Pentagon Summons Anthropic CEO Amid Musk's Data Theft Allegations

The report from Axios said, citing an anonymous senior defence official, that the meeting was "not a friendly" one as Anthropic did not remove restrictions on their technology even as Hegseth urged AI firms to do so.

Claude is currently the only AI system deployed inside classified defence networks, under a $200 million pilot contract signed last year but Hegseth in a January 9 memo asked AI companies to renegotiate terms to remove restrictions on their technology.

However, Anthropic stayed put on refusal to fully lift safeguards, including restrictions on mass surveillance of Americans and development of fully autonomous weapons, the report said.

Defence officials warned Anthropic could be designated a "supply chain risk," voiding contracts and restricting other Pentagon partners from using Claude even as the AI firm's spokesperson called discussions "productive". Replacing Anthropic is deemed complex given its deep integration into defence systems, the report added.

Meanwhile, Pentagon has signed agreements with Elon Musk's xAI and is nearing a deal with Google for Gemini model building pressure on Anthropic, The New York Times reported.

Ahead of the meeting, Anthropic alleged three Chinese AI firms used chatbots to siphon millions of Claude outputs to train their own models.

Musk, in response, lashed out at Anthropic on X saying, "Anthropic is guilty of stealing training data at massive scale and has had to pay multi‑billion-dollar settlements for their theft."

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO called the AI company 'MisAnthropic.'

Claude is a next generation AI assistant built by Anthropic and trained to be safe, accurate, and secure. The new AI assistant could automate legal document reviews, compliance checks, sales planning, marketing campaign analysis, financial reconciliation, data visualisation, SQL‑based reporting and enterprise‑wide document search.

- IANS