Tech Companies Shouldn’t Be Bullied Into Doing Surveillance

The Secretary of Defense has givenan ultimatumto the artificial intelligence company Anthropic in an attempt to bully them into making their technology available to the U.S. military without any restrictions for their use. Anthropic should stick by their principles and refuse to allow their technology to be used in the two ways they have publicly stated they would not support:autonomous weapons systems and surveillance. The Department of Defense has reportedly threatened to label Anthropic a supply chain risk," in retribution for not lifting restrictions on how their technology is used. According toWIRED, that label would be, a scarlet letter usually reserved for companies that do business with countries scrutinized by federal agencies, like China, which means the Pentagon would not do business with firms using Anthropic's AI in their defense work."

In 2025,reportedlyAnthropic became the first AI company cleared for use in relation to classified operations and to handle classified information. This current controversy, however, began in January 2026 when, through a partnership with defense contractor Palantir, Anthropic came tosuspect their AI had been used during the January 3 attack on Venezuela. In January 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodeiwrote to reiteratethat surveillance against US persons and autonomous weapons systems were two bright red lines" not to be crossed, or at least topics that needed to be handled with extreme care and scrutiny combined with guardrails to prevent abuses." You can also read Anthropic's self-proclaimed core views on AI safetyhere, as well as their LLM, Claude's, constitutionhere.

Now, the U.S. government is threatening to terminate the government's contract with the company if it doesn't switch gears and voluntarily jump right across those lines.

Companies, especially technology companies, oftenfailto live up to their public statements and internalpolicies related to human rights and civil libertiesfor all sorts of reasons, including profit. Government pressure shouldn't be one of those reasons.

Whatever the U.S. government does to threaten Anthropic, the AI company should know that their corporate customers, the public, and the engineers who make their products are expecting them not to cave. They, and all other technology companies, would do best to refuse to become yet another tool of surveillance.

Reposted from the EFF's Deeplinks blog.