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Defense #defense · USA/DoD February 28, 2026

Pentagon Threatens Defense Contractor Over AI Safety Rules

Published about 2 hours ago
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SpaceX Falcon Heavy STP-2 Liftoff
NASA / NASA/Cory Huston

Pentagon Threatens Defense Contractor Over AI Safety Rules

AI Ethics Clash Threatens Pentagon-Anthropic Partnership

In a rare showdown between a major defense contractor and an AI company over ethical guardrails, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has publicly refused Pentagon demands to remove safety restrictions on how its Claude AI model can be deployed in military operations. The Department of Defense has given the company until 5:01 PM ET Friday to capitulate or face designation as a "supply chain risk"—a label previously reserved for adversarial nations—and potential invocation of the Defense Production Act to forcibly remove the safeguards.

At the center of the dispute: Anthropic's refusal to loosen policies that prevent its AI from being used in lethal autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance operations. While Pentagon officials claim they have "no interest" in either application, they argue that no private company should be allowed to impose restrictions on how the U.S. military uses its own tools—a governance question with implications far beyond this single contract.

The Escalation

The conflict erupted after the Department of Defense's Chief Digital & AI Office awarded Anthropic (along with Google, xAI, and OpenAI) contracts worth up to $200 million each in summer 2025 to customize generative AI systems for military applications. Since then, classified versions of Claude have been made available to Defense Department personnel through Amazon and Palantir infrastructure. Amodei reportedly met with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth this week in a direct attempt to resolve the dispute, but negotiations failed.

DoD Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael accused Amodei of harboring a "God-complex" and attempting to "personally control the US Military," framing Anthropic's position as a threat to national security. Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell characterized the request as "simple, common-sense"—allowing military use for "all lawful purposes"—and warned that refusal could "jeopardize critical military operations and potentially put our warfighters at risk."

Amodei countered that the Pentagon's threats are "inherently contradictory": simultaneously labeling Anthropic a security risk while declaring Claude essential to national security. He emphasized the company's willingness to support U.S. defense and democratic interests, citing previous decisions to cut off funding to China and existing Pentagon partnerships. However, he drew a clear line on two areas where "AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values."

The Deeper Governance Question

This dispute reflects a fundamental tension in defense procurement: the extent to which private technology companies should retain control over their own products' applications. Michael argued it would be "not democratic" to "let any one company dictate a new set of policies above and beyond what Congress has passed," while Amodei framed the safeguards as necessary guardrails on powerful dual-use technology.

Anthropically's position echoes broader industry concerns about AI autonomy and accountability that have emerged across defense and civilian sectors. The company has previously published detailed policies on acceptable AI use, drawing both praise from safety advocates and criticism from military and intelligence officials who view such restrictions as impediments to operational effectiveness.

What Happens Next

With a Friday deadline now public, the coming 48 hours will determine whether Anthropic capitulates, maintains its stance and accepts supply-chain-risk designation, or negotiates a middle ground with Pentagon leadership. Any resolution will likely establish precedent for how other AI companies—and broader tech contractors—negotiate ethical and operational constraints with the Defense Department. The outcome also carries implications for international security partnerships, as NATO allies and democratic nations watch how the U.S. reconciles technological capability with governance principles.

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Think of it like...

The $200 million contract value is equivalent to NASA's annual budget for three major Earth science missions—substantial enough that losing it would reshape a company's aerospace-tech partnerships.

Related Entities

Anthropic·company
U.S. Department of Defense·agency
Dario Amodei·person
Sean Parnell·person
Emil Michael·person
Claude AI·vehicle
Pentagon's Chief Digital & AI Office·agency
Google·company
OpenAI·company
xAI·company
Amazon·company
Palantir·company
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Space Weather1 day ago

NASA's Twin Spacecraft Will Map Mars' Atmospheric Death

NASA's Twin Spacecraft Will Map Mars' Atmospheric Death NASA's ESCAPADE mission has switched on its science instruments, marking the first operational phase of an unprecedented dual-spacecraft venture to understand how the Sun systematically stripped Mars of its once-habitable atmosphere. Launched November 13, 2025, aboard a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket, the two orbiters are currently looping around Lagrange Point 2—a gravitational waystation 1 million miles from Earth—before executing a gravity-assisted maneuver off our planet in November 2026 to reach Mars in September 2027. The mission arrives at a critical moment for Mars exploration. While robotic rovers have mapped the planet's surface for decades, ESCAPADE represents the first coordinated two-spacecraft investigation of Mars' magnetosphere and the solar wind processes that have transformed the Red Planet from a warm, wet world into a frozen desert over billions of years. "Having two spacecraft is going to help us understand cause and effect," said Michele Cash, ESCAPADE program scientist at NASA Headquarters. This stereo perspective—simultaneous measurements from two vantage points—will reveal how the solar wind interacts with Mars' magnetic field and drives atmospheric escape in real time. Why Mars Lost Its Atmosphere (And Why That Matters for Human Missions) Mars once possessed a dense atmosphere and a robust global magnetic field capable of deflecting the Sun's relentless particle stream. Today, the Red Planet's magnetosphere is a patchwork: remnants of ancient crustal magnetism combined with a weaker, induced field generated by solar wind interactions with charged particles in the upper atmosphere. This "hybrid" magnetosphere provides minimal protection against solar radiation—a critical liability for future human explorers. Understanding this process isn't merely academic. Before NASA sends astronauts to Mars, engineers must quantify radiation exposure on the surface and develop shielding protocols for habitats. ESCAPADE will also characterize Mars' ionosphere, the electrically charged upper atmosphere layer that future missions will rely on for radio communications and navigation systems. "If we ever want GPS at Mars or long-distance communications, we need to understand the ionosphere," said Rob Lillis, the mission's principal investigator at UC Berkeley. A New Approach to Mars Trajectory ESCADADE showcases a paradigm shift in deep-space mission planning. Traditional Mars launches required Earth-Mars orbital alignment—a constraint that restricted launch windows to every 26 months. By adopting a "loiter" orbit around Lagrange Point 2, ESCAPADE decouples launch timing from planetary mechanics, enabling missions to depart Earth almost on demand. During this extended loop, the twin spacecraft will traverse an unexplored region of Earth's distant magnetotail, approximately 1.2 million miles from our planet, collecting the first direct measurements of this region's plasma and magnetic field properties. Technical Innovation: Stereo Magnetosphere Monitoring Once in Mars orbit, ESCAPADE's dual-spacecraft architecture enables groundbreaking measurements. For the mission's first six months, the orbiters will follow identical orbital paths, passing over the same magnetic features at different times. This configuration allows detection of magnetosphere variations on timescales as short as two minutes—previously impossible with single-spacecraft missions. After six months, one spacecraft will climb to higher altitude while the other remains closer to Mars, enabling simultaneous upstream solar wind measurements and magnetosphere monitoring. "Prior spacecraft could either be in the upstream solar wind, or they could be close to the planet," Lillis noted. "ESCAPADE allows us to be in two places at once and measure the cause and the effect." What's Next The spacecraft will arrive at Mars in September 2027, initiating a multi-year science campaign timed to inform NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate planning for crewed missions. ESCAPADE's data will directly feed into radiation protection standards, landing site selection, and life support system requirements for Mars exploration. The mission's success could validate the Lagrange Point loiter trajectory as a standard approach for future deep-space missions, fundamentally reshaping how NASA schedules interplanetary exploration.

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NASA's SpaceX Crew-5 in space station mockups
Discovery1 day ago

NASA Just Made Moonlight into Breathable Air

The News NASA's Carbothermal Reduction Demonstration (CaRD) project has cleared a critical hurdle: successfully extracting oxygen from simulated lunar regolith using nothing but concentrated sunlight. The integrated prototype test, conducted aboard the International Space Station, confirmed that solar-driven chemistry can produce carbon monoxide from lunar soil—the essential first step toward generating breathable air for astronauts living on the Moon. This isn't theoretical anymore. It's hardware that works. Why This Matters Right Now The challenge facing long-duration lunar missions is brutally simple: you can't ship enough oxygen from Earth. Resupply missions are expensive, infrequent, and add massive weight to launch vehicles. For NASA's Artemis program to establish a sustainable lunar base—a cornerstone of the Moon-to-Mars architecture—the agency needs to generate life support resources on-site rather than hauling them across 240,000 miles of vacuum. CaRD solves this by turning lunar geology into life support. The Moon's regolith, the pulverized rock covering its surface, is approximately 45% oxygen by mass, locked inside silicate minerals. The catch: extracting it requires intense heat. CaRD uses a solar concentrator—essentially a sophisticated mirror array—to focus sunlight into a reactor hot enough to drive carbothermal reduction, the same chemistry used on Earth to refine metals from ore. The Technical Achievement The CaRD prototype integrates four major components: a carbothermal oxygen production reactor built by Sierra Space, a solar concentrator designed by NASA Glenn Research Center, precision mirrors from Composite Mirror Applications, and avionics and gas analysis systems from Kennedy Space Center. Johnson Space Center pulled the systems engineering together. During testing, they confirmed production of carbon monoxide (CO) from the regolith simulant—proof that the concept works in controlled conditions. The real power lies downstream: when CO is converted into O₂ using additional chemical processes already in development, the system could produce a steady oxygen supply for habitat life support, fuel cell operations, or even metallurgical processes. Why carbothermal reduction specifically? It's proven industrial chemistry, scalable, and—critically—it requires no chemical inputs that aren't already abundant on the Moon. Sunlight is the only external resource needed. What Comes Next The immediate path forward involves coupling this oxygen extraction with conversion technology to turn CO into usable O₂. Beyond the lunar south pole, NASA is already eyeing how to adapt CaRD for Mars, where the technology could extract oxygen from Martian regolith or even convert atmospheric CO₂ into propellant. The cost and logistics savings are staggering: reducing payload mass for human missions, decreasing launch frequency, and enabling crews to live off the land rather than Earth's supply chain. CaRD was funded by NASA's Game Changing Development program under the Space Technology Mission Directorate—signaling this is no longer moonshot research, but mainstream development. As Artemis missions ramp up in the coming years, technologies like this transition from "demonstration" to "flight hardware." The Moon just became a lot more hospitable.

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