The Cold War Era Law at the Center of Hegseth’s Anthropic Threat

The Pentagon is poised to take unprecedented steps in its standoff with Anthropic PBC that risk touching off a massive legal fight with the $380 billion company and threaten to undermine Pentagon efforts to further adopt artificial intelligence.

At the center of the escalating dispute is a 76-year-old law called the Defense Production Act, passed in 1950 to boost production for the Korean War. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has threatened to invoke the legislation as a way of forcing Anthropic to give up guardrails it’s set around the way its Claude AI system can be used.