Hegseth Called Amodei a Lunatic. The Pentagon Is Testing Whether It Can Go Further.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that Anthropic would not agree to the Pentagon's terms of service — then offered the analogy without prompting: that position was, quote, "like Boeing giving us airplanes and telling us who we can shoot at." He also described Anthropic as being run by "an ideological lunatic who shouldn't have a sole decision-making over what we do." The remarks, from the April 30 hearing on the Defense Department's fiscal year 2027 budget request, landed in the middle of an escalating legal confrontation over whether the government can exclude a frontier AI company from federal contracts because of the restrictions it builds into its own models.
The mechanism is 10 U.S.C. § 3252, a procurement authority the Pentagon used to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk in March — a move that amounts to a government blacklist for a company that had been on U.S. classified networks since June 2024. Anthropic challenged the designation in federal court. A California judge issued a preliminary injunction against it; the D.C. Circuit declined to pause the injunction while the appeal proceeds. Oral arguments are scheduled for May 19. What happens in that courtroom will determine whether § 3252 can be used to punish a vendor for product safety choices — or whether its reach is limited to actual national security systems, as Just Security has argued.
The substance of the dispute is not new. Both sides agree on what they are doing: Anthropic says humans make lethal decisions, not AI. The Pentagon says that stance amounts to unacceptable interference with military authority. Hegseth told the committee Thursday: "We follow the law and humans make decisions. AI is not making lethal decisions." The adversarial posture is about what comes next. Anthropic's contract with the Defense Department was worth up to $200 million, according to NPR. No prior American company has been designated under § 3252. If the courts side with the Pentagon, every frontier AI company watching from the sideline will have received the same signal.
Source: Senate Armed Services Committee
Source: Bloomberg/Mint — Hegseth quotes