Pete Hegseth meets with Anthropic CEO over disagreements about AI guardrails for military use

Hadas Gold, CNN

Wed, February 25, 2026 at 2:06 AM GMT+9 2 min read

(L-R): Anthropic Co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. - Chance Yeh/Getty Images/Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today, as the Pentagon threatens the AI company with what could amount to a government blacklist.

At issue is the guardrails Anthropic placed on its AI models. The Pentagon, which has a $200 million contract with Anthropic, wants the company to lift its restrictions for the military to be able to use the model for “all lawful use,” according to a source familiar with the discussions.

But Anthropic has concerns over two issues that it isn’t willing to drop, the source said: AI-controlled weapons and mass domestic surveillance of American citizens. According to a source familiar, Anthropic believes AI is not reliable enough to operate weapons and no laws or regulations yet that cover how AI could be used in mass surveillance.

The negotiations have been ongoing for a couple months, the source said, but in recent weeks the spat became public as reports began surfacing about the tensions between the two sides.

Then last week, Axios reported Hegseth was close to cutting the Pentagon’s contract with Anthropic and designating the company a “supply chain risk”. That designation, usually reserved for companies seen as extensions of foreign adversaries like Russia or China, could severely impact Anthropic’s business, because any of its enterprise customers with government contracts would have to make sure their government work doesn’t touch Anthropic’s tools.

“We are having productive conversations, in good faith, with (the Department of War) on how to continue that work and get these complex issues right,” an Anthropic spokesperson said.

“Anthropic is committed to using frontier AI in support of US national security,” the spokesperson said. “That’s why we were the first frontier AI company to put our models on classified networks and the first to provide customized models for national security customers.”

A Pentagon official confirmed to CNN the meeting with Anthropic was taking place, but did not comment further.

Anthropic has long positioned itself as the AI company most concerned with AI safety. Its founders were all former OpenAI employees who left the company over disagreements about the ChatGPT maker’s direction, approach to safety and pace of AI development. Anthropic also recently announced it is giving $20 million to a political group campaigning for more regulation of AI.

_CNN’s Kaanita Iyer contributed to this report. _

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