For years, Anthropic has distinguished itself from peers by embracing a safety-first stance. Its flagship model, Claude, was designed with guardrails that explicitly prohibit use in fully autonomous lethal weapons or domestic surveillance. Those restrictions have been central to the company's identity and its appeal to customers wary of unfettered AI.
The Pentagon had kept trying to leave itself little escape hatches in the agreements that it proposed to Anthropic. It would pledge not to use Anthropic's AI for mass domestic surveillance or for fully autonomous killing machines, but then qualify those pledges with loopholey phrases like as appropriate—suggesting that the terms were subject to change, based on the administration's interpretation of a given situation.