Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will reportedly give Anthropic until Friday to drop certain guardrails for military use, as reported by Axios. The outlet also reported that CEO Dario Amodei met with Hegseth yesterday as the Pentagon ratcheted up pressure on the AI company to give in to its demands.

The makers of Claude have reportedly been offered an ultimatum: Either yield to the government’s demands to remove limits for certain military applications, or potentially be forced to tailor its AI model to the government’s needs under the Defense Production Act.

Anthropic, for its part, has said that while it was willing to adopt certain policies for the Pentagon, it would not allow its model to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or for the development of autonomous weapons.

Claude is currently the only AI model employed in some of the government’s most sensitive work. “The only reason we’re still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. The problem for these guys is they are that good,” a defense official told Axios.

The Pentagon is reportedly ramping up conversations with OpenAI and Google about using their models for classified work. ChatGPT and Gemini are already approved for unclassified government use. Elon Musk’s xAI also recently signed with the DoD to use Grok in classified systems.