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Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report, where sources tell us, mind-blowingly, that we are already at the end of February.

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: The U.S. Defense Department and Anthropic wait to see who will blink first, U.S.-Iran nuclear talks resume under the threat of U.S. military action, and a former supreme allied commander of NATO weighs in on the risk of mission creep in a potential Iran operation.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report, where sources tell us, mind-blowingly, that we are already at the end of February.

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: The U.S. Defense Department and Anthropic wait to see who will blink first, U.S.-Iran nuclear talks resume under the threat of U.S. military action, and a former supreme allied commander of NATO weighs in on the risk of mission creep in a potential Iran operation.

What happens when the world’s biggest military gives one of the most safety-conscious artificial intelligence companies an ultimatum? We’re about to find out.

An escalating disagreement between the U.S. Defense Department and Anthropic, an AI company, over how the U.S. military uses Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, came to a head on Tuesday, with U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivering an ultimatum to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a tense meeting at the Pentagon.

SitRep spoke to multiple people familiar with the meeting and the resulting fallout. Here’s what you need to know.

The demand. Hegseth told Amodei that Anthropic must provide the U.S. military with unfettered access to Claude by Friday evening. “Anthropic has until 5:01 p.m., Friday, to get on board or not,” a senior Pentagon official told SitRep.

If not, the Pentagon will do one of two things: invoke the Defense Production Act or label the company a supply chain risk.

The first option would see the Defense Department use a 1950 law, enacted during the Korean War, that allows the government to co-opt the private sector for defense purposes—thus “compelling [Anthropic] to be used by the Pentagon regardless of if they want to or not,” the official said.

The second option, which the Pentagon appears to be leaning toward, would do the opposite by labeling Anthropic as a supply chain risk—a designation typically used for companies from adversarial nations, such as China’s Huawei—which would force any company working with the U.S. military to stop using Anthropic’s products.

The conflict. While the Pentagon says that it should be allowed to use Claude however it wants as long as that use is within legal limits, Anthropic wants guarantees that its models will not be used to develop........

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