Michael: AI vendors restricting kinetic use pose legitimate military supply chain risks
Emil Michael · The Pentagon's AI Plan + Behind the Anthropic Fight — With Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · Apr 15, 2026 · at 36:14
Emil Michael, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, defends the Pentagon's decision to classify Anthropic as a supply chain risk.
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“If Lockheed Martin builds a weapon for me, and they're using, ah, a technology to help them do some of these science-oriented things, physics, aerodynamics, and so on, and the vendor has expressed an unwillingness to want that to be part of the use case, well, then what am I getting in that system that's eventually going to come upstream to our warfighters? I don't know. What if they decide to change their red lines? What if the model hallucinates because its values are like, we don't want to cause this to be used in a kinetic way? Those were the things currently in the contract. So you worry about the downstream implications of that on everything that leads to the protecting the warfighter and defending the country. And so it is a legit worry if their alignment with our mission is, is not real.”
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