Anthropic’s fight with the Pentagon shows how AI could threaten a crucial safeguard of democracy

In February, the United States Department of Defense threatened to designate the AI firm Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” after a dispute over the military’s use of the company’s Claude models.

This designation would not only put the company’s $200 million Pentagon contract at risk, but would require all defence contractors to cut ties with the company.

At the centre of the dispute were two uses that Anthropic said it would not permit: fully autonomous weapons and the mass surveillance of Americans.

The Pentagon wanted Anthropic to allow the military to use its AI for “ all lawful purposes .” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the company did not believe current frontier AI models were reliable enough for fully autonomous weapons and argued that mass domestic surveillance would endanger democratic values.

U.S.

President Donald Trump responded by directing federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology , while allowing agencies like the Defense Department six months to phase out existing use.

Anthropic challenged the designation in court, and on March 26, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking its enforcement while the litigation proceeds.

The dispute raises a question larger than the future of one government contract.

In my book Corporations and Persons: A Theory of the Firm in Democratic Society , I argue that a company’s responsibilities are owed not primarily to an administration, but to the entire democratic constitutional order.

I have previously argued that this includes a duty to resist autocratic demands.

Here, I want to focus on a particularly urgent version of that responsibility: the duty to warn.

Two kinds of warning Companies often know things that democratic citizens need to know in order to govern themselves.

For example, Facebook’s internal research raised serious concerns about Instagram’s effects on teenagers’ mental health.

Those findings became public only after former Facebook employee Frances Haugen came forward as a whistle-blower.