The Pentagon-Anthropic Clash Exposes AI Ethics as a Contested Terrain

Anthropic's collision with Pentagon procurement is not a story about one company's values under stress — it is a demonstration of what ethics commitments are actually worth when institutional power makes a counter-offer. The lab built its public identity around safety-first development, and that identity has commercial value precisely because it differentiates Anthropic from labs that do not make the same claim. Military contracting tests a different variable: whether the commitment holds when the buyer has enough leverage to reshape it.