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 by means of 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 one more 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 Power raided a number of targets throughout Caracas. Greater than 150 plane have been concerned. Air protection techniques 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 dying toll of roughly 100.
Two sources advised Axios that Claude was used through the energetic operation itself, although Axios famous it couldn’t verify the exact function Claude performed.
What Claude would possibly even have performed
To know what may have been occurring, you should know one technical factor about how Claude works.
Anthropic’s API is stateless. Every name is impartial 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 a particularly quick marketing consultant you may name each thirty seconds: you describe the scenario, they provide you their finest evaluation, you dangle up, you name once more with new data.
That is the API. However that claims nothing in regards to the techniques Palantir constructed on high of it.
You may engineer an agent loop that feeds real-time intelligence into Claude repeatedly. You may construct workflows the place Claude’s outputs set off the subsequent motion with minimal latency between suggestion and execution.
Testing These Situations Myself
To know what this really appears to be like like in follow, I examined a few of these situations.
each 30 seconds. indefinitely.
The API is stateless. A classy navy system constructed on the API would not must be.
What that may appear to be when deployed:
Intercepted communications in Spanish fed to Claude for immediate translation and sample evaluation throughout lots of of messages concurrently. Satellite tv for pc imagery processed to establish automobile actions, troop positions, or infrastructure adjustments with updates each couple of minutes as new photographs arrived.
Or real-time synthesis of intelligence from a number of sources – alerts intercepts, human intelligence reviews, digital warfare knowledge – compressed into actionable briefings that will take analysts hours to provide manually.
educated on situations. deployed in Caracas.
None of that requires Claude to “determine” something. It is all evaluation and synthesis.
However once you’re compressing a four-hour intelligence cycle into minutes, and that evaluation is feeding instantly into operational choices 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 person exterior 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 completely different query. And one no person can presently reply.
Hole between autonomous and significant
Anthropic’s onerous restrict is autonomous weapons – techniques that determine to kill and not using a human signing off. That is an actual line.
However there’s an infinite quantity of territory between “autonomous weapons” and “significant human oversight.” Take into consideration what it means in follow for a commander in an energetic operation. Claude is synthesizing intelligence throughout knowledge volumes no analyst may 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 sooner than any human staff may 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 shifting so quick that it turns into not possible to judge what’s in it in quick paced situations like a navy assault.When Claude generates an intelligence abstract, that abstract turns into the enter for the subsequent resolution. And since Claude can produce these summaries a lot sooner than people can course of them, the tempo of your complete operation quickens.
You may’t decelerate to consider carefully a couple of suggestion when the scenario it describes is already three minutes outdated. The data has moved on. The subsequent replace is already arriving. The loop retains getting sooner.
90 seconds to determine. that is what the loop appears to be like like from inside.
The requirement for human approval is there however the capacity to meaningfully consider what you are approving will not be.
And it will get structurally worse the higher the AI will get as a result of higher AI means sooner synthesis, shorter resolution home windows, much less time to suppose 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 actually: utilization coverage is our downside, not yours.
However Anthropic desires to keep up particular prohibitions – no absolutely autonomous weapons and prohibiting mass home surveillance of People.
After the WSJ broke the story, a senior administration official advised Axios their partnership/settlement was beneath overview and that is the rationale Pentagon acknowledged:
“Any firm that will jeopardize the operational success of our warfighters within the subject is one we have to reevaluate.”
However paradoxically, Anthropic is presently the one industrial AI mannequin authorised for sure labeled DoD networks. Though, OpenAI, Google, and xAI are all actively in discussions to get onto these techniques with fewer restrictions.
The actual struggle past arguments
In hindsight, Anthropic and the Pentagon could be lacking your complete level and pondering coverage languages would possibly remedy this concern.
Contracts can mandate human approval at each step. However, that doesn’t imply the human has sufficient time, context, or cognitive bandwidth to really consider what they’re approving. That hole between a human technically within the loop and a human really in a position to suppose clearly about what’s in it’s the place the true danger lives.
Rogue AI and autonomous weapons are most likely the later set of arguments.
In the present day’s debate needs to be – would you name it “supervised” once you put a system that processes data orders of magnitude sooner than people right into a human command chain?
Remaining ideas
In Caracas, in January, with 150 plane and real-time feeds and choices 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 now have no personal 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).
