Anthropic to Pentagon: Autonomous weapons could hurt US troops and civilians

Anthropic has fired back at the US Department of War, arguing that it can’t agree to Uncle Sam’s contract demand to remove guardrails on its AI in part because the tech can’t be trusted not to harm American civilians and warfighters.

As The Register reported earlier this week, the US Department of War wants to compel Anthropic to allow unrestricted military use of its Claude tech, and has threatened to cancel the AI upstart’s Pentagon contracts and penalize the company if it does not comply.

On Thursday, Anthropic issued a statement in which CEO Dario Amodei said the company won’t change its stance.

“Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner,” he wrote, before adding “However, in a ...