PANews reported on March 5th that, according to the Financial Times, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is restarting negotiations with Emil Michael, the U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, in an attempt to reach a new contract for the Pentagon to use Anthropic's large-scale models, in order to avoid being officially designated as a "supply chain risk" and having cooperation cut off by the military-industrial complex. Previous negotiations broke down due to disagreements over whether AI could be used for scenarios such as "mass data acquisition and analysis," with Amodei insisting on prohibiting the use of large-scale models for large-scale domestic surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons. The Pentagon has pushed for AI companies to agree to allow their technology to be used for any "legitimate" purpose, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatened last week to designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, but this has not yet been formally implemented.
