The Pentagon is open to more talks with Anthropic PBC ahead of a 5 pm Friday deadline to loosen restrictions on the use of its artificial intelligence technology, a senior Defense Department official said on Friday.
Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael said on Friday morning that the Pentagon remains open to dialogue with Anthropic, despite the company's “unpredictable” behavior in an acrimonious standoff over AI safeguards.
“So long as they're in good faith, we're always open to talks,” Michael said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “Up until that deadline, I'm open to more talks and I told them so.”
Michael's comments come on the final day that Anthropic has to accede to the Pentagon's demands to drop certain AI safeguards or face severe consequences.
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The Defense Department official made the comments on Friday morning, a day after he blasted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a series of X posts, calling him a liar and accusing him of having “a God-complex.”
“He wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US Military and is ok putting our nation's safety at risk,” Michael wrote on X.
At stake is up to $200 million in work that Anthropic had agreed to do for the military, along with contracts for other government agencies that could also be imperiled.
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Amodei, whose company doesn't want its technology used for mass surveillance of Americans or with weapons that have no human oversight, said he hopes the Defense Department will revisit its current position of only working with contractors who will agree to an all-lawful-use standard.
If Anthropic fails to drop its conditions, the Defense Department has vowed to declare the company a supply-chain risk, a move that would preclude it from working with other defense contractors. The Pentagon has also threatened to invoke the Cold War-era Defense Production Act to use Anthropic's software over the company's objections.
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