Image: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks during a visit to Sierra Space in Louisville, Colorado on Monday, February 23, 2026. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

The federal government is expanding its feud with those who have a problem with illegal orders. This time, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is threatening to invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic, the maker of the Claude artificial intelligence model, to tailor it to the Pentagon’s desires beyond the red lines set by the company, which include forbidding the mass surveillance of Americans and fully-autonomous drone swarms.

A source familiar with the discussions told Salon that, in a Tuesday meeting between Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Hegseth, Amodei laid out the company’s red lines. Hegseth also ended the meeting by threatening to either invoke the Defense Production Act to compel Anthropic to produce an AI model in line with his desire, or that the Pentagon will cut ties with Anthropic and contract with a different AI firm.

The conflict, however, comes into sharper focus when the red lines set by Amodei are made clear. In an interview with The New York Times’s Ross Douthat, Amodei laid them out, with Douthat asking, “What is the safeguard there to prevent essentially AI becoming a tool of authoritarian takeover inside a democratic context?”

“I’m worried about the autonomous drone swarm,” Amodei said. “The constitutional protections in our military structures depend on the idea that there are humans who would, we hope, disobey illegal orders. With fully autonomous weapons we don’t necessarily have those protections.”

Amodei went on to say he was also concerned about the potential uses for Anthropic’s technology for mass surveillance, saying that it could easily identify members of the opposition based on their conversations in public.

“With AI, the ability to transcribe speech, to look through it, correlate it all, you could say ‘Oh, this person is a member of the opposition. This person is expressing this view.’ And make a map of all 100 million,” Amodei said.

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