Bangladesh, Feb. 27 -- A simmering feud between Anthropic and the US Department of Defense has burst into the open, and it is, as Foreign Policy put it, “a very bad sign”. The dispute centers on a $200 million Pentagon contract granting the military access to Anthropics Claude model for classified tasks. What looked like another milestone in civil-military AI cooperation has instead exposed deep tensions between private-sector guidelines and state imperatives of control, coercion, and warfighting.

In this case, the clash was almost inevitable, in a way: Anthropics internal policies explicitly ban the use of its models for violence, weapons development, lethal autonomous systems, and mass surveillance. The Pentagon in turn, op...