Anthropic Faces Scrutiny Over AI Safety Commitments and National Security Use Cases

Anthropic drew heightened scrutiny from security and policy communities over how its AI safety and governance commitments are evolving and how its models are being positioned for sensitive use cases. A Help Net Security analysis reported that Anthropic’s updated Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) 3.0 represents a structural shift from maintaining absolute risk below fixed thresholds to a more relative, competitor-dependent posture—implying Anthropic may be less willing to pause or constrain capability development if peers do not. The same reporting also noted Anthropic’s launch of Claude Code Security as a move that unsettled parts of the cybersecurity market and raised questions about trust and vendor assurances in security-adjacent AI offerings.

In parallel, Lawfare reported the Pentagon labeled Anthropic a national security risk tied to usage restrictions Anthropic imposed on a military contract, while also describing reporting that the U.S. military used Anthropic’s Claude model in initiating operations in Iran less than a day later—highlighting the tension between policy concerns and rapid military adoption of frontier AI. Separately, Anthropic announced the creation of the Anthropic Institute, a research unit intended to study long-term societal impacts and risks from advanced AI; the company stated its models can already discover severe cybersecurity vulnerabilities and argued that governments and industry will face near-term governance challenges as capabilities accelerate.