US President Donald Trump late Sunday floated “treason” charges against media outlets that he accused of reporting false information about the Iran war as the human and economic costs of his illegal military assault continued to mount. In a tirade posted to his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote that media outlets he accused of circulating “fake news” should “be brought up on Charges for…
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Former schoolteacher Theo Henderson had been unhoused for six years when he launched the “We the Unhoused” podcast in 2019 from a park in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Henderson became unhoused in 2013 when he was evicted after losing his job and falling into medical debt due to spiraling costs related to his diabetes. When he began documenting his experiences and those of his unhoused neighbors…
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Colorado organizers celebrated a “victory,” after Palantir Technologies, the data-mining and AI company long criticized for its work with immigration enforcement and the military, announced on Feb. 17 that it moved its corporate headquarters from Denver to Miami. The relocation followed more than a year of escalating protests in Colorado targeting Palantir’s local offices that included…
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This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Feb. 25, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has threatened to punish the artificial intelligence company Anthropic if it doesn’t let the Pentagon use its technology however it wants—apparently even to create autonomous killer drones or conduct surveillance of Americans.
Anthropic’s powerful AI model, Claude, is currently the only one permitted to handle classified military data, and the company was awarded a $200 million contract last year to develop AI capabilities for the Department of Defense to use alongside other AI firms.
However, the company’s usage policy prohibits its use for mass surveillance and for the development of autonomous weapons—such as drones that attack targets without a human operator.
These limitations have infuriated the Defense Department leadership. On Tuesday, Hegseth called Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, to a meeting at the Pentagon, where he demanded “unfettered” access to Claude without any guardrails.
This goal was outlined last month in the department’s “AI Strategy” memo, which called for the US to adopt an “AI-first warfighting force” and for companies to allow their technology to be deployed for “any lawful use,” free from ethical safeguards.
According to a senior defense official who spoke to Axios, Hegseth issued an ultimatum to Amodei on Tuesday: If he does not grant the Pentagon unrestricted use of Anthropic’s technology by 5:01 pm on Friday, the department would take measures to coerce the company.
It would either declare Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” effectively blacklisting it for military use and ending its contract, or it would invoke the Defense Production Act, which would force the company to tailor the product to the military’s needs.
While it would not be an
Artificial intelligence has rapidly evolved from a niche lobbying issue into a central pillar of corporate influence in Washington. Nowhere is this shift more evident than in the defense industry, where both legacy defense contractors and an influx of AI-first startups are making the technology a core focus of their lobbying efforts. AI barely registered in federal lobbying disclosures for…
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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has threatened Antropic with blacklisting if the AI company refuses to allow its tools to be used for autonomous drone attacks or mass surveillance – a chilling show of the Pentagon’s priorities. In a meeting with the company on Tuesday, Hegseth said that the company must lift its demands for the safety restrictions by Friday at 5:01 pm. Otherwise…
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