Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was set to hold a high-stakes meeting with Anthropic boss Dario Amodei on Tuesday as they have been trying to navigate rising tensions over military use of the Claude AI chatbot.
The meeting was scheduled to come just days after reports surfaced that Hegseth was “close” to designating Anthropic as a supply chain threat. That would effectively blacklist Anthropic, voiding its contracts and forcing other firms that do business with the US military to stop using Claude.
“Anthropic knows this is not a get-to-know-you meeting,” a senior Defense official told Axios, which first reported on the rendezvous. “This is not a friendly meeting. This is a s–t-or-get-off-the-pot meeting.”
A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed the meeting was slated to take place but declined further comment. Anthropic did not immediately return a request for comment.
Anthropic, which runs the Claude chatbot that is the only AI model currently approved for use on classified military systems, has blocked the Pentagon from using the technology to enable mass surveillance of Americans or to power weapons that can fire without human involvement.
Tensions between the two sides have been rising for months, with Pentagon officials growing weary on safety-minded Anthropic’s efforts to control how its products are used. The feud reportedly escalated in January after Claude was used in the operation to arrest Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.
Hegseth is set to be joined in the meeting by Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg and Under Secretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael, according to Axios.
An Anthropic spokesperson said the company is “committed to using frontier AI in support of US national security” and was “having productive conversations, in good faith” with Hegseth’s team.
Amodei, who cofounded the company after leaving OpenAI, has rankled his AI peers and some Trump administration officials with his frequent warnings about the technology’s safety risks.
Anthropic’s critics include White House AI czar David Sacks, who has accused Amodei and his allies of belonging to a camp of AI “doomers” who were stifling innovation.
“The problem with Dario is, with him, it’s ideological. We know who we’re dealing with,” a senior Pentagon official told Axios.
The Post first reported in November that Anthropic’s ties to the cultlike Effective Altruism movement and Democratic megadonors like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman were on the Trump administration’s radar.
