Anthropic is standing up to the US Department of War and refusing to remove AI autonomous weapon and mass surveillance safeguards: 'We cannot in good conscience accede to their request'

Anthropic is standing up to the US Department of War and refusing to remove AI autonomous weapon and mass surveillance safeguards: ‘We cannot in good conscience accede to their request’ | PC Gamer Skip to main content Open menu Close main menu PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES US Edition UK US Canada Australia Subscribe Sign in View Profile Sign out Search Search PC Gamer Games Hardware News Reviews Guides Video Forum More PC Gaming Show PC Gamer Clips Software Codes Coupons Movies & TV Magazine Newsletter Affiliate links Meet the team Community guidelines About PC Gamer PC Gamer Magazine SubscriptionWhy subscribe?Subscribe to the world’s #1 PC gaming magTry a single issue or save on a subscriptionIssues delivered straight to your door or device From$1Subscribe now Don’t miss these AI Todd Howard says AI’s ‘not a fad’ but ‘we’re not using it to generate anything… that handcrafted human intention, is what makes things special, and that’s where we want to be’ AI Reports claim an AWS outage last year was caused by an AI coding tool deciding to ‘delete and recreate the environment’ from scratch, while Amazon says ‘misconfigured access controls’ were to blame Gaming Industry Krafton’s new chief AI officer says the company ‘uses AI as a tool to amplify human imagination and creativity, not replace it’ 3 months after it announced a hiring freeze and launched a voluntary resignation programme AI ‘I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb’: OpenClaw AI chose to ‘speedrun’ deleting Meta AI safety director’s inbox due to a ‘rookie error’ Platforms Open-source game engine Godot is drowning in ‘AI slop’ code contributions: ‘I don’t know how long we can keep it up’ AI Judging by the GPT-4o situation, game developers will have a big problem if they get serious about AI chatbot NPCs AI ‘The compute bottleneck is massively under appreciated’ says Google AI Studio lead: ‘I would guess the gap between supply and demand is growing [by a] single digit % every day’ AI Microsoft CEO warns that we must ‘do something useful’ with AI or they’ll lose ‘social permission’ to burn electricity on it AI A human software engineer rejected an AI agent’s code change request, only for the AI agent to retaliate by publishing an ‘angry’ blog about him Gaming Industry Microsoft’s execs can’t stop hooting and hollering about AI, but Xbox’s new overlords promise ‘We’ve got no pressure’ from up top that would ‘flood our ecosystem with slop’ AI Anthropic ditches its defining safety promise to pause dangerous AI development because it’s basically pointless when everybody else is ‘blazing ahead’ AI Anthropic says it has identified thousands of ‘fraudulent accounts’ taking Claude and ‘extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models’ AI Anthropic AI’s safety lead quits with epic vaguepost claiming ‘the world is in peril’, and so he’s off to become ‘invisible’ and study poetry RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian defends itself as fans react to generative AI use: ‘I’m not entirely sure we are the ideal target for the level of scorn’ AI ‘No platform gets a free pass’: UK government’s Online Safety Act rules extending to chatbots after Grok fallout PopularNEW: PC Gamer Clips!Resident EvilArc RaidersBest PC gearGame Quizzes Software AI Anthropic is standing up to the US Department of War and refusing to remove AI autonomous weapon and mass surveillance safeguards: ‘We cannot in good conscience accede to their request’ News By Andy Edser published 27 February 2026 ‘We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk.’ When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter PC Gamer Get the PC Gamer Newsletter Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. You are now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful Want to add more newsletters? Every Friday GamesRadar+ Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you’re going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them. 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From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we’ve got you covered. Signup + Once a month SFX Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month! Signup + An account already exists for this email address, please log in. Subscribe to our newsletter Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has released a statement on the company’s website regarding its months-long dispute with the US Department of War over the use of its AI technology. In the statement. Amodei outlines his refusal to remove safeguards that prevent its AI products from being used for fully autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance purposes.”I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries,” the statement begins. “Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community.”However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values,” the statement continues. “Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now: Related articles Anthropic’s apparently starting to learn that it can’t have its cake and eat it when it comes to working with the military ‘I think this is crazy’: Anthropic’s CEO takes a potshot at