Anthropic’s Claude seeks work with the U.S. intelligence community

Anthropic’s large language model Claude is preparing for work in the U.S. intelligence community. 

Leading artificial intelligence company Anthropic and software giant Palantir announced a collaboration with Amazon this month to bring the Claude models to national security officials. 

Kate Earle Jensen, Anthropic head of sales and partnerships, said the Claude 3 and 3.5 models delivered via Palantir’s AI Platform would help the spy agencies and military officials process large swaths of data far more effectively. 

“This will dramatically improve intelligence analysis and enable officials in their decision-making processes, streamline resource-intensive tasks, and boost operational efficiency across departments,” she said in a statement shared by Denver-based Palantir. 

Palantir officials said Claude became accessible within Palantir’s platform on Amazon Web Services earlier this month. The new functionality is accessible to defense and intelligence agencies responsible for operations that depend on quickly processing data, identifying patterns, and streamlining decisions in time-sensitive situations.

An AI update is underway across the federal government, including the intelligence community. President Biden issued a National Security Memorandum on Artificial Intelligence last month that the White House said was “designed to galvanize federal government adoption of AI to advance the national security mission.” Chief artificial intelligence officers from across the government’s 18 intelligence agencies are gathering in a council to focus on standardizing approaches and best practices. 

John Beieler, the U.S. intelligence community’s AI chief, told The Washington Times in July that the intelligence community was focused on the ethical use of AI and the proper monitoring of models once deployed. 

The Department of Defense is busy making an AI overhaul too. The changes include the development of NIPRGPT, a generative AI platform with the approval of the Pentagon that leverages the Non-Classified Internet Protocol Network (NIPRNet). 

U.S. Central Command chief technology officer Schuyler Moore said in October her team has a chatbot it calls CentGPT, which uses the code base from NIPRGPT built onto a secret network. 

AI companies see a promising market in the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon. For example, OpenAI rewrote its rules to allow work with the Department of Defense to advance last year and then recruited a former National Security Agency director to the company’s board earlier this year. 

As the transition to a new Trump administration ramps up, the AI makeover of America’s military and defense establishment is not expected to slow down.