The 76-year-old law that once mobilized factories for the Korean War is now being wielded as leverage over frontier AI companies like Anthropic.
A law designed to keep American factories humming during the Korean War is getting a very 21st-century makeover. The Defense Production Act, first enacted in 1950, is now at the center of the Trump administration’s strategy to maintain national security control over advanced artificial intelligence, with its core authorities set to expire on September 30, 2026.
A Cold War tool meets frontier AI #
The DPA grants the executive branch sweeping powers: prioritizing government contracts, expanding industrial production, and responding to national emergencies. Over its lifetime, the law has been reauthorized more than 50 times, applied to everything from wartime manufacturing to pandemic-era supply chains.
In February 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and reportedly threatened to invoke the DPA to enforce compliance regarding military use of Anthropic’s AI models. The message was blunt: cooperate with defense applications, or the government has tools to compel it.
For a company that has publicly positioned itself as the “safety-first” AI lab, that kind of meeting carries significant weight. Anthropic has historically maintained restrictions on how its models can be used in military contexts, making the confrontation a direct collision between corporate AI ethics policies and national security imperatives.
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Executive action and legislative maneuvering #
Executive Order 14409, issued on June 2, 2026, emphasizes the development of secure AI technologies specifically for national security applications. Three days later, NSPM-11 directed agencies to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence across the national security apparatus.
On the legislative side, the current DPA expiration date exists because of a one-time extension tucked into the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act. A new bill, H.R. 7688, proposes extending DPA authorities for five years, pushing the deadline to September 30, 2031, while also including modernization provisions designed to update the law for an era its original authors couldn’t have imagined.
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