WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is pressuring Anthropic to give the military broader access to its artificial intelligence technology or lose its Pentagon contract. Hegseth gave Anthropic’s CEO a Friday (Feb. 27, 2026) deadline to open its AI tech for unrestricted military use o r risk losing its government contract. That’s according to a person familiar with their meeting who was not authorized to speak about it publicly. Hegseth met Tuesday with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, whose company makes the chatbot Claude and remains the last of its peers to not supply its technology to a new U.S. military internal network. The Defense Department hasn’t commented. ...read more read less