Pentagon | Crypto

Hegseth warned that prediction market wagers could expose military operations to adversaries. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has barred all Pentagon staff from using undisclosed information to place wagers on upcoming military action, including on prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket.  In a memo sent to senior Pentagon and defense agencies on Tuesday, Hegseth said all Department of War personnel are prohibited from engaging in financial transactions using nonpublic information. This involves both classified and unclassified information.  “Make no mistake why this matters. Our enemies watch movements in these markets,” Hegseth wrote. “The lives of our Service members often depend on the enemy not knowing what is coming.” Read more

Anthropic previously secured a $200 million Pentagon contract, and its AI has been used in classified operations, including support for US airstrikes on Iran, the Financial Times reports. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has reportedly reopened negotiations with the US Department of Defense in a last-minute effort to secure continued access to Pentagon contracts as the company faces the possibility of being labeled a supply chain risk by the Trump administration. Amodei has been holding discussions with Emil Michael, the US undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, to finalize terms governing the military’s use of Anthropic’s artificial intelligence models, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter. A new agreement would allow the Pentagon to keep using the company’s technology and could prevent a formal designation that would force contractors in the defense supply chain to cut ties with the AI developer, according to the report. Read more

The company was the first to deploy its AI models on classified US military cloud networks, according to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. The CEO of AI company Anthropic, Dario Amodei, has responded to the United States Department of Defense and the White House, ordering military defense contractors that do business with the Department of Defense to stop using Anthropic’s products. Anthropic objected to the use of its AI models for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons that can fire without any human input, Amodei told CBS News on Saturday.  He added that Anthropic was fine with all of the US government’s proposed use cases for its AI models, except for surveillance and fully autonomous weapons platforms. He said: Read more

The Pentagon isn’t usually in the business of commodity speculation, but when national security is at stake, expect the old rules to bend. The Financial Times reports that the U.S. Defense Department has kicked off a $1 billion spree to stockpile critical minerals like rare earths. This includes everything from rare earths to strategic metals […] The post From gold bars to rare earths: Pentagon’s billion-dollar bet on America’s resource security appeared first on CryptoSlate.