What happened
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth yesterday gave Anthropic until Friday to allow the Pentagon unrestricted access to its Claude artificial intelligence tool or face serious consequences. In a “tense meeting,” Axios said, Hegseth told Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that if his firm did not drop its safety guardrails, the Pentagon would cancel its $200 million contract and “declare Anthropic a ‘supply chain risk,’ or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military’s needs.” 

Who said what
Anthropic has “aggressively positioned itself to be a key player in national security” and was the first AI firm to “integrate its technology into the Pentagon’s classified networks,” The Washington Post said. But tensions have mounted over Amodei’s “ethical concerns about unchecked government use of AI,” The Associated Press said, especially for “fully autonomous armed drones” and “AI-assisted mass surveillance that could track dissent.” Some Trump administration officials have lambasted Anthropic’s “hard-line on domestic surveillance and AI weapons” as “Woke AI,” NPR said. 

Yesterday’s meeting “ended in a stalemate,” as Amodei “reiterated the company’s red lines and said they wouldn’t interfere with the Pentagon’s operations,” The Wall Street Journal said. Either of Hegseth’s threatened sanctions “would be nearly unprecedented,” and a supply-chain risk designation would affect “a swath of companies, including many in the tech sector.” Defense Production Act experts “questioned whether it could be used to force Anthropic to drop the limitations it seeks to maintain,” the Post said. 

What next?
The Pentagon’s threats are “extreme,” legally questionable and “strategically counterproductive,” Lawfare said. But the “deeper problem” is that the “terms governing how the military uses the most transformative technology of the century are being set through bilateral haggling between a defense secretary and a startup CEO,” not by Congress. 

What happened
The House yesterday failed to pass a bipartisan aviation safety bill that won unanimous approval in the Senate in December. The 264-133 House vote fell just short of the two-thirds majority required under special fast-track rules typically used for non-controversial bills. Nearly all 133 no votes came from Republicans. The bill would have required most aircraft to carry advanced location tracking technology, ADS-B In, that the National Transportation Safety Board said would have prevented last year’s deadly midair collision near Washington, D.C.

Who said what
The Senate’s ROTOR Act is strongly backed by the families of the 67 people who died in the January 2025 collision between an Army helicopter and an American Airlines flight. It was also supported by labor groups, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy and, until Monday night, the Defense Department. But it “ran into headwinds in the House from several powerful Republican committee leaders,” NPR said. 

The bill’s defeat was a “major win” for Transportation Committee Chair Sam Graves (R-Mo.), a longtime advocate for smaller private aircraft, Politico said. Graves argued that his rival ALERT Act addressed all 50 NSTB recommendations to prevent future collisions. But Homendy and the victims’ families oppose his legislation because it does not require the use of ADS-B In, as the NSTB has advocated since 2008.

What next?
The victims’ families said in a statement they were “devastated” by the Senate bill’s defeat and urged “House leadership to bring the ROTOR Act back for a vote that lets the majority pass it.” Given that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and his top lieutenants voted no yesterday, “it is unlikely that the House will revive the bill,” The New York Times said. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the ROTOR Act’s lead sponsor with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), called yesterday’s vote a “temporary delay” and predicted the bill will “become the law of the land.”