New Delhi, March 1 -- A rift between the AI firm Anthropic and the US federal government has broken into the open at a fraught geopolitical moment. Negotiations between the AI firm and the Pentagon over deployment of frontier models by the US military stalled after Anthropic refused to permit the use of its models for two specific use cases: domestic surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons.

Open AI has struck a deal with the Pentagon in the meantime, even as the use of AI in the battlefield accelerates with deployments by Israel and the US in the ongoing war in West Asia.

Dario Amodei, founder of Anthropic, has argued that his proposed limits are non-negotiable. When talks stalled, the disagreement turned political. Trump criticized ...