Astral Codex Ten

Department of War

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Department of War

Article

Department of War is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 01, 2026 and March 03, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Anthropic’s refusal to allow the Department of War to use their AIs for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons”; “Altman’s contract with the Department of War”; “the Department of War can change its own policies”. It most often appears alongside Anthropic, ChatGPT, OpenAI.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: March 01, 2026
  • Last seen: March 03, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

"All Lawful Use": Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 01, 2026 · Original source
Last Friday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared AI company Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, the first time this designation has ever been applied to a US company. The trigger for the move was Anthropic’s refusal to allow the Department of War to use their AIs for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
Inline links: supply chain risk, refusal
The debate centers on the Department of War’s demand that AIs be permitted for “all lawful use”. Anthropic worried that mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry would de facto fall in this category; Hegseth and Altman have tried to reassure the public that they won’t, and the parts of their agreement that have leaked to the public cite the statutes that Altman expects to constrain this category. Altman’s initial statement seemed to suggest additional prohibitions, but on a closer read, provides little tangible evidence of meaningful further restrictions.
Some alert ACX readers1 have done a deep dive into national security law to try to untangle the situation. Their conclusion mirrors that of Anthropic and the majority of Twitter commenters: this is not enough. Current laws against domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons have wide loopholes in practice. Further, many of the rules which do exist can be changed by the Department of War at any time. Although OpenAI’s national security lead said that “we intended [the phrase ‘all lawful use’] to mean [according to the law] at the time the contract is signed’, this is not how contract law usually works, and not how the provision is likely to be enforced2. Therefore, these guarantees are not helpful.
Inline links: 1, said, 2
Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day
March 03, 2026 · Original source
In conjunction with the President's directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.
If you are a Department of War contractor, this designation—if formally adopted—would only affect your use of Claude on Department of War contract work. Your use for any other purpose is unaffected.
In other words, the “supply chain risk” designation only means that companies can’t use Anthropic products in their specific Department of War contracts. So if Amazon is doing 95% normal civilian cloud compute stuff, and 5% special government contracts, only 5% of their contracts are affected. This is trivial! Anthropic can keep all its compute and most of its business partnerships even with Department-of-War-linked companies!