Hegseth Calls Anthropic CEO a ‘Lunatic,’ Defends Pentagon AI Use

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the US doesn’t let artificial intelligence make lethal targeting decisions even as he called Anthropic PBC Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei an “ideological lunatic” after a recent spat over military use of the company’s chatbot.

Hegseth again slammed Anthropic over its insistence that its Claude chatbot not be used for mass surveillance against Americans or in fully autonomous weapons operations. Those demands led the Pentagon in March to take the unprecedented steps of designating Anthropic a national-security threat and moving to bar its products from the military.

“On Anthropic they wouldn’t agree to our terms ...