Opinion: Anthropic, the Pentagon, and a Problem Congress Needs to Fix

This is about as political as I get on gordostuff.com. I write mostly about technology, engineering, education, and the occasional fish story. But this dispute sits at the intersection of AI, national security, and corporate governance, and those topics are worth paying attention to regardless of where you stand politically.

Here is what happened. In January 2026, U.S. special operations forces raided Caracas, captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and flew him to New York to face narcoterrorism charges. During that operation, the military used Claude, an AI model built by Anthropic, a San Francisco company that holds a $200 million contract with the Pentagon. Claude was accessed through Palantir Technologies, a data firm whose tools are standard across the Defense Department. After the raid, an Anthropic employee asked Palantir how Claude had been used. That question triggered a confrontation that is now public: the Pentagon wants unrestricted access to Claude for any lawful military purpose; Anthropic refuses to remove safeguards that block use for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon has threatened to cancel the contract and label Anthropic a supply chain risk. CEO Dario Amodei has said the company will not comply.

The Pentagon’s position is straightforward. The “any lawful use” standard it requires is exactly that: lawful. Congress sets those limits. Courts enforce them. OpenAI, Google, and xAI have all reached deals allowing military users access to their models with fewer restrictions. The Pentagon argues that a private company writing its own usage restrictions into a government contract is not a governance model that works in an operational environment, and the Venezuela sequence supports that view. After a successful operation with no American casualties, an Anthropic employee felt it necessary to check whether their product had been used appropriately. That is not a posture compatible with military operations.

Anthropic’s position is not without merit. Amodei argues that current AI is not reliable enough for fully autonomous weapons, and a King’s College London study showing that leading AI models deployed nuclear weapons in 95% of simulated geopolitical crises suggests the concern is grounded. The company’s resistance to enabling mass domestic surveillance of American citizens also has clear constitutional backing. These are not frivolous objections.

The problem is that Anthropic is trying to solve a legislative problem with a contract clause. Mass surveillance of American citizens by the military is a constitutional question. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Posse Comitatus Act, the Fourth Amendment, these are the frameworks that exist for exactly this purpose. If they need updating for the AI era, that is Congress’s job.

Here is the urgency. AI is being deployed in classified military operations right now, today, and the legal frameworks governing its use have not kept pace. The Venezuela operation was not the last time this will happen. The next one may not go as cleanly, and when it doesn’t, the question of what AI was authorized to do, and by whom, will matter enormously. The Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees should be holding hearings, calling in the AI companies, the Pentagon, and independent legal experts, and drafting legislation that sets clear boundaries. Not someday. Now. A terms-of-service clause in a private contract is not a substitute for law, and the fact that we are currently relying on one is the real problem here.