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autonomous weapons
Anthropic Sues Trump Pentagon Over 'Supply Chain Risk' Designation
“These actions are unprecedented and unlawful,” the lawsuit said after the Pentagon punished the AI company for refusing to lift restrictions on using their products for autonomous killer robots or mass surveillance.
Mar 09, 2026
Anthropic is suing the Trump administration over its unprecedented attempt to coerce the company into allowing the military to use its artificial intelligence technology without ethical restrictions.
After the company refused to bend to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's demands that it drop limits on the use of its product for specific purposes—including to create autonomous weapons and for the mass surveillance of Americans—the Pentagon formally designated Anthropic as a “supply chain risk" on Thursday.
The designation under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act (FASCSA) imposes a sweeping prohibition on contractors using the company's technology, including its highly advanced language model Claude.
Hegseth said that effective immediately, "no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic."
The "supply chain risk" designation has typically only been used against foreign companies with ties to adversaries of the United States. According to the Associated Press, Anthropic is the first American firm to be slapped with the label.
On Monday, the San Francisco-based company filed two lawsuits—one in California federal court and another in the federal appeals court in Washington, DC—each challenging different aspects of the designation.
“These actions are unprecedented and unlawful,” Anthropic’s lawsuit says. “The Constitution does not allow the government to wield its enormous power to punish a company for its protected speech. No federal statute authorizes the actions taken here. Anthropic turns to the judiciary as a last resort to vindicate its rights and halt the executive’s unlawful campaign of retaliation.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned about the dangers of "AI-enabled autocracies" that use their technology to more efficiently invade and dominate less powerful countries and stamp out anti-government sentimet.
"Anthropic’s Usage Policy has always conveyed its view that Claude should not be used for two specific applications: (1) lethal autonomous warfare and (2) surveillance of Americans en masse. Anthropic has never tested Claude for those uses. Anthropic currently does not have confidence, for example, that Claude would function reliably or safely if used to support lethal autonomous warfare," the lawsuit continued.
"These usage restrictions," it said, "are therefore rooted in Anthropic’s unique understanding of Claude’s risks and limitations—including Claude’s capacity to make mistakes and its unprecedented ability to accelerate and automate the analysis of massive amounts of data, including data about American citizens."
The Trump administration issued its ultimatum to Anthropic just days before the US and Israel launched a massive war with Iran, which has involved the targeting of thousands of civilian sites, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, including schools, hospitals, oil and water facilities, and residential areas.
The war has resulted in the deaths of at least 1,255 Iranians so far as of Monday, according to the country's deputy health minister, Ali Jafarian. Most of those killed have been civilians, Jafarian said, and have included about 200 children and 11 healthcare workers.
Hegseth, who has said the US would follow "no stupid rules of engagement" and boasted that the military was raining down “death and destruction from the sky all day long" upon Iran, has described adopting artificial intelligence as something necessary to make America's military "more lethal."
Last week, the Washington Post reported that in Iran, the US has “leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare, a tool that could be difficult for the Pentagon to give up even as it severs ties with the company that created it.”
During the war's first 24 hours, Palantir’s Maven Smart System, which contains Claude, reportedly helped US commanders select 1,000 Iranian targets, according to the Post, which credited the program with "speeding the pace of the campaign."
This is despite the fact that, as SkyNews tech correspondent Rowland Manthorpe recently demonstrated, when presented with "tricky images," AI programs from Claude to ChatGPT to Google's Gemini still "struggle to recognize what is really going on."
"Now," he said, "this very same system is being used for war."
That first day of the war, February 28 saw a massacre in which a Tomahawk missile likely directed by the US obliterated a girls' school in Minab, resulting in at least 175 people killed—mostly children aged 7 to 12—in what was reportedly a "double-tap" strike. Despite video evidence suggesting otherwise, the Trump administration has claimed that Iran was responsible for the massacre.
It is unclear what, if any, role artificial intelligence systems played in the bombing of the Minab school, which was adjacent to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility. One investigation by Al Jazeera concluded that the bombing of the school was likely "deliberate."
Beyond putting the lives of innocent people at risk through indiscriminate attacks that lack human intervention, media analyst and journalist Adam Johnson has warned that the adoption of AI in warfare will also allow the US, Israel, and other countries to avoid responsibility for atrocities their militaries commit while using the technology.
"One reason these systems are attractive to militaries is that they double as moral laundromats. Offsetting responsibility to AI is a feature, not a bug," Johnson said. "If the decision about what to bomb can be pawned off on some over-eager or sloppy 'AI', then no person, or system even, is responsible. That's a primary selling point of off-setting 'target-choosing' responsibilities to a machine. It's not just speed, it's blanket indemnification."
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Anthropic CEO 'Cannot in Good Conscience Accede' to Pentagon's AI Demand
"Anthropic and Dario deserve credit for standing up for two very basic and obvious principles: no mass surveillance and no autonomous killer robots," said one progressive commentator.
Feb 26, 2026
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic until Friday evening to agree to let the Pentagon use the company's artificial intelligence technology however it wants, or else. Roughly 24 hours ahead of the deadline, CEO Dario Amodei announced that "we cannot in good conscience accede to their request," and reiterated opposition to enabling autonomous weapons or surveillance of US citizens.
Anthropic's Claude was the first AI model allowed to handle classified US military data. While the Department of Defense (DOD) has now signed an agreement with Elon Musk's xAI and "is getting close to making a deal with Google," as the New York Times reported Monday, Hegseth demanded "unfettered" access to Claude during a Tuesday meeting with Amodei.
Hegseth threatened to declare the Anthropic a "supply chain risk," effectively blacklisting it for military use and ending its current contract, or invoke the Defense Production Act, which would force Anthropic to tailor the product to the DOD’s needs, if Amodei refused to drop the company's guardrails.
The CEO responded publicly with a Thursday blog post. Using President Donald Trump's preferred name for the Pentagon, he wrote that "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."
"However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today's technology can safely and reliably do," Amodei continued. He explained the company's position that "using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values."
"AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties. To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI," he wrote. "For example, under current law, the government can purchase detailed records of Americans' movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant, a practice the Intelligence Community has acknowledged raises privacy concerns, and that has generated bipartisan opposition in Congress. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person's life—automatically and at massive scale."
The CEO also argued that "frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America's warfighters and civilians at risk." He noted that Anthropic offered to work directly with the department on research and development to "improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer."
Amodei concluded by expressing hope that the Pentagon revises its position, writing that "our strong preference is to continue to serve the department and our warfighters—with our two requested safeguards in place. Should the department choose to offboard Anthropic, we will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider, avoiding any disruption to ongoing military planning, operations, or other critical missions."
Amodei's blog post followed CBS News reporting earlier Thursday that "Pentagon officials on Wednesday night sent Anthropic their best and final offer in negotiations for use of the company's artificial intelligence technology."
It also came just hours after Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell responded to a related post from a Google scientist on Musk's social media platform X. The DOD official claimed that "the Department of War has no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal) nor do we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement. This narrative is fake and being peddled by leftists in the media."
"Here's what we're asking: Allow the Pentagon to use Anthropic's model for all lawful purposes. This is a simple, commonsense request that will prevent Anthropic from jeopardizing critical military operations and potentially putting our warfighters at risk. We will not let ANY company dictate the terms regarding how we make operational decisions," Parnell added, noting the Friday deadline and the threat to "terminate our partnership with Anthropic and deem them a supply chain risk."
While Amodei and observers await the Pentagon's next move, several Anthropic employees, other tech experts, and critics of the Trump administration praised the CEO for "standing on principle" and choosing "war with the Department of War."
"Anthropic and Dario deserve credit for standing up for two very basic and obvious principles: no mass surveillance and no autonomous killer robots," said progressive commentator Krystal Ball. "Perhaps this is a low bar but it isn’t clear any of the other leading AI companies would put principle above profits in ANY scenario. The Pentagon is sure to make Anthropic pay for daring to defy them."
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Congress Must Review an Autonomous Weapons Deal Between UAE and US Companies
There is a serious concern that these autonomous weapons could end up in the arms of the UAE-backed militia and regimes in the Middle East, which would fuel ongoing wars and cause great harm.
Dec 23, 2025
In December 2025, a joint venture was announced between EDGE, the leading Emirati advanced technology and defense conglomerate comprising 25 companies involved in military and civilian products and technologies, and Anduril Industries, an American defense company specializing in the development of advanced autonomous systems. The first product envisioned under this joint venture is Omen, a newly developed hover-to-cruise Autonomous Air Vehicle, or AAV. According to the terms of the agreement, the UAE will acquire the first 50 units of Omen.
There is, however, a serious concern that these autonomous weapons could end up in the arms of the UAE-backed militia and regimes in the Middle East, which would fuel ongoing wars and cause great harm.
For years, the United Arab Emirates has presented itself as a stabilizing force in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. Yet its actions on the ground tell a far more troubling story. From Libya to Ethiopia, the UAE has repeatedly backed armed groups and proxy forces, deepening conflicts rather than resolving them. In Somalia and Yemen, it has been bolstering the separatists' voice. During the ongoing War in Sudan, the UAE has been backing the RSF militia with financial and military support to the RSF militia, including a recent supply of foreign combatants. The impact of UAE funding to the RSF militia has been catastrophic; it enabled the militia to commit numerous massacres and genocides in the Darfur region. According to United Nations experts, it is estimated that the militia killed 15,000 members of the Massalit tribe based on their ethnicity. In other parts of Darfur, women were raped and abducted, and children were piled up and shot to death. For months, El-Fashir city, the main refugee area in Darfur, has been besieged by the militia.
Here, we are not speculating but building our analysis on previous solid violations cases. EDGE has consistently supported the UAE's allied militias in different parts of the Middle East. In November 2024, an investigative report by Amnesty International exposed that armored personnel carriers (APCs) were found in Sudan. These arms are manufactured by EDGE and are used by the RSF militia in stark violations of the UN arms embargo in Darfur. UN experts said that vehicles built by EDGE were also found in Libya and Somalia. These revelations show how EDGE could go far to collude with the UAE regime in its devastating wars and reckless interventions.
Ideally, an oversight mechanism should be established to ensure that these autonomous weapons and drones will not reach outlaw military militias and rogue regimes.
Recently, the UAE started to use Wagner and other Russian militia in its operations in Africa, for instance, in September 2024, it used Wagner to funnel arms to its RSF ally. The UAE also supported the Central Republic of Africa to pay the cost of hiring the Russian Atlas Corps to defend the government. And in November 2020, a report by the Pentagon mentioned that he UAE funded Wagner in Libya. Given these growing ties, it is legitimate to consider a scenario where these advanced autonomous systems could be leaked to Russian mercenary groups at any point in the future, which indeed represents a serious threat to US security and its interests in Africa.
Related to this are the recent reports that show that the UAE has increased its arms to the region in 2025. This escalation reflects its plans and goals, and that these autonomous weapons will be on its list for the next shipments, providing its militia and allied regimes with a competitive advantage over its foes, i.e stable governments and nations
When thinking about this deal, we have to take into consideration that the UAE isn’t a democratic country. It's ruled by a single family, with no parliament to review decisions made concerning wars. Hence, it can’t be trusted by any measure to act responsibly if it owns this advanced technology.
Congress must take this issue seriously and review this deal. Ideally, an oversight mechanism should be established to ensure that these autonomous weapons and drones will not reach outlaw military militias and rogue regimes and be part of subverting countries and jeopardizing the US long-term interests.
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