Hegseth Calls Anthropic CEO a ‘Lunatic,’ Defends Pentagon AI Use
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, left, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman John D. Caine during a House Armed Services Committee hearing in Washington on April 29.
Photographer: Daniel Heuer/BloombergDefense 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.