Primary source: Anthropic News: Statement on Department of War

Anthropic’s statement positions the company as a partner to democratic governments while drawing hard lines on specific uses (domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons). As policy messaging, it is highly polished: it presents national-security cooperation, ethical constraints, and institutional responsibility in one coherent narrative.

The tension appears when that narrative is compared with events from the past year. Claude has repeatedly been framed as a safety-focused model, yet multiple public incidents suggest recurring misuse and extraction pressure. In that context, the statement can be read not only as an ethical position, but also as narrative repositioning: shifting attention from “our model has been abused” to “we are principled gatekeepers.”