---
type: source
title: "Exclusive: Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge — Binding Pause Commitment Replaced with Non-Binding Roadmap"
author: "Time Magazine (@time)"
url: https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-safety-pledge/
date: 2026-02-24
domain: grand-strategy
secondary_domains: [ai-alignment]
format: article
status: unprocessed
priority: high
tags: [anthropic, rsp-v3, pause-commitment, frontier-safety-roadmap, non-binding, mutually-assured-deregulation, voluntary-governance, safety-policy, pentagon, hegseth-ultimatum]
---

## Content

On February 24, 2026, Anthropic released RSP v3.0 — the same day Defense Secretary Hegseth gave CEO Dario Amodei a deadline of 5pm to allow unrestricted military use of Claude.

**Key changes in RSP v3.0:**

**What was dropped:**
- The binding pause commitment from RSP v2 (October 2024) — Anthropic had pledged to halt development/deployment if it couldn't implement adequate mitigations before reaching the next ASL threshold
- Hard stop operational mechanism: "if we cannot implement adequate mitigations before reaching ASL-X, we will pause"

**What replaced it:**
- "Frontier Safety Roadmap" — a detailed list of non-binding safety goals
- "Risk Reports" — comprehensive risk assessments every 3-6 months (beyond current system cards)
- Commitment to publicly grade progress toward goals
- Commit to matching competitors' mitigations if they're more effective and can be implemented at similar cost

**Anthropic's stated rationale:**
- "Stopping the training of AI models wouldn't actually help anyone if other developers with fewer scruples continue to advance"
- "Some commitments in the old RSP only make sense if they're matched by other companies"
- "Unilateral pauses are ineffective in a market where competitors continue to race forward"
- The strategy of "non-binding but publicly-declared" targets borrows from transparency approaches championed for frontier AI legislation

**GovAI analysis (governance.ai):**
- Initial reaction: "rather negative, particularly concerned about the pause commitment being dropped"
- After deeper engagement: "more positive"
- Conclusion: "better to be honest about constraints than to keep commitments that won't be followed in practice"

**Additional change:** Anthropic added a "missile defense carveout" — autonomous missile interception systems are exempted from the autonomous weapons prohibition in use policy.

**Timeline context:**
- RSP v2: October 2024 — introduced ASL framework and binding pause commitments
- February 24, 2026: RSP v3.0 released; Hegseth ultimatum to Anthropic same day
- February 26, 2026: Anthropic publicly refuses Pentagon terms; RSP v3 already released
- February 27, 2026: Pentagon designates Anthropic supply chain risk; $200M contract canceled

## Agent Notes
**Why this matters:** Anthropic's rationale for dropping binding pause commitments IS the Mutually Assured Deregulation mechanism operating at corporate voluntary governance level. The same logic that makes national-level restraint untenable ("competitors will advance without restraint so unilateral restraint means falling behind with no safety benefit") is explicitly invoked to justify abandoning binding corporate safety commitments. This extends MAD from national/institutional levels down to the corporate voluntary governance level.
**What surprised me:** The timing (same day as Hegseth ultimatum). Whether causal or coincidental, the effect is that on the day of maximum external pressure, the binding safety mechanism was converted to non-binding. Also: GovAI's evolution from "negative" to "positive" — the safety community normalized the change relatively quickly.
**What I expected but didn't find:** A clear signal that the change was planned before February 24 (which would support "independent of Pentagon pressure"). All sources treat it as part of the Pentagon dispute context.
**KB connections:** [[voluntary-ai-safety-red-lines-are-structurally-equivalent-to-no-red-lines-when-lacking-constitutional-protection]], [[voluntary-ai-safety-constraints-lack-legal-enforcement-mechanism-when-primary-customer-demands-safety-unconstrained-alternatives]], [[mandatory-legislative-governance-closes-technology-coordination-gap-while-voluntary-governance-widens-it]]
**Extraction hints:** Strong claim candidate: "RSP v3's substitution of non-binding Frontier Safety Roadmap for binding pause commitments instantiates Mutually Assured Deregulation at corporate voluntary governance level — the MAD mechanism operates fractally across national, institutional, and corporate levels." Also: "Anthropic's RSP v3 missile defense carveout establishes that autonomous weapons prohibition is commercially negotiable under competitive pressure."
**Context:** Time exclusive signals this was considered significant news. The February 24 timing is the key contextual fact — whether driven by the Pentagon ultimatum or pre-planned, the binding commitment was removed at the moment of maximum external coercive pressure.

## Curator Notes (structured handoff for extractor)
PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[voluntary-ai-safety-red-lines-are-structurally-equivalent-to-no-red-lines-when-lacking-constitutional-protection]]
WHY ARCHIVED: RSP v3 pause commitment drop is the corporate-level instantiation of Mutually Assured Deregulation — the safety-committed lab explicitly uses MAD logic to justify removing binding commitments, confirming the mechanism operates at every governance level simultaneously
EXTRACTION HINT: Extract two claims: (1) RSP v3 pause commitment drop using MAD logic; (2) Missile defense carveout as precedent for commercially negotiable autonomous weapons prohibition
