Inside Anthropic’s existential negotiations with the Pentagon
Summary
Anthropic is negotiating with the U.S. Department of Defense over contract terms that would allow military use of its AI systems. The disputed phrase 'any lawful use' would permit the military to deploy Anthropic's AI for mass surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons (AI systems that can identify and attack targets without human approval), while OpenAI and xAI have already accepted similar terms.
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Affected Vendors
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Original source: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/883456/anthropic-pentagon-department-of-defense-negotiations
First tracked: February 24, 2026 at 07:00 AM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 85%