Alan Z. Rozenshtein
On Tuesday, Feb. 24, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) if Anthropic doesn't agree to the Pentagon’s terms by Friday. The DPA, Hegseth warned, would let the government compel Anthropic to provide its technology on the Pentagon's terms. Anthropic is resisting allowing its artificial intelligence (AI) to be used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance—two red lines that the company has maintained since entering the defense market.
I argued last week that Congress—not the Pentagon or Anthropic—should set the rules for military AI. The DPA threat makes that case stronger. But first, it's worth understanding what the DPA can actually do here, because the answer depends entirely on what the government is demanding. The legal analysis is genuinely complicated: Different demands raise very different legal questions, and a statute whose core compulsion powers were designed for steel mills and tank factories maps awkwardly onto a dispute about AI safety guardrails.
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