Pentagon Stops Using Anthropic's Claude After Blacklisting — SkimNews
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- The Pentagon confirmed it "has ceased the use of Anthropic products," months after Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth designated the company a "national security supply-chain risk" in February and ordered a phase-out by late August.
- Anthropic refused to strip safety guardrails from Claude over concerns about mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, prompting the blacklisting — a legal category typically reserved for companies based in adversarial countries.
- Anthropic's Claude remained in active use across the Pentagon as recently as last week, including for intelligence gathering and military operations against Iran, because it was deeply embedded in Palantir's Maven Smart System, the department's primary intelligence platform.
- Hegseth set the six-month phase-out deadline on 27 February — one day before the US and Israel attacked Iran — and the Pentagon has since signed contracts with Google, xAI, and OpenAI, with OpenAI tools seeing wider adoption in some military departments.
- A federal judge ruled on 28 August that the Trump administration illegally retaliated against Anthropic, bolstering the company's lawsuit to overturn the supply-chain-risk designation.
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei met with Trump twice at the White House last week, telling reporters he still has AI risk concerns but believes "if we work with the president, we can win safely," signalling a thaw even as the legal fight continues.
Why it matters: The Pentagon's full break with Anthropic hands OpenAI, Google, and xAI a clear runway inside the most security-sensitive AI buyer in the US, while Anthropic's parallel courtship of Trump at the White House suggests the company is betting that diplomatic access can outflank a court defeat it already won once.
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