Top names in the U.S. defense industry got together last week for a meeting in West Palm Beach.

Here's our colleague Amrith Ram Kumar.

The Defense Technology Summit in Florida on Tuesday was really a gathering of some top Pentagon officials and people in the tech world. And the

motivation is to embed the most advanced technology throughout the U.S. military. These days,

talking about tech means talking about AI. But there was one thing they were really buzzing about.

And that was the AI company Anthropic and the use of its tools in the military.

And it's the latest sort of development in this saga that's consumed a lot of Washington.

This saga goes back years and has to do with the way Anthropics AI is being used.

They are clashing with the Pentagon over how the military uses quad,

Anthropics AI models, and Anthropic is trying to put up some guardrails and

prevent some uses, and they've been fighting over that for many months now.

One of the loudest voices in the disagreement is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegesith.

Department of War AI will not be woke. It will work for us.

We're building war-ready weapons and systems, not chatbots, for an Ivy League faculty lounge.

What is its stake here?

Why does it matter if Anthropic and the government are on the outs?

This fight is really about AI's use in the military and the government broadly. It's about whether the technology can be

used for in the future autonomous weapons potentially or for surveillance and law enforcement.

And that has far-reaching consequences that will probably not be clear for a while. But this is

the first salvo in what is going to be a very one complicated battle.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Jessica Mendoza.

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