Elon Musk attacks Anthropic while the Pentagon calls for Dario Amodei, CEO of an AI business

Pete Hegseth has reportedly summoned Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, to the Pentagon for what officials described as a “high-stakes” and “tense” meeting over the military’s use of the company’s Claude AI model.

According to Axios, citing a senior defence official, the meeting was “not a friendly” one, as Anthropic has declined to remove certain safeguards from its technology despite a January 9 memo from Hegseth urging AI companies to renegotiate contracts and loosen restrictions.

Claude is currently the only AI system deployed inside classified US defence networks under a $200 million pilot contract signed last year. However, Anthropic has resisted fully lifting guardrails, including restrictions preventing the use of its models for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons without human oversight.

Defence officials reportedly warned that Anthropic could be designated a “supply chain risk,” a move that could void contracts and restrict other Pentagon partners from using Claude. Despite the tensions, an Anthropic spokesperson described discussions as “productive.” Replacing the company’s systems would be complex given Claude’s deep integration into defence infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has signed agreements with xAI, founded by Elon Musk, and is nearing a deal with Google for its Gemini model, according to The New York Times — moves seen as increasing pressure on Anthropic.

Ahead of the meeting, Anthropic alleged that three Chinese AI firms had siphoned millions of Claude outputs via chatbots to train competing models. Musk responded on X by accusing Anthropic of “stealing training data at massive scale” and claimed the company had paid multi-billion-dollar settlements, referring to it as “MisAnthropic.”

Claude, Anthropic’s next-generation AI assistant, is designed to be safe, accurate and secure. The system is capable of automating complex enterprise tasks including legal document review, compliance checks, sales planning, marketing analysis, financial reconciliation, data visualisation, SQL-based reporting and large-scale document search.