As the drumbeats of a new American war in the Middle East sounded this week, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth was busy battling a very different opponent: high-profile AI start-up Anthropic.
In a tense Pentagon meeting on Tuesday with chief executive Dario Amodei, Hegseth demanded that Anthropic let the military use its technology however it sees fit, or face expulsion from the defence department’s supply chains. Anthropic balked, concerned about the potential use of its technology in lethal autonomous weapons and for mass domestic surveillance. One of Hegseth’s top lieutenants, Emil Michael, lashed out online at Amodei for being a “liar” with a “God complex”.
The feud is emblematic of the newly styled secretary of war’s crusading approach to leading the Pentagon. Hegseth is shaking up how the defence department does business in an institutional revolution that has echoes across the second Trump administration. But as a standard bearer of the Maga culture wars, the 45-year-old former Fox News host is also overhauling the Pentagon in far deeper ways, tearing up what the administration considers “woke” policies and purging top military leaders viewed as disloyal or unaligned with its rightwing agenda.