1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

As a deeply concerned and actively engaged constituent, I am in solidarity with the Center for American Progress and numerous other alarmed experts in objecting to the unprecedented threats by the Department of Defense (DOD) against AI giant Anthropic. Maker of the popular AI tool called Claude, Anthropic should be praised and wholly supported for its principled stand against the Pentagon’s incredibly dangerous demands. While the DOD is insisting that it be given unrestricted military use of Claude, Anthropic insists on maintaining the very few restrictions it has placed on the utilization of their AI technology: i.e. “to ensure that Claude is not used for mass domestic surveillance or for autonomous weapons systems without human oversight” (Connor 2/26/26, cited at bottom). As a result of Anthropic’s refusal to strip away these safety guardrails—given the company’s belief that Claude “is the most powerful technology in the history of the world” (ibid)— the Pentagon has threatened to designate the company as a “supply chain risk,” which would severely damage or even destroy the company. Far more disturbing, the Pentagon’s unfettered use of Claude could also unleash a true existential threat to the world, since one person could control a whole army of drones, for example, with no aid from any other persons. Given the Trump administration’s brazen disregard for the law and Trump’s history of immensely self-enriching government decisions that appear to be obviously corrupt, who knows what horrific results would follow from the DOD’s unrestricted access to this technology? Given these grave risks, I join with the Center for American Progress to insist that you do everything in your power stop this madness. More specifically, I call on Congress to do the following (ibid): (1) Vociferously object to and forbid “the administration’s attempt to abuse its power and threaten to destroy one of America’s newest and most valuable companies”; (2) Immediately hold hearings convened by the Senate and House Armed Services Committees “on the DOD’s threatened use of supply chain risk designations and the DPA [Defense Production Act] against a domestic AI company”; (3) Urge members of both parties to demand that “the DOD provide Congress with the full terms of its existing contracts with Anthropic and a legal justification for any threatened retaliation.” In sum, I am in complete agreement with the urgent call for Congress to “recognize that the need is real for true AI safeguards and prohibited uses—not just from private companies but codified in law for government use of AI as well.” Source for quotes (in Adam Connor’s 2/26/26 “The Trump Administration Is Trying to Make an Example of the AI Giant Anthropic”): <https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-trump-administration-is-trying-to-make-an-example-of-the-ai-giant-anthropic/>