The Pentagon's Ultimatum: Anthropic's 72-Hour Life-or-Death Crisis

Original Author: Ada, TechFlow

Tuesday, February 24th. Washington, the Pentagon.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sat across from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. According to multiple media outlets including NPR and CNN citing informed sources, the atmosphere of the meeting was "polite," but the content was anything but gentle.

Hegseth gave him an ultimatum: by 5:01 PM on Friday, lift the restrictions on military use of Claude, allowing the Pentagon to use it for "all lawful purposes," including autonomous weapons targeting and domestic mass surveillance.

Otherwise, cancel the $200 million contract. Invoke the Defense Production Act for forced requisition. Designate Anthropic as a "supply chain risk," which is equivalent to placing it on a blacklist alongside hostile entities from Russia and China.

On the same day, Anthropic released the third version of its "Responsible Scaling Policy" (RSP 3.0), quietly deleting the company's most core commitment since its founding: not to train more powerful models if safety measures cannot be guaranteed.

Also on the same day, Elon Musk posted on X: "Anthropic stole training data at scale. This is a fact." Meanwhile, X's Community Notes added a report that Anthropic paid a $1.5 billion settlement for using pirated books to train Claude.

Within seventy-two hours, this AI company that claims to have a "soul" simultaneously played three roles: safety martyr, intellectual property thief, and Pentagon traitor.

Which one is real?

Perhaps all of them.

The Pentagon's "Comply or Get Out"

The first layer of the story is simple.

Anthropic is the first AI company to receive Top Secret access from the U.S. Department of Defense. It secured the contract last summer, with a ceiling of $200 million. OpenAI, Google, and xAI later received contracts of similar scale.

According to Al Jazeera, Claude was used in a U.S. military operation this past January. The report stated the operation involved the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro.

But Anthropic drew two red lines: no support for fully autonomous weapons targeting, and no support for mass surveillance of U.S. citizens. Anthropic believes AI reliability is insufficient to control weapons, and there are currently no laws or regulations governing AI use in mass surveillance.

The Pentagon wasn't buying it.

White House AI advisor David Sacks publicly accused Anthropic on X last October of "using fear as a weapon for regulatory capture."

Competitors have already knelt. OpenAI, Google, and xAI all agreed to let the military use their AI for "all lawful scenarios." Musk's Grok was just approved this week for entry into classified systems.

Anthropic is the last one standing.

As of publication, Anthropic stated in its latest declaration that it does not intend to concede. But the 5:01 PM Friday deadline is looming.

An anonymous former liaison between the Justice Department and the Department of Defense expressed confusion to CNN: "How can you simultaneously declare a company a 'supply chain risk' and force that company to work for your military?"

Good question, but that's not within the Pentagon's consideration. What they care about is that if Anthropic doesn't compromise, they will resort to coercive measures, or, become a Washington outcast.

"Distillation Attack": A Slap-in-the-Face Accusation

On February 23rd, Anthropic published a strongly-worded blog post accusing three Chinese AI companies of conducting an "industrial-scale distillation attack" on Claude.

The accused are DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax.

Anthropic alleges they used 24,000 fake accounts to initiate over 16 million interactions with Claude, specifically extracting Claude's core capabilities in agent reasoning, tool use, and programming.

Anthropic framed this as a national security threat, claiming distilled models are "unlikely to retain safety guardrails" and could be used by authoritarian governments for cyberattacks, disinformation, and mass surveillance.

The narrative was perfect, and the timing was perfect.

Right after the Trump administration just relaxed chip export controls to China, right when Anthropic needed ammunition for its own lobbying stance on chip export controls.

But Musk fired a shot: "Anthropic stole training data at scale and paid billions in settlements for it. This is a fact."

Tory Green, co-founder of AI infrastructure company IO.Net, stated: "You train your models on data from the entire web, and then when others use your public API to learn from you, it's called a 'distillation attack'?"

Anthropic calls distillation an "attack," but this is commonplace in the AI industry. OpenAI uses it to compress GPT-4, Google uses it to optimize Gemini, even Anthropic itself does it. The only difference is, this time it's them being distilled.

According to AI professor Erik Cambria from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, speaking to CNBC: "The boundary between legitimate use and malicious exploitation is often blurry."

More ironically, Anthropic just paid a $1.5 billion settlement for using pirated books to train Claude. It trains its models on data from the entire web, then accuses others of using its public API to learn from it. This isn't double standards, it's triple standards.

Anthropic wanted to play the victim, but ended up being exposed as the defendant.

Dismantling the Safety Commitment: RSP 3.0

On the very same day as the Pentagon standoff and the Silicon Valley spat, Anthropic released the third version of its Responsible Scaling Policy.

Anthropic Chief Scientist Jared Kaplan told media in an interview: "We felt that stopping AI model training wouldn't help anyone. In the context of rapid AI development, making unilateral promises... while competitors are moving full speed ahead, doesn't make sense."

In other words, since others aren't playing by the rules, we're dropping the act too.

The core of RSP 1.0 and 2.0 was a hard commitment to pause training if model capabilities exceeded the coverage of safety measures. This commitment earned Anthropic a unique reputation in the AI safety community.

But 3.0 deleted it.

It was replaced with a more "flexible" framework, separating safety measures Anthropic can implement itself from safety recommendations requiring industry-wide collaboration into two tracks. A risk report is issued every 3-6 months. Reviewed by external experts.

Sounds responsible?

Independent reviewer Chris Painter from the nonprofit METR, after seeing an early draft of the policy, told TIME: "This indicates Anthropic believes it needs to enter 'triage mode' because methods for assessing and mitigating risks can't keep up with the speed of capability growth. This is more proof that society is unprepared for AI's potential catastrophic risks."

According to TIME, Anthropic spent nearly a year internally debating this rewrite, with CEO Amodei and the board voting unanimously in favor. The official line is that the original policy was designed to drive industry consensus, but the industry simply didn't follow. The Trump administration adopted a laissez-faire attitude towards AI development, even attempting to repeal state-level regulations. Federal AI legislation is nowhere in sight. Although establishing a global governance framework seemed possible in 2023, three years later, that door has clearly closed.

An anonymous researcher long-tracking AI governance put it more bluntly: "RSP was Anthropic's most valuable brand asset. Deleting the training pause commitment is like an organic food company quietly tearing the 'organic' label off its packaging and then telling you their testing is now more transparent."

Identity Crisis Under a $380 Billion Valuation

In early February, Anthropic completed a $30 billion financing round at a $380 billion valuation, with Amazon as the anchor investor. Since its founding, it has achieved $14 billion in annualized revenue. Over the past three years, this figure has grown more than 10x each year.

Simultaneously, the Pentagon threatens to blacklist it. Musk publicly accuses it of data theft. Its own core safety commitment is deleted. Anthropic's AI safety lead, Mrinank Sharma, resigned and wrote on X: "The world is in danger."

Contradiction?

Perhaps contradiction is in Anthropic's DNA.

The company was founded by former OpenAI executives because they feared OpenAI was moving too fast on safety. Then they built a company themselves, building more powerful models at an even faster pace, while telling the world how dangerous these models are.

The business model can be summarized in one sentence: we are more afraid of AI than anyone, so you should pay us to build AI.

This narrative worked perfectly in 2023-2024. AI safety was a hot term in Washington, and Anthropic was the most popular lobbyist.

In 2026, the wind changed direction.

"Woke AI" became an attack label, state-level AI regulation bills were blocked by the White House, and while the California SB 53 supported by Anthropic was signed into law, the federal level is a wasteland.

Anthropic's safety card is sliding from a "differentiating advantage" towards a "political liability."

Anthropic is performing a complex balancing act. It needs to be "safe" enough to maintain its brand, yet "flexible" enough to avoid being abandoned by the market and the government. The problem is, the tolerance space on both ends is shrinking.

How Much is the Safety Narrative Still Worth?

Overlay the three events, and the picture becomes clear.

Accusing Chinese companies of distilling Claude is to strengthen the lobbying narrative for chip export controls. Deleting the safety pause commitment is to avoid falling behind in the arms race. Refusing the Pentagon's autonomous weapons demand is to preserve the last layer of moral clothing.

Each step has its own logic, but each step contradicts the others.

You can't on one hand say Chinese companies "distilling" your model threatens national security, and on the other hand delete the commitment preventing your own model from going out of control. If the model is truly that dangerous, you should be more cautious, not more aggressive.

Unless you are Anthropic.

In the AI industry, identity isn't defined by your statements, but by your balance sheet. Anthropic's "safety" narrative is essentially a brand premium.

In the early stages of the AI arms race, this premium was valuable. Investors were willing to pay a higher valuation for "responsible AI," governments were willing to give the green light to "trustworthy AI," and customers were willing to pay for "safer AI."

But in 2026, this premium is evaporating.

What Anthropic faces now is not a multiple-choice question of "whether to compromise," but a prioritization question of "who to compromise with first." Compromise with the Pentagon, brand damage. Compromise with competitors, safety commitment voided. Compromise with investors, concessions on both ends.

At 5:01 PM on Friday, Anthropic will deliver its answer.

But whatever the answer is, one thing is already certain: the Anthropic that once stood on "we're not like OpenAI" is becoming like everyone else.

The endpoint of an identity crisis is often the disappearance of identity.