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As the drumbeats of a new American war in the Middle East sounded this week, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth was busy battling a very different opponent: high-profile AI start-up Anthropic.
In a tense Pentagon meeting on Tuesday with chief executive Dario Amodei, Hegseth demanded that Anthropic let the military use its technology however it sees fit, or face expulsion from the defence department’s supply chains. Anthropic balked, concerned about the potential use of its technology in lethal autonomous weapons and for mass domestic surveillance. One of Hegseth’s top lieutenants, Emil Michael, lashed out online at Amodei for being a “liar” with a “God complex”.
The feud is emblematic of the newly styled secretary of war’s crusading approach to leading the Pentagon. Hegseth is shaking up how the defence department does business in an institutional revolution that has echoes across the second Trump administration. But as a standard bearer of the Maga culture wars, the 45-year-old former Fox News host is also overhauling the Pentagon in far deeper ways, tearing up what the administration considers “woke” policies and purging top military leaders viewed as disloyal or unaligned with its rightwing agenda.
Hegseth has done so with a performative style that has been shocking to many. With his slicked-back hair, he has declared that he no longer wants to see “fat generals”, fixating on physical fitness and making videos of himself working out with US troops, cabinet secretaries like Robert F Kennedy Jr and foreign officials such as Japanese defence minister Shinjirō Koizumi. Last week, he was pictured swinging from a tree alongside top health department official Mehmet Oz after a midweek brunch, as the top ranks of the military were briefing Donald Trump on options to attack Iran.
“Between travelling and doing social media videos, I don’t know that he’s got a bearing on [what is] fundamentally important that the Pentagon does,” says a US defence official.
“The fact that he’s doing all these other things in the lead up to potentially a major war in the Middle East is somewhat alarming,” adds one former senior defence official. “It’s a very strange set of behaviours.”
Born in Minneapolis in 1980, Hegseth grew up in its suburbs with his basketball coach father and executive career coach mother. He studied politics and played basketball at Princeton University, where he joined an army officer training programme. He was also publisher of The Princeton Tory, a conservative student magazine, where he railed against “encouragement and support for premarital sex, homosexuality, abortion, and a general hostility towards faith and religion”.
At the Pentagon, Hegseth has put his faith front and centre, starting a monthly prayer service that has featured a Christian nationalist pastor who opposes same-sex marriage and thinks women should be denied voting rights.
After graduating in 2003, Hegseth did a brief stint on Wall Street before being commissioned as an infantry officer in the Army National Guard and deployed to Guantánamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan. His service ended in 2021 after he was barred from duty on Joe Biden’s inauguration day when a fellow soldier reported that he had a tattoo of “deus vult” — a symbol that has been associated with white nationalists.
During his service, Hegseth became an advocate for veterans. Paul Rieckhoff, who knew him at the time and is now a critic, says the “intense” and “charismatic” secretary previously had more moderate views but “was built to be a culture warrior in a rightwing lab”.
In 2014, Hegseth became a Fox News contributor and then co-host of the Fox & Friends Weekend show, catching Trump’s attention. “Pete never struck me as Maga, but like others who owe their success and enhanced positions to Trump, he became Maga, knowing that Trump and his large, powerful audience could eliminate him in a nanosecond,” says one former colleague.
A person familiar with Hegseth’s meetings with defence industry executives says he “can be quite personable”, in “a break from his public persona”. But of all Trump’s cabinet picks, he has had the most fraught confirmation process.
In November 2024, he told a podcast that “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles”, triggering an early backlash. A California police department released a report containing an accusation of sexual assault against him, surprising Trump’s transition team. Separately, Hegseth’s former sister-in-law wrote to senators saying he abused alcohol and “was abusive to his ex-wife”, who she said had at one point hidden from him in her closet. Hegseth has denied the allegations.
Soon after he took the helm at the Pentagon, scandal enveloped him again. In March 2025, Hegseth shared plans for strikes against Houthi rebels in a Signal chat of national security officials that also included a journalist, an action the Pentagon’s watchdog found violated department policy. And late last year, he became embroiled in a furore over the legality of the military’s campaign against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
Trump has continued to stand by his unorthodox defence secretary. The Pentagon said Trump chose Hegseth for his “bold, visionary reforms that reject the failed experiment of woke ideology force-fed to our troops and to restore the warrior ethos that has always made our military the greatest fighting force on Earth”. But in recent days, General Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, has been widely seen as the more influential adviser to Trump on military options for Iran. “Nobody’s going to look to Hegseth as the guy who’s going to run a major war,” says the former defence official.