Pentagon leaders called Claude AI ‘woke.’ Tests show otherwise

(Valerie Wirtschafter – Defense One) When Secretary of War Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic a deadline to renegotiate its contract with the Pentagon to include “all lawful purposes” or be designated a supply chain risk — a classification typically reserved for adversarial foreign firms like Huawei — he framed it as a fight against “woke AI.” . “Department of War AI will not be woke,” Hegseth declared during a speech at SpaceX in mid-January 2026. “We’re building war ready weapons and systems, not chatbots for an Ivy League faculty lounge.” Later on, President Donald Trump lambasted Anthropic as a “RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY.”. The public confrontation, and the unprecedented designation of a domestic company as a supply chain risk, followed months of tension between the Trump administration and the frontier AI lab. – Pentagon leaders called Claude AI ‘woke.’ Tests show otherwise. – Defense One