Anthropic faces a Friday evening deadline to grant the U.S. military unrestricted access to its AI model or risk significant repercussions. During a Tuesday morning meeting, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth informed CEO Dario Amodei that the Pentagon is prepared to designate Anthropic as a “supply chain risk”—a label typically applied to foreign adversaries—or to invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA). This law empowers the president to compel companies to prioritize or scale up production for national defense, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic when it was used to direct General Motors and 3M to manufacture ventilators and masks, respectively.

Anthropic has consistently maintained that it will not allow its technology to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or for fully autonomous weapons, and the company is standing firm on these principles. Pentagon officials, however, contend that military use of technology should be regulated by U.S. law and constitutional boundaries, not by the policies of private contractors.

Invoking the DPA in a conflict over AI safeguards would represent a notable expansion of the law’s contemporary application. According to Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and former senior AI policy advisor in the Trump White House, such a move would also signal a continuation of the growing instability within the executive branch in recent years. “It would basically be the government saying, ‘If you disagree with us politically, we’re going to try to put you out of business,’” Ball remarked.

This clash occurs amid ongoing ideological tensions, with some administration figures, including AI czar David Sacks, publicly dismissing Anthropic’s safety policies as “woke.” Ball warned that the situation could undermine confidence in the U.S. as a stable business environment. “Any reasonable, responsible investor or corporate manager is going to look at this and think the U.S. is no longer a stable place to do business,” he stated. “This is attacking the very core of what makes America such an important hub of global commerce. We’ve always had a stable and predictable legal system.”

The standoff is intensifying, and Anthropic may not be the one to yield. Reports indicate the company has no intention of relaxing its usage restrictions. Notably, Anthropic is currently the only frontier AI lab with classified Department of Defense access, and while the Pentagon has reportedly secured an agreement to use xAI’s Grok in classified systems, no immediate backup is in place. Ball suggested this lack of alternatives may be driving the Pentagon’s assertive stance. “The DOD has no backups. This is a single-vendor situation here,” he explained. “They can’t fix that overnight.”