Anthropic built its public position around the idea that safety commitments could survive defense procurement — that a lab could engage with military customers without surrendering the guardrails that define it. The Pentagon's push for unrestricted access, including terms covering mass surveillance and autonomous lethal systems, put that position to a contractual test. Anthropic held. The DoD got the same access from Google within weeks. The safety constraint was real; its effect on the military's AI capabilities was zero.