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https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/02/get-your-war-on-ai-chatbots-in-the-kill-chain/>
"The term “artificial intelligence” was invented in 1955 for a marketing pitch
to the US Department of Defense. Silicon Valley’s goal has always been the
government teat — the final stage of capitalism.
Last week, chatbot vendor Anthropic had some issues with the Department of
Defense. The DoD is very into its chatbots. And they love Anthropic’s Claude.
They’ve got Claude all through DoD systems, usually embedded in software from
Palantir.
Anthropic had a $200 million contract with the DoD. They even made a model
called Claude Gov that didn’t have the guardrails and restrictions the
commercial version has.
The DoD contract said Claude couldn’t be used for domestic surveillance or in
“autonomous lethal operations” — Anthropic did not want the chatbot in the kill
chain. The DoD started talking in January about cancelling the whole contract.
The DoD is upset Anthropic won’t change these provisions. So now the DoD wants
to designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — so no other company with a
defense contract will be allowed to use Anthropic.
“Supply chain risk” is a big deal — that’s a designation you use for spies, not
as a business negotiation. The threat first came up two weeks ago. A senior
Pentagon official told
Axios:
It will be an enormous pain in the ass to disentangle, and we are going to
make sure they pay a price for forcing our hand like this.
That is, wanting the DoD to stick to the contract they signed. Pete Hegseth,
the Secretary of Defense, called Dario Amodei of Anthropic into his office last
Tuesday morning and made the supply chain risk threat directly to his face.
So Anthropic and the DoD were close to hammering out the last details of the
new contract. Deadline was 5pm last Friday, 27 February.
The sticking point was that the Pentagon really, really wanted a loophole that
would allow domestic surveillance:
the Pentagon still wanted to use the company’s AI to analyze bulk data
collected from Americans.
The deadline passed. At 5:14pm, Hegseth posted a statement to Twitter,
obviously prepared well ahead of time, saying he was designating Anthropic a
supply chain risk:
The Terms of Service of Anthropic’s defective altruism will never outweigh
the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the
battlefield.
You might think using a hallucination machine was risking their lives already.
Anthropic is not happy about the supply chain risk designation. They’re going
to sue over it. It’s one thing for the DoD to say they don’t want to use Claude
any more, it’s quite another to threaten to destroy Anthropic’s business. It’d
clearly be illegal, if laws existed."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
