Hegseth issues an ultimatum to ‘woke AI’ startup Anthropic: Get with military program by Friday or lose $200 million

The Trump administration has repeatedly condemned AI safeguards as “woke AI.” During a fiery speech at SpaceX in January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth railed against AI systems with ideological restrictions. “Department of War AI will not be woke,” he said. “It will work for us. We’re building war-ready weapons and systems, not chatbots for an Ivy League faculty lounge.”

With just days left before Hegseth’s reported deadline for Anthropic to drop its seemingly woke demands for AI safety and guarantees of nonmilitary use, Anthropic told Fortune that it “continued good-faith conversations” with the Pentagon.

Anthropic is facing a deadline of 5:01 p.m. Friday to give the Pentagon unrestricted access to its AI technology or be blacklisted from the military supply chain, Axios reported, as confirmed by the Associated Press.

The standoff follows months of negotiations between the Defense Department and Anthropic over how the military can use the company’s AI. As Axios reported, Hegseth warned Anthropic the Pentagon could label the company a “supply-chain risk,” a designation reserved for foreign adversarial firms, such as...