Headlines
On February 13, the Wall Road 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 way of Anthropic’s partnership with Palantir Applied sciences, whose platforms are broadly 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 all the pieces 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 large was the operation
Calling this a covert extraction misses what really occurred.
Delta Drive raided a number of targets throughout Caracas. Greater than 150 plane had been concerned. Air protection methods had been suppressed earlier than the primary boots hit the bottom. Airstrikes hit navy targets and air defenses, and digital warfare property had been moved into the area, per Reuters.
Cuba later confirmed 32 of its troopers and intelligence personnel had 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 lively operation itself, although Axios famous it couldn’t affirm the exact function Claude performed.
What Claude may even have accomplished
To know 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 impartial i.e. you ship textual content in, you get textual content again, and that interplay is over. There is no persistent reminiscence or Claude working repeatedly within the background.
It is much less like a mind and extra like a particularly quick guide you may name each thirty seconds: you describe the state of affairs, they offer you their greatest evaluation, you cling up, you name once more with new data.
That is the API. However that claims nothing in regards to the methods Palantir constructed on high of it.
You possibly can engineer an agent loop that feeds real-time intelligence into Claude repeatedly. You possibly can construct workflows the place Claude’s outputs set off the following motion with minimal latency between suggestion and execution.
Testing These Eventualities Myself
To know what this really appears to be like like in follow, I examined a few of these eventualities.
each 30 seconds. indefinitely.
The API is stateless. A classy navy system constructed on the API would not should be.
What that may seem like when deployed:
Intercepted communications in Spanish fed to Claude for immediate translation and sample evaluation throughout tons of 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 reviews, digital warfare knowledge – compressed into actionable briefings that will take analysts hours to provide manually.
educated on eventualities. deployed in Caracas.
None of that requires Claude to “resolve” 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 this can be a labeled community, no one exterior that system is aware of what was really constructed.
So when somebody says “Claude cannot run an autonomous operation” – they’re in all probability proper in regards to the API stage. Whether or not they’re proper in regards to the deployment stage is a totally totally different query. And one no one can presently reply.
Hole between autonomous and significant
Anthropic’s laborious restrict is autonomous weapons – methods that resolve to kill with out 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 follow for a commander in an lively 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 proposals sooner than any human crew might produce them.
Technically, a human approves all the pieces 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 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 following resolution. And since Claude can produce these summaries a lot sooner than people can course of them, the tempo of all the operation accelerates.
You possibly can’t decelerate to think twice a couple of suggestion when the state of affairs 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 resolve. 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 shouldn’t 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 assume earlier than performing.
Pentagon and Claude’s arguments
The Pentagon needs entry to AI fashions for any use case that complies with U.S. regulation. Their place is actually: utilization coverage is our drawback, not yours.
However Anthropic needs 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 informed Axios their partnership/settlement was beneath evaluation and that is the rationale Pentagon said:
“Any firm that will jeopardize the operational success of our warfighters within the area is one we have to reevaluate.”
However mockingly, Anthropic is presently the one industrial AI mannequin accepted 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 battle past arguments
In hindsight, Anthropic and the Pentagon is likely to be lacking all the level and considering coverage languages may 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 in all probability the later set of arguments.
At the moment’s debate ought to be – would you name it “supervised” if you put a system that processes data orders of magnitude sooner than people right into a human command chain?
Ultimate 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 search out out.
All claims on this piece are sourced to public reporting and documented specs. We have now 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).
