Anthropic’s Pentagon Showdown Is About More Than AI Guardrails (1)

As the Pentagon was pressing Anthropic PBC to drop the guardrails on its powerful artificial intelligence tools, a senior US defense official posed a hypothetical scenario to the company’s safety-conscious chief executive officer, Dario Amodei.

What if a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile were hurtling towards the US with only 90 seconds to spare, and Anthropic’s AI were the only way to trigger a missile response to save the country, but the company’s safeguards wouldn’t allow it, the senior official mused in a December phone call.

Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic.

Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg

“Call me,” was how Pentagon officials interpreted Amodei’s answer, according to another senior ...