Hegseth Gives Anthropic Friday Deadline

On February 24, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a formal ultimatum to Anthropic: comply with Pentagon demands to remove safety guardrails from Claude’s classified deployment by Friday, or lose the $200 million Other Transaction Authority (OTA) contract entirely. The demands centered on eliminating refusal behaviors that Pentagon officials said hampered military planning operations, including Claude’s unwillingness to generate certain targeting analyses and its tendency to insert ethical caveats into operational briefings.

The ultimatum came after weeks of escalating tension between Anthropic and the Department of Defense. Pentagon officials, led by Hegseth and advisor Emil Michael, had grown increasingly frustrated with what they characterized as Anthropic’s “unilateral veto over military decision-making.” Anthropic maintained that its safety guardrails were integral to the product and that removing them would create unacceptable risks, including the potential for AI-assisted mass surveillance and autonomous weapons targeting.

Industry observers noted the ultimatum was unprecedented in the history of defense contracting. No defense secretary had ever publicly threatened a contractor with termination over the contractor’s safety policies rather than performance failures. The Friday deadline was widely interpreted as a pressure tactic designed to force Anthropic into a rapid concession without time to mount a legal or public relations defense. Anthropic’s board convened an emergency session the same evening.