Senators Markey and Van Hollen Demand Hegseth Stop Pressure Campaign Against ...

Washington (February 27, 2026) - Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), member of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, and Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), member of the Appropriations Committee, today led a letter to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth urging the Department of Defense (DOD) to drop its week-long intimidation campaign against Anthropic and engage in good-faith negotiations with all of its AI contractors. The Department of Defense has threatened to terminate its contract with Anthropic, label the company a “supply-chain risk,” and potentially invoke the Defense Production Act against it if, by 5:00 PM Friday, February 27, Anthropic does not drop its requests for safeguards against DOD’s potential use of Anthropic’s AI model for mass surveillance and autonomous-weapons deployment.

In the letter the senators wrote, “These DOD threats are an extraordinary and deeply alarming abuse of government power. DOD is deploying its strongest statutory tools to compel a private contractor to agree to its preferred contractual terms, using false and incoherent arguments about national security to justify its action — all because the contractor, Anthropic, has requested two reasonable safeguards in its contract with DOD. This is retaliation, and it is unacceptable. It is an attempt to bully an American company to surrender critical safety and security safeguards — the very protections the federal government should itself be mandating — and instead provide the Department unlimited power over a powerful AI model.”

The senators continued, “The Department’s resistance to restrictions on mass domestic surveillance is particularly alarming because the Trump administration is already weaponizing federal surveillance tools to chill speech and suppress dissent. … The Department’s threats against the one company willing to push back makes clear that the Trump administration has no intention of curtailing its expanding surveillance state. … The Department should end this coercive campaign and instead commit to good-faith negotiations with all its AI contractors to establish enforceable safeguards that protect the American people.”