Why the Pentagon Wants to Destroy Anthropic

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

News, Government, Society & Culture

4.3 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2026

⏱️ 70 minutes

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Summary

Last Friday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that he was breaking the Pentagon’s contract with the A.I. company Anthropic and would declare the company a supply chain risk — a designation for companies so dangerous, they can’t exist anywhere in the U.S. military supply chain. What makes this so wild is the military is still using Anthropic’s A.I. system right now. They reportedly used it during the raid to capture Maduro in Venezuela, and are now using it in the war in Iran. This story raises so many questions: Why does the government think Anthropic is so dangerous? How exactly is the government using A.I. right now? How do they want to use A.I.? And who should ultimately control this powerful and uncertain technology? Dean Ball is a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and the author of the newsletter Hyperdimensional. He served as a senior policy adviser on A.I. for the Trump White House and was the primary staff writer of their A.I. action plan. But he’s been furious at the Trump administration for how it has been handling the conflict with Anthropic. So I wanted to have him on the show to explain why. Mentioned: “Hyperdimensional" by Dean Ball “What if Dario Amodei Is Right About A.I.?” The Ezra Klein Show “Stratechery” by Ben Thompson Book Recommendations: Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays by Michael Oakeshott Empire Of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene D. Genovese Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The So right now, everyone is thinking about Iran.
0:35.1	But there is this story happening around it that I think we need to not lose
0:39.4	sight of, because it's about not just how we are fighting this war, but how we're going to be
0:44.8	fighting all wars going forward. On Friday of last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hagseth announced
0:50.5	that he was breaking the government's contract with the AI company Anthropic.
0:55.7	And not just that, he intended to designate them a supply chain risk. The supply chain risk
1:01.9	designation is for technologies so dangerous. They cannot exist anywhere in the U.S. military supply
1:08.2	chain. They cannot be used by any contractor or any subcontractor
1:12.3	anywhere in that chain. It has been used before for technologies produced by foreign companies
1:17.6	like China's Huawei, where we fear espionage or losing access to critical capabilities during a
1:24.1	conflict. It has never been used against an American company. What is even wilder about
1:31.3	this is it is being used, or at least being threatened, against an American company that is even now
1:38.2	providing services to the U.S. military as we speak. Anthropics AI system Claude was used in the raid against Nicholas Maduro,
1:46.0	and it is reportedly being used in the war with Iran. But there were red lines that Anthropic
1:51.8	would not allow the Department of War to cross. The one that led to the disintegration of the
1:56.4	relationship was overusing AI systems to surveil the American people using commercially available data.
2:02.9	So what is going on here? How does the government want to use these AI systems? And what does it
2:08.1	mean that they are trying to destroy one of America's leading AI companies for setting some
2:13.4	conditions on how these new, powerful, and uncertain technologies can be deployed.
2:20.2	My guest today is Dean Ball.
2:22.4	Dean is a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and author of the newsletter
	...

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