Headlines
On February 13, the Wall Avenue Journal reported one thing that hadn’t been public earlier than: the Pentagon used Anthropic’s Claude AI through the January raid that captured Venezuelan Chief Nicolás Maduro.
It stated Claude’s deployment got here via Anthropic’s partnership with Palantir Applied sciences, whose platforms are extensively utilized by the Protection Division.
Reuters tried to independently confirm the report – they could not. Anthropic declined to touch upon particular operations. The Division of Protection declined to remark. Palantir stated nothing.
However the WSJ report revealed yet another element.
Someday after the January raid, an Anthropic worker reached out to somebody at Palantir and requested a direct query: how was Claude really utilized in that operation?
The corporate that constructed the mannequin and signed the $200 million contract needed to ask another person what their very own software program did throughout a navy assault on a capital metropolis.
This one element tells you the whole lot about the place we really are with AI governance. It additionally tells you why “human within the loop” stopped being a security assure someplace between the contract signing and Caracas.
How massive was the operation
Calling this a covert extraction misses what really occurred.
Delta Pressure raided a number of targets throughout Caracas. Greater than 150 plane have been concerned. Air protection methods have been suppressed earlier than the primary boots hit the bottom. Airstrikes hit navy targets and air defenses, and digital warfare belongings have been moved into the area, per Reuters.
Cuba later confirmed 32 of its troopers and intelligence personnel have been killed and declared two days of nationwide mourning. Venezuela’s authorities cited a demise toll of roughly 100.
Two sources informed Axios that Claude was used through the energetic operation itself, although Axios famous it couldn’t affirm the exact function Claude performed.
What Claude would possibly even have achieved
To grasp what might have been taking place, it is advisable to know one technical factor about how Claude works.
Anthropic’s API is stateless. Every name is unbiased i.e. you ship textual content in, you get textual content again, and that interplay is over. There is not any persistent reminiscence or Claude working repeatedly within the background.
It is much less like a mind and extra like an especially quick marketing consultant you may name each thirty seconds: you describe the scenario, they offer you their greatest evaluation, you hold up, you name once more with new info.
That is the API. However that claims nothing in regards to the methods Palantir constructed on prime of it.
You’ll be able to engineer an agent loop that feeds real-time intelligence into Claude repeatedly. You’ll be able to construct workflows the place Claude’s outputs set off the subsequent motion with minimal latency between advice and execution.
Testing These Eventualities Myself
To grasp what this really seems like in observe, I examined a few of these eventualities.
each 30 seconds. indefinitely.
The API is stateless. A classy navy system constructed on the API does not should be.
What that may seem like when deployed:
Intercepted communications in Spanish fed to Claude for fast translation and sample evaluation throughout a whole bunch of messages concurrently. Satellite tv for pc imagery processed to establish car actions, troop positions, or infrastructure adjustments with updates each jiffy as new photographs arrived.
Or real-time synthesis of intelligence from a number of sources – alerts intercepts, human intelligence studies, digital warfare knowledge – compressed into actionable briefings that might take analysts hours to supply manually.
skilled on eventualities. deployed in Caracas.
None of that requires Claude to “determine” something. It is all evaluation and synthesis.
However if you’re compressing a four-hour intelligence cycle into minutes, and that evaluation is feeding immediately into operational selections being made at that very same compressed timescale, the excellence between “evaluation” and “decision-making” begins to break down.
And since it is a labeled community, no one outdoors that system is aware of what was really constructed.
So when somebody says “Claude cannot run an autonomous operation” – they’re most likely proper in regards to the API stage. Whether or not they’re proper in regards to the deployment stage is a very totally different query. And one no one can at present reply.
Hole between autonomous and significant
Anthropic’s exhausting restrict is autonomous weapons – methods that determine to kill and not using a human signing off. That is an actual line.
However there’s an unlimited quantity of territory between “autonomous weapons” and “significant human oversight.” Take into consideration what it means in observe for a commander in an energetic operation. Claude is synthesizing intelligence throughout knowledge volumes no analyst might maintain of their head. It is compressing what was a four-hour briefing cycle into minutes.
this took 3 seconds.
It is surfacing patterns and suggestions quicker than any human staff might produce them.
Technically, a human approves the whole lot earlier than any motion is taken. The human is within the course of. However the course of is now transferring so quick that it turns into inconceivable to guage what’s in it in quick paced eventualities like a navy assault.When Claude generates an intelligence abstract, that abstract turns into the enter for the subsequent determination. And since Claude can produce these summaries a lot quicker than people can course of them, the tempo of all the operation quickens.
You’ll be able to’t decelerate to consider carefully a couple of advice when the scenario it describes is already three minutes outdated. The data has moved on. The following replace is already arriving. The loop retains getting quicker.
90 seconds to determine. that is what the loop seems like from inside.
The requirement for human approval is there however the potential to meaningfully consider what you are approving just isn’t.
And it will get structurally worse the higher the AI will get as a result of higher AI means quicker synthesis, shorter determination home windows, much less time to assume earlier than appearing.
Pentagon and Claude’s arguments
The Pentagon desires entry to AI fashions for any use case that complies with U.S. regulation. Their place is basically: utilization coverage is our drawback, not yours.
However Anthropic desires to take care of particular prohibitions – no totally autonomous weapons and prohibiting mass home surveillance of People.
After the WSJ broke the story, a senior administration official informed Axios their partnership/settlement was underneath evaluate and that is the rationale Pentagon said:
“Any firm that might jeopardize the operational success of our warfighters within the subject is one we have to reevaluate.”
However satirically, Anthropic is at present the one business AI mannequin authorized for sure labeled DoD networks. Though, OpenAI, Google, and xAI are all actively in discussions to get onto these methods with fewer restrictions.
The true struggle past arguments
In hindsight, Anthropic and the Pentagon is likely to be lacking all the level and pondering coverage languages would possibly resolve this problem.
Contracts can mandate human approval at each step. However, that doesn’t imply the human has sufficient time, context, or cognitive bandwidth to truly consider what they’re approving. That hole between a human technically within the loop and a human really capable of assume clearly about what’s in it’s the place the actual threat lives.
Rogue AI and autonomous weapons are most likely the later set of arguments.
In the present day’s debate must be – would you name it “supervised” if you put a system that processes info orders of magnitude quicker than people right into a human command chain?
Closing ideas
In Caracas, in January, with 150 plane and real-time feeds and selections being made at operational pace and we do not know the reply to that.
And neither does Anthropic.
However quickly, with fewer restrictions in place and extra fashions on these labeled networks, we’re all going to seek out out.
All claims on this piece are sourced to public reporting and documented specs. We’ve no private details about this operation. Sources: WSJ (Feb 13), Axios (Feb 13, Feb 15), Reuters (Jan 3, Feb 13). Casualty figures from Cuba’s official authorities assertion and Venezuela’s protection ministry. API structure from platform.claude.com/docs. Contract particulars from Anthropic’s August 2025 press launch. “Visibility into utilization” quote from Axios (Feb 13).
