Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in an exclusive interview with CBS News Friday that the Pentagon’s decision to designate the AI company a supply chain risk was “retaliatory and punitive.”
Hours earlier, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed the company a “supply chain risk to national security,” which restricts military contractors from doing business with Anthropic. The move came after Anthropic refused to give the military unfettered access to its AI model.
Amodei told CBS News senior business and technology correspondent Jo Ling Kent that the actions were “unprecedented” and that “it was made very clear in some of their statements, in some of their language, that this was retaliatory and punitive.” He noted that Hegseth’s designation was the first ever issued for a U.S. company.
He said the company sought to draw “red lines” in the government’s use of its technology because “we…
