The Anthropic-DOD Conflict: Privacy Protections Shouldn’t Depend On the Decisions of a Few Powerful People

The U.S. military has officially ended its $200 million contract with AI company Anthropic and has ordered all other military contractors to cease use of their products. Why? Because of a dispute over what the government could and could not use Anthropic’s technology to do. Anthropic had made it clear since it first signed the contract with the Pentagon in 2025 that it did not want its technology to be used for mass surveillance of people in the United States or for fully autonomous weapons systems. Starting in January, that became a problem for the Department of Defense, which ordered Anthropic to give them unrestricted use of the technology. Anthropic refused, and the DoD retaliated.

There is a lot we could learn from this conflict, but the biggest take away is this: the state of your privacy is being decided by contract negotiations between giant tech companies and the U.S. government—two entities with spotty track records for caring about your civil liberties. It’s good when CEOs step up and do the right thing—but it’s not a sustainable or reliable solution to build our rights on. Given the government’s loose interpretations of the law, ability to find loopholes to surveil you, and willingness to do illegal spying, we needs serious and proactive legal restrictions to prevent it from gobbling up all the personally data it can acquire and using even routine bureaucratic data for punitive ends.

Imposing and enforcing such those restrictions is properly a role for Congress and the courts, not the private sector. 

The companies know this. When speaking about the specific risk that AI poses to privacy, the CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei said in an interview, “I actually do believe it is Congress’s job. If, for example, there are possibilities with domestic mass surveillance—the government buying of bulk data has been produced on Americans, locations, personal information, political affiliations, to build profiles, and it’s not possible to analyze all of that with AI—the fact that that is legal—that seems like the judicial interpretation of the Fourth Amendment has not caught up or the laws passed by Congress have not caught up.” 

The example he cites here is a scarily realistic one—because it’s already happening. Customs and Border Protection has tapped into the online advertising world to buy data on Americans for surveillance purposes. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been using a tool that maps millions of peoples’ devices based on purchased cell phone data. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has proposed a centralized data broker marketplace to make it easier for intelligence agencies to buy commercially available data. Considering the government’s massive contracts with a bunch of companies that could do analysis, including Palantir, a company which does AI-enabled analysis of huge amounts of data, then the concerns are incredibly well founded. 

But Congress is sadly neglecting its duties. For example, a bill that would close the loophole of the government buying personal information passed the House of Representatives in 2024, but the Senate stopped it.  And because Congress did not act, Americans must rely on a tech company CEO has to try to protect our privacy—or at least refuse to help the government violate it.

Privacy in the digital age should be an easy bipartisan issue. Given that it’s wildly popular (71% of American adults are concerned about the government’s use of their data and among adults that have heard of AI 70% have little to no trust in how companies use those products) you would think politicians would be leaping over each other to create the best legislation and companies would be promising us the most high-end privacy protecting features. Instead, for the time being, we are largely left adrift in a sea of constant surveillance, having to paddle our own life rafts.

EFF has, and always will, fight for real and sustainable protections for our civil liberties including  a world where our privacy does not rest upon the whims of CEOs and back room deals with the surveillance state.