Anyone interested in AI ethics should pay close attention to what is unfolding in America right now.
The Department of Defence (given the pointed new title “Department of War” by Trump) is demanding that Anthropic (maker of Claude) lift all usage restrictions on its AI models. Specifically at issue are two safeguards Anthropic had written into its contract: a prohibition on mass surveillance of American citizens, and a prohibition on fully autonomous lethal weapons that select and kill a target without a human in the loop.
Anthropic has refused, and that has brought the wrath of the American government down upon it. Trump has ordered all government agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI models. Defence Secretary Hegseth has labelled Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — a designation normally reserved for foreign adversaries and never previously applied to an American company. At the same time, the administration is threatening to invoke the Defense Production Act, a law that only applies when a product is essential to national security. So Anthropic is simultaneously a security risk and indispensable. A curious contradiction that reveals this is above all a power struggle.
Meanwhile OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) has stepped into the breach and struck a deal with the Pentagon. They claim to uphold the same red lines, but leave the assessment of what that means to the Department of Defence. Convenient.
Anthropic is no saint: it works with surveillance firm Palantir and was the first AI company to operate on the government’s defence computer networks. But this confrontation does show that significant differences exist between AI providers when it comes to drawing ethical lines.
By now almost all of us use AI in some form. This episode shows how high the stakes are: the ethical limits on AI are under enormous pressure, and a favourable outcome is far from certain. This is a strong argument for digital sovereignty — our own European and Dutch AI models, on our own terms, grounded in our own ethics.
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