TL;DR: The clock is now ticking on the dustup between Anthropic and the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave the company until Friday at 5:01pm to meet its demands during a reportedly “tense” face-to-face yesterday, a senior defense official confirmed to Tech Brew. The government is floating drastic legal measures to force Anthropic to roll back certain AI guardrails, but the company is said to be digging in its heels—despite rolling back some of its protections separately, if they affect its competitiveness. The next couple days might show just how resilient AI ethics pledges are in the face of potential business losses and DC pariah status. It’s also a test of just how irreplaceable Anthropic’s AI is.

What happened: An Anthropic spokesperson said that yesterday’s Pentagon meeting was a “good-faith conversation,” but a defense official’s description to Axios—“not warm and fuzzy at all”—sounds a bit more on point.

Hegseth reiterated to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that the department will declare Anthropic a “supply chain risk” and also invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to allow use on the Pentagon’s terms—two different steps that would seem to contradict one another (OpenAI, Google, and xAI have all accepted the terms). Anthropic’s Claude was the only AI model approved for use in classified systems. As of Monday, the government has granted Elon Musk’s xAI (and its controversial Grok model) that status and is close to doing so with other AI companies it’s in talks with, the senior defense official told us (OpenAI has already been ramping up work with the military).

Anthropic’s leverage: Claude holds some cards that Grok doesn’t have, though: It’s generally considered to be better. And a senior administration official told Axios that other models “are just behind” when it comes to specialized government use cases.

Anthropic has positioned itself well for national security, and its models perform well on the use cases the Pentagon needs, according to Owen Daniels, associate director of analysis at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

And it may be hard to remove Claude depending on how deeply it’s already embedded, Chirag Mehta, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research told us. Anthropic’s relationship with Palantir also makes Claude tricky to disentangle.

“Swapping models is easy on paper but hard in production,” Mehta said. “The real work sits in the integration, the evaluations, and the accreditation trail.”

Why it matters: “Using the DPA to try to strongarm a private company to do what they want just strikes me as unprecedented and uncalled for,” Kristian Stout, director of innovation policy at the International Center for Law and Economics, told us. “We're not at war, we're not at threat of war. There's no asteroid landing that we need sudden emergency help with.”

The government also doesn’t usually label companies as “supply chain risks” unless they’re doing something like working with a foreign adversary. But Daniels said it is also “very uncommon” for a government contractor to draw boundaries the way Anthropic is.

“Part of the challenge here stems from the clash of cultures of these two organizations,” Daniels said. “From the Pentagon's perspective, there's […] the precedent that this could set in terms of companies trying to dictate terms to DoD.”

What comes next: Anthropic has until 5:01pm on Friday to comply with the Pentagon’s demands. But there’s always a chance the deadline could be kicked down the road. And Anthropic does hold some leverage here—the Pentagon clearly wants to keep using its models. But it’s also out on a limb without its industry peers backing up its stance. “They're really stepping out on their own in this regard,” Daniels said. —PK

The water bottle with main character energy

In an era when wellness culture champions drinking more water than ever, you can now take hydration to the next level by tracking every sip. Hussaina from Toronto, Canada, uses HidrateSpark, a smart water bottle, to make sure she’s drinking enough H2O.

"It makes me track my water intake and because it’s usually on the lower end, I tend to drink at least a litre more because of the tracking data," says Hussaina.

With two models available (the Pro and Pro 2) in a few different sizes and lid types, HidrateSpark water bottles contain a chargeable sensor that uses weight to track volume. Connect your bottle via Bluetooth to the HidrateSpark app and it’ll automatically sync your water intake. The bottles run for about $50-$80 depending on which you pick.

The app sets daily consumption goals based on things like your age, sex, weight, height, and activity level (if you choose to give it these details). The bottom of the bottle lights up when you’re behind on your goal, and the app gently reminds you to drink more water via push notifications. If you pay for the premium version of the app ($1.99 per month or $14.99 per year), it also gives you a score based on how well you did throughout the day. Finally, a water bottle that does more than cosplay as hydration decor (sorry, Stanley).

The Good: If you have the latest model, you can use Apple’s Find My feature to locate your bottle if misplaced. You can also compete with friends in fun, healthy challenges and connect your information to other apps like Apple Health and Fitbit. Another feature users enjoy: You can change the color of the glow for when your bottle lights up.

The Bad: “Bluetooth setup is painful,” according to Hussaina. Plus, all models of the HidrateSpark water bottles monitor how much you drink, not what you drink, meaning your vessel can’t tell if you actually put iced coffee in it. If you want to track beverages besides water, you have to manually input those in the app. And because of the sensor, you should avoid putting hot liquid in most versions, as they are generally designed for cold, noncarbonated drinks.

Verdict: Signal —CM

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Major League Baseball was founded before the invention of the light bulb—and now it’s finally catching up to the 21st century. For the first time, MLB will use an automated system to lay down the final verdict on balls and strikes in the regular season when it kicks off on March 25 (it was previously tested during last year’s spring training, which started again this past weekend). The Automated Ball-Strike tech is already proving the umpires wrong more often than not.

While a human still squints at every pitch to make the initial call, now the ump’s authority can be reviewed and overturned in about 15 seconds by the ABS, which uses a dozen Hawk-Eye cameras—the same used in tennis—and computer vision AI to show what happened over home plate. That should mean fewer blown calls and, fans hope, fewer heartbreaking losses.

Sports fans will find a way to argue about anything, but the reaction to ABS has been largely positive, with many people calling it long overdue. Throughout the MLB’s 150-year history, umpires have made calls that decided championships and cost at least one pitcher a perfect game. One Boston University study found that MLB umpires made about 14 missed calls per game in 2018, which adds up to a lot of thrown beer cans. Pitches have also gotten faster, making them even harder for just two eyeballs to track accurately.

Still, baseball took its sweet time to get here—soccer, tennis, the NBA, and the NFL have all handed off big calls to automated officiating already. The only downside of the robo-umpire: It’s just not as fun booing a camera. —WK

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