Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, attends the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, India on Thursday, February 19, 2026.
Ruhani Kaur | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will meet with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon on Tuesday morning to discuss how the military will use the company’s artificial intelligence models, a Pentagon official said.
Negotiations between Anthropic and the Department of Defense have stalled in recent weeks as the two organizations clash over the terms of use of Anthropic’s technology.
Anthropic wants assurances that its models will not be used for autonomous weapons or spying on Americans. The Department of Defense has made clear that it wants to use Anthropic’s model without restriction “for any legitimate use case.”
As of February, Anthropic is the only AI company to deploy models on the Department of Defense’s classified networks and provide customized models to national security customers. The company signed a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense last year.
Axios was first to report on the upcoming meeting between Amodei and Hegseth.
The dispute is the latest hurdle in Anthropic’s increasingly strained relationship with the Trump administration, which has publicly criticized the company in recent months. The meeting between Mr. Amodei and Mr. Hegseth could help both organizations reach a solution and establish a path forward.
“Anthropic is committed to leveraging frontier AI to support U.S. national security,” a spokesperson said Monday, adding that the company is having “good faith and productive conversations” with the Department of Defense about how to “correctly solve these complex problems.”
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI researchers, and the startup is best known for developing a family of AI models called Claude. The company closed a $30 billion funding round earlier this month, increasing its valuation to $380 billion.
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