Last month, AI supergiant and Department of Defense contractor Anthropic found itself embroiled with the Pentagon over the use of its AI for military purposes. On Feb. 14, Axios reported that the Pentagon was considering severing ties with Anthropic, which insisted on guardrails for its use of AI by the military. The conflict became public two days after the press revealed the American military used Anthropic’s Claude AI to help capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Tensions soon boiled over. Anthropic pushed back, and on Feb. 24, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued an ultimatum: allow unrestricted use of Anthropic’s platform by the Department of Defense or get canceled. Trump followed suit, threatening to ban all federal agencies from using Anthropic’s technology and label the company a supply chain risk. On March 5, the Pentagon followed through, stating it has “officially informed Anthropic leadership the company and its products are deemed a supply chain risk, effective immediately.” This marks the first time such a sanction has been applied to a U.S. company. In response, Anthropic is suing the Pentagon over the risk label.
According to the company’s public relations, many media accounts and some tech workers, the episode is proof that the corporation aims to “do good” and put people over profits.
But is this really true? Is Anthropic really concerned with the lives shattered by U.S. militarism, and the American Empire in general, or is it pushing familiar Big Tech public relations asserting commitments to humanitarian values?
The answer is unquestionably the latter. Anthropic, which was founded in 2021, was happily offering its services to the military prior to this episode; and it is not in any meaningful way “resisting” the Pentagon. Anthropic remains woven into the fabric of the American Empire by virtue of its attempt to colonize the global AI economy in conjunction with other U.S. tech giants. This cannot be separated from the military applications of its technology.
Let’s dig in.
Partners in militarism: Anthropic’s services to American Empire are not new
In Nov. 7, 2024, Palantir proudly announced “a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to the Claude 3 and 3.5 family of models on AWS.” The partnership would “[allow] for an integrated suite of technology to operationalize the use of Claude within Palantir’s AI Platform (AIP).” The arrangement, Palantir stated, “will equip U.S. defense and intelligence organizations with powerful AI tools that can rapidly process and analyze vast amounts of complex data.”
Palantir played a central role assisting the U.S. military for its operations in the Middle East. It provided a “God’s-eye view” of Afghanistan and a data processing backbone for U.S. intelligence in Iraq. After building big data analytics systems on the battlefield, it sold its tools back to U.S. police departments, what’s sometimes called the “imperial boomerang.”
On July 14, 2025, Anthropic proudly announced a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense to “advance U.S. national security.” Details, while vague, included “Exchanging technical insights, performance data, and operational feedback to accelerate responsible AI adoption across the defense enterprise.”
This forms the backdrop for Anthropic’s recent “resistance” to the Pentagon. But what does that “resistance” entail? The company only stipulated two “restrictions” on the use of its technology by the U.S. military. First, that Anthropic not be used to guide autonomous weapons (meaning, a human must pull the trigger if munitions are fired). And second, that Anthropic not be used for the mass surveillance of Americans. The rest of the world is, apparently, fair game.
In reality, Anthropic openly embraces U.S. militarism and American supremacy. It has no problem with the well-documented history of U.S. war crimes, the devastation to populations throughout the world and the crimes of its military allies, such as Israel, receiving its advanced weaponry.
This helps explain why Anthropic’s AI is now being used for “intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios” in Iran. The company “was a step ahead of its rivals,” such as Google, OpenAI and xAI, “thanks to its partnership with Palantir,” the press reported.
While this controversy unfolded, Anthropic also dropped its promise to keep a high bar on general safety measures. According to this provision, the Responsible Scaling Policy, Anthropic would refrain from training an AI system unless it could guarantee in advance that its safety measures were adequate. The AI giant decided to remove this restriction because it would disadvantage them against competitors like OpenAI.
U.S. economic domination goes hand-in-hand with war
There is another theme on which the left is near-universally silent: the economic dominance of the United States in the global economy. The tech pseudo-left has, at times, been vocal about Big Tech services provided to the U.S. military. This dates back to protests at Google in 2017 against its development of drone analytics for the military via Project Maven. Yet this ignores the fact that American economic supremacy goes hand-in-hand with war. In the aftermath of World War II, elite policy planners wrote that the U.S. owns about half the world’s wealth, but only houses 6.3% of the world’s population, a disparity which “cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment.” The goal was to “maintain this position of disparity,” a task that required dispensing with “the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”
To ignore Anthropic’s role in “maintaining this disparity,” with its $380 billion market cap and CEO worth $7 billion, is to pretend that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Wars waged by the United States and its allies are largely a violent means to preserve the economic “disparity” between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Under this neo-colonial arrangement, the Global South is to fulfill its role as supplier of raw materials and cheap labor, while the U.S. monopolizes the most lucrative parts of the global economy, with Big Tech at the helm. In other words, the American war machine is unleashed on societies in order to maintain the globally unequal exchange and division of labor.
Anthropic offers no objections to a global status quo where the United States, which now has 4% of the world’s population, one third of the wealth, and almost half the financial assets, continues to exploit the poor people of the world. Rather, it holds that democracies “must work together to ensure AI development strengthens democratic values globally by maintaining technological leadership to protect against authoritarian misuse.” This tracks with the New Cold War ideology of its high-profile CEO, Dario Amodei, a China hawk who pits the “democratic” West against the authoritarian Chinese. In January, Amodei said Trump’s decision to allow the sale of some AI chips to China is akin to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”
Just one year prior, following the release of DeepSeek-R1 in 2025, Amodei penned an article calling for export controls on China so that the U.S. and other “democratic nations” can maintain a “unipolar world” where “only the U.S. and its allies” have the cutting edge AI models and “take a commanding and long-lasting lead on the global stage.”
If Amodei were even slightly humanitarian in his worldview, he would publicly oppose the flagrant violations of international law, war crimes, genocidal violence of the U.S. and its allies, and sever ties with the military. Instead, the company boasts it is “very proud” to work with the Department of Defense. “Our most important priority right now,” Anthropic stated last week, “is making sure that our warfighters and national security experts are not deprived of important tools in the middle of major combat operations.”
In other words, Anthropic and its allegedly “ethical” CEO Amodei, are full-throated American supremacists bolstering the U.S. Empire, and its violent wars, at the highest level. The most recent “stand” against the Pentagon is pure theater.
