Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has declined a request from the U.S. Department of Defense to remove safety guardrails from the company’s Claude AI models. Amodei argues that frontier AI systems are not yet reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons and that removing ethical constraints would jeopardize both safety and civil liberties. While affirming the strategic importance of AI for national defense, he stresses that current models cannot replace the critical judgment of trained troops. The refusal puts a $200 million Pentagon contract at risk. Read more →