Autonomous Weapons

When Caitlin Kalinowski posted “I resigned from OpenAI” on X and LinkedIn this past Saturday, she didn’t just leave a job. She drew a line in the sand that the entire AI industry is now being forced to acknowledge. Kalinowski — a veteran hardware executive who previously led Meta’s Orion AR glasses project and spent nearly six years designing MacBooks at Apple — walked away from her role leading OpenAI’s robotics team over one issue: the company’s rushed agreement to deploy AI models inside the Pentagon’s classified computing systems. ...

The United States Department of Defense just did something it has never done before: it officially designated an American company a “supply chain risk to national security.” The company? Anthropic — maker of Claude, one of the most capable AI systems on the planet. This label was designed for foreign adversaries. Companies with backdoors in their hardware. Firms controlled by hostile intelligence services. It’s been used publicly exactly once before, against a Swiss cybersecurity firm with reported Russian ties. ...

Imagine you’re one of the most successful AI companies in the world. Developers love your model, enterprise revenue is soaring, and your technology is running inside classified military networks. Then the government tells you to drop your ethical red lines — and when you refuse, they blacklist you entirely. That’s not a thought experiment. That’s what just happened to Anthropic. In the most dramatic week in AI policy since the technology entered public consciousness, the Trump administration effectively declared war on one of America’s most prominent AI companies — while its chief rival rushed to fill the void. The fallout is reshaping the relationship between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon in real time. ...

On Friday, the President of the United States declared war — not with missiles, but with procurement orders — against one of America’s leading AI companies. The crime? Anthropic told the Pentagon “no.” No to mass surveillance of Americans. No to fully autonomous weapons. And for that act of corporate conscience, Anthropic is now being treated like a foreign adversary. The Ultimatum The conflict had been building for months. Anthropic held government AI contracts since 2024 — it was the first advanced AI company deployed in federal agencies. But it had two red lines: no mass surveillance, no autonomous weapons. ...

The deadline is today. By 5:01 PM Friday, Anthropic must either hand over unrestricted access to Claude to the U.S. military — or face being labeled a national security risk and blacklisted from all government contracts. Anthropic’s answer? No. CEO Dario Amodei published a blog post late Thursday declaring that Anthropic “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Pentagon’s demands. The company is walking away from a $200 million defense contract rather than remove two guardrails: a ban on using Claude for mass domestic surveillance and a prohibition on fully autonomous weapons systems. ...