Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Anthropic was exercising its right to free speech when it said no to the Pentagon’s terms of use for its frontier model, Claude.
“We exercised our classic First Amendment rights to speak up and disagree with the government. Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world, and we are patriots in everything we have done here,” Amodei said in an interview with CBS News that aired on Saturday morning.
“We have stood up for the values of this country,” he said.
In a blog post on Thursday, Amodei said the company could not “in good conscience accede” to the Defense Department’s demands regarding Claude. He cited the lab’s red lines that its AI tech could not be deployed in mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
That statement came after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday laid out an ultimatum for the lab: Agree to the military’s terms, or be blacklisted.
In a Friday post on X, Hegseth said no “contractor, supplier, or partner” with the US military will be allowed to do business with Anthropic. The CBS interview was taped hours after Hegseth declared Anthropic a “supply chain risk to national security” on Friday, per CBS.
President Donald Trump struck a similar tone on Friday, ordering all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s products.
“We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again,” Trump wrote in a Friday Truth Social post, which called Anthropic a “radical left, woke company.”
Amodei told CBS that the company has not received “any formal information” about its working relationship with the Defense Department.
“All we’ve seen are tweets from the president and tweets from Secretary Hegseth,” Amodei said. “When we receive some kind of formal action, we will look at it, we will understand it, and we will challenge it in court.”
“We are still interested in working with them as long as it is in line with our red lines,” he added.
Separately, OpenAI has finalized a deal with the Defense Department to use its AI models. Its CEO, Sam Altman, announced the partnership late on Friday.
