House Democrat: ‘Good for Anthropic’ in rejecting Pentagon demands

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) praised the artificial intelligence company Anthropic for rejecting the Pentagon’s demands in how its AI technology is used by Friday evening. 

The company and the U.S. government have been in battle for weeks over Anthropic’s AI policy, which blocks its AI model Claude from being used to conduct mass surveillance or develop lethal autonomous weapons.

The company said in a statement Thursday that it “cannot in good conscience accede to their request.” 

“Good for Anthropic,” Khanna, who represents the nation’s technology capital, Silicon Valley, said in a Friday interview with Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo. “I don’t want technology used by a federal government to have mass surveillance on American citizens. That’s common sense.

“I mean, think about if you had a Democratic president, would you want them to have tools of AI to figure out whether you have a gun, to figure out what church you’re going to?” he told Bartiromo. “It is scary. And I hope we can come together and say, no, we don’t want mass surveillance.”

Khanna’s comments come as Anthropic faces a Friday 5:01 p.m. deadline to agree to the Pentagon’s terms. It threatened Tuesday that it would implement the Defense Production Act (DPA), which gives the president broad authority to control domestic industries for national defense purposes. The threat drew criticism from experts.

“It’s the wrong purpose of the tool,” Mark Dalton, senior policy director for technology and innovation at the R Street Institute, told The Hill on Thursday. “The DPA exists for a capacity reason, like it’s an industrial capacity policy, and to use it as leverage is, I think, irresponsible.”

If Anthropic doesn’t comply by Friday, it also faces losing a $200 million contract from the Pentagon and being labeled a “supply chain risk.” 

Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said Thursday the department has “no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal) nor do we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement.”

“This is a simple, common-sense request that will prevent Anthropic from jeopardizing critical military operations and potentially putting our warfighters at risk,” he wrote in a post on X. “We will not let ANY company dictate the terms regarding how we make operational decisions.”

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