How Anthropic’s safety-first ethos collided with the Pentagon
How Anthropic’s safety-first ethos collided with the Pentagon
Publish Date: 2026-03-07 08:00:00
Source Domain: www.livescience.com
On February 5 Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6, its most powerful artificial intelligence model. Among the model’s new features is the ability to coordinate teams of autonomous agents — multiple AIs that divide up the work and complete it in parallel. Twelve days after Opus 4.6’s release, the company dropped Sonnet 4.6, a cheaper model that nearly matches Opus’s coding and computer skills. In late 2024, when Anthropic first introduced models that could control computers, they could barely operate a browser. Now Sonnet 4.6 can navigate Web applications and fill out forms with human-level capability, according to Anthropic. And both models have a working memory large enough to hold a small library.
Enterprise customers now make up roughly 80 percent of Anthropic’s revenue, and the company closed a $30-billion funding round last week at a $380-billion valuation. By every available measure, Anthropic is one of the fastest-scaling technology companies in history.
But behind the big product launches and valuation, Anthropic faces a severe threat: the Pentagon has signaled it may designate the company a “supply chain risk” — a label more often associated with foreign adversaries — unless it drops its restrictions on military use. Such a designation could effectively force Pentagon contractors to strip Claude from sensitive work.
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Tensions boiled over after January 3, when U.S. special operations forces raided Venezuela and captured Nicolás Maduro. The Wall Street Journal reported that forces used Claude during the operation via Anthropic’s partnership with the defense contractor Palantir — and Axios reported that the episode escalated an already fraught negotiation over what, exactly, Claude could be used for. When an Anthropic executive reached out to Palantir to ask whether the technology had been used in the raid, the question raised immediate alarms at the Pentagon. (Anthropic has disputed that the…
