Major General Robert F. Dees says the United States has entered a new phase of strategic competition in which artificial intelligence is now a decisive element of military power, and he warns America cannot fight an artificial intelligence arms race with technology it does not control.
Dees, a retired Army commander and national security expert, said the current model leaves the Pentagon buying access to AI capabilities while private firms keep control over development, testing and ongoing updates. He described that arrangement as unsustainable for a constitutional republic.
That warning comes as the Pentagon leans harder on advanced software for military planning and intelligence while policymakers debate how much authority private companies should have over what the government can use in war. Dees spent 31 years in uniform, leading troops from the 101st Airborne Division to U.S. Forces Korea and a joint U.S.-Israeli missile defense task force, giving weight to his view that the stakes are no longer theoretical.
The friction in his argument is simple. Anthropic, the company behind Claude and its model Mythos, sought to impose red lines around certain uses of its technology, while the Pentagon said it must retain the ability to use AI tools for all lawful purposes in defense of the nation. Those positions could not be reconciled. The relationship collapsed, Anthropic was later designated a supply chain risk, and the Department of War was forced to look elsewhere for AI capabilities.
Anthropic has limited access to Mythos, which was described as too dangerous for public release and reportedly can autonomously identify and weaponize undiscovered cybersecurity vulnerabilities. That is the kind of capability that makes the race feel immediate rather than abstract, especially as China and its aligned partners move aggressively to deploy AI at scale.
The competition is not playing out only inside sealed corporate systems. China and its partners are also using open-source models that can be adapted for military and intelligence applications, and systems like DeepSeek are not bound by the same governance structures that shape American firms. They are built to be modified, extended and integrated across a wider ecosystem that includes China’s military and a growing network of partner nations at odds with the United States.
Dees’s central warning lands because it matches the structure of the field. The Pentagon can purchase access, but it does not control the tools. The companies decide what is trained, tested and deployed. And in the middle of a fast-moving strategic contest, that gap is where the next advantage — or the next failure — is likely to emerge.
