AI for warfare: West Asia’s flare-up should focus attention on red lines for autonomous weapons

A rift between the AI firm Anthropic and the US federal government has broken into the open at a fraught geopolitical moment. Negotiations between the AI firm and the Pentagon over deployment of frontier models by the US military stalled after Anthropic refused to permit the use of its models for two specific use cases: domestic surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons. Open AI has struck a deal with the Pentagon in the meantime, even as the use of AI in the battlefield accelerates with deployments by Israel and the US in the ongoing war in West Asia.

Dario Amodei, founder of Anthropic, has argued that his proposed limits are non-negotiable. When talks stalled, the disagreement turned political. Trump criticized the firm in sharp terms, calling it a “Left Wing, Woke” company in a Truth Social post.

Secretary of War Pete Pete Hegseth labelled Anthropic a ‘Supply Chain Risk,’ which means companies that do business with it cannot engage with the US military. This dispute has no precedent. Never in American history has a leading company been treated, in effect, as an enemy of the state for declining to military cooperation.

It is easy to view this episode as another instance of industrial policy under US President Donald Trump, where he seems to have picked Open AI at the cost of a rival. His administration has intervened aggressively in technology markets several times before. For instance, the US government provided billions in support to chip-maker Intel and took an equity stake to stabilize domestic chip capacity late last year.