It would take the Pentagon months to replace Anthropic’s AI tools: sources

If the Pentagon carries out its threat to blacklist Anthropic’s Claude AI platform, it could be three months or even longer before the U.S. military regains access to such a powerful tool on its classified networks, according to multiple sources familiar with the fight between the Defense Department and the AI maker. 

On Thursday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei reiterated his refusal to allow Claude to be used for mass surveillance of U.S. citizens or to guide fully autonomous weapons, rejecting Pentagon requests to make unfettered use of the model.

Claude is one of just two large generative-AI models that the Pentagon has made available on classified networks, and it is the only one that belongs to the cutting-edge group of frontier models. The Defense Department isn’t saying just how it uses such models. But Emil Michael, defense undersecretary for research and engineering, has suggested that their ...