Oppose Pentagon Coercion of Anthropic and Support AI Surveillance Safeguards

I am writing to urge you to oppose Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's ultimatum to Anthropic and to support congressional oversight that prevents AI-enabled mass surveillance of Americans. Hegseth has given Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday to allow unrestricted military use of the company's Claude chatbot or face losing its $200 million Pentagon contract. Defense officials have threatened to designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk or invoke the Defense Production Act to force compliance. Amodei has maintained firm boundaries on two critical areas: fully autonomous military targeting operations and domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens. His concerns are well-founded. In a January essay, he warned that "a powerful AI looking across billions of conversations from millions of people could gauge public sentiment, detect pockets of disloyalty forming, and stamp them out before they grow." This is not hypothetical fearmongering. It describes surveillance capabilities that already exist and that the Pentagon is rapidly adopting without adequate legal constraints. Amos Toh of the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program has stated that "the law is not keeping up with how quickly the technology is evolving" and emphasized that "DoD doesn't have a blank check." He is correct. The Pentagon has already awarded AI contracts worth up to $200 million each to four companies, with OpenAI and Elon Musk's xAI joining the Pentagon's GenAI.mil network for unclassified military tasks. Anthropic remains the only major AI company refusing to provide unrestricted access. The government should not coerce private companies into enabling surveillance tools that could track dissent among American citizens. I ask you to publicly oppose the Pentagon's threats against Anthropic and to support legislation that establishes clear legal boundaries preventing AI-assisted domestic surveillance. Congress must act now to ensure that DoD's rapid AI adoption does not come at the expense of our constitutional rights.