Anthropic ditches its core safety promise in the middle of an AI red line fight with the Pentagon

[highplainsdem]

Source: CNN

Anthropic, a company founded by OpenAI exiles worried about the dangers of AI, is loosening its core safety principle in response to competition.

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In a blog post Tuesday outlining its new policy, Anthropic said shortcomings in its two-year-old Responsible Scaling Policy could hinder its ability to compete in a rapidly growing AI market.

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It’s not clear that Anthropic’s change is related to its meeting Tuesday with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei an ultimatum to roll back the company’s AI safeguards or risk losing a $200 million Pentagon contract. The Pentagon threatened to put Anthropic on what is effectively a government blacklist.

But the company said in its blog post that its previous safety policy was designed to build industry consensus around mitigating AI risks – guardrails that the industry blew through. Anthropic also noted its safety policy was out of step with Washington’s current anti-regulatory political climate.

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Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/25/tech/anthropic-safety-policy-change

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Oh, I think it's clear enough that they're caving to the Pentagon. That meeting was very early yesterday. The blog post was almost certainly hours later, and had probably been drafted long before that.

Yesterday's post about that meeting and the Friday deadline they were given:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143621589