Claude suite are used after it told the Pentagon it couldn't be used for domestic surveillance or autonomous lethal activities. Anthropic said the safety policy changes an update based on the speed of AI's development and a lack of federal AI regulations which they have been pushing for.”

“Anthropic previously paused development work on its model if it could be classified as dangerous, but said it would end that practice if a comparable or superior model was released by a competitor. So I don't understand that at all because if you have a dangerous model, I want you to continue developing it. I want you to develop it until it's not dangerous anymore.”

“Part of this, what I believe the fight is over is like two main clauses that Anthropic kind of puts on these contracts, which is we don't want our AI to be used to autonomously kill people without any humans in the loop. And we don't want it to be used to, I believe, autonomously surveil the American people. And those are two things that I believe the DOD already says it essentially doesn't do.”

“The latest thinking on this is that it would impact the use of Anthropic's products on Pentagon systems and Pentagon-related systems. So like Google Cloud, for example, wouldn't be able to use Claude on any kind of systems or servers that touch Google's government contracts. But the belief is that Anthropic could still work with Google, just not on anything that kind of touches Google's government contracts.”

“The issue now is that Anthropic is restricting Pentagon's access, like American-owned self-defense against these kinds of things. And so the Pentagon is getting fed up and issuing them an ultimatum and saying, listen, if you don't figure this out, we're going to classify you as a threat to the country. Now, I have to give credit to Anthropic for maintaining their identity evenly across every single facet, but I don't think it's the smart way to do it.”

“Anthropic has pretty strict restrictions on how their technology can be deployed. For instance, it can't be used for domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. You know, the fully autonomous weapons thing really gets me. What Anthropic is saying here is not like some woke, left wing, wild thing. It's saying that machines can't be the ones to fully push the button. Right? Right. They can't kill people just themselves. They have to do it with the help of people. That feels reasonable.”

“The Pentagon is pushing four leading AI labs to let the military use their tools for, quote, all lawful purposes, even in the most sensitive areas of weapons development, intelligence collection, and battlefield operations. Anthropic has not agreed to those terms, and the Pentagon is getting fed up after months of difficult negotiations. The tensions came to a head recently over the military's use of Claude in the operation to capture Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro through Anthropic's partnership with AI software firm Palantir.”

“The Department of Defense has a couple of options. One of them is that they could designate it as a supply chain risk... The other alternative is that they could use what's I think called the Defense Production Act... Anthropic, I don't think has, I mean, they have the ability to say, fine, we're just going to neuter our product. You're going to force us to do this thing we don't want to do.”

“"The interesting impetus of like this line around the policy environment has shifted towards prioritizing AI competitiveness and economic growth while safety oriented discussions have yet to gain meaningful traction at the federal level. I still feel like there's a lack of communication around what safety orientation at the federal level means. Like, yes, OK, we'll pass the bill that says the AI can't kill everyone. Like, well, yeah, obviously everyone supports that. But like, what does it actually mean in practice?"”

“Meanwhile, the Pentagon is in a fight with one of the biggest AI companies, Anthropic. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says he wants AI to make our military more deadly, and he wants AI to make us better informed about possible enemies. Anthropic has essentially said, that's too far. Here's how CBS News reports it. Quote, the Pentagon gave Anthropic an ultimatum this week. Give the U.S. military unrestricted use of its AI technology or face a ban from all government contracts, end quote.”