The U.S. military has formally designated artificial intelligence firm Anthropic a supply chain risk, the company announced Thursday, a sweeping move that could cut it off from military-related contracts.
The Trump administration and Anthropic — the only AI company deployed on the Pentagon’s classified networks — are at an impasse over Anthropic’s push for guardrails that would explicitly ban the U.S. military from using its Claude model to conduct mass surveillance on Americans or power fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon says it needs the ability to use Claude for “all lawful purposes,” and argues the uses of AI that Anthropic is concerned about are already not allowed.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last week that Anthropic would be cut off from its government contracts and designated a supply chain risk, but Anthropic had not received formal notification of that step until this week. A senior Pentagon official confirmed to CBS News that the company has now been notified.
Hegseth said the military will phase out Anthropic over six months. A source familiar with the situation told CBS News that no timeline for offboarding Claude was provided in the designation.
The U.S. military has used Claude in its strikes on Iran that began last weekend, two sources familiar with the matter previously told CBS News. It’s not clear exactly how the artificial intelligence model is being deployed.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement that “we do not believe this action is legally sound, and we see no choice but to challenge it in court.”
Amodei also said “the vast majority of our customers are unaffected” by the move. He wrote that the designation doesn’t prevent military contractors from using Anthropic’s technology for non-military work, and should only impact uses of Claude that are directly linked to Defense Department contracts.
Anthropic received the supply chain risk designation after Amodei told investors this week he was still in talks with the Pentagon “to try to deescalate the situation.” Amodei said at a Morgan Stanley conference that the two sides “have much more in common than we have differences,” according to audio exclusively obtained by CBS News.
In an interview with CBS News last Friday, Amodei said he wants to work with the military to protect U.S. national security interests, but the company is standing firm in insisting on guardrails. He argued that AI could offer the government vast new surveillance powers that are “contrary to American values,” and AI isn’t precise enough to be used for fully autonomous weapons that target people without human input. In his view, the law hasn’t caught up with technology.
“We have these two red lines,” Amodei said. “We’ve had them from day one. We are still advocating for those red lines. We’re not going to move on those red lines.”
The Pentagon’s position is that it’s already illegal for the military to conduct mass surveillance on Americans, and fully autonomous weapons are already restricted by internal Defense Department policies, so there is no need to put restrictions on any of those uses of AI in writing.
Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, said in an interview with CBS News late last week: “At some level, you have to trust your military to do the right thing.” But he also noted that “we’ll never say that we’re not going to be able to defend ourselves in writing to a company.”
Michael said last week the Pentagon offered a compromise that would acknowledge in writing the laws and policies that restrict mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Anthropic called those compromises inadequate, saying the offer was “paired with legalese” that effectively let the military disregard the guardrails.
The disagreement grew increasingly bitter last week, with Trump administration officials accusing Anthropic of trying to restrict the military’s operations and impose its own values onto the federal government. Hegseth called Anthropic “sanctimonious,” Michael said Amodei has a “God-complex,” and Mr. Trump called the company “radical left” and “woke.”
The Trump administration gave Anthropic a deadline of last Friday evening to agree to let the military use Claude for “all lawful purposes.” With the two sides still far apart, Mr. Trump on Friday ordered federal agencies to immediately stop using Claude, though the Defense Department was given up to six months to phase the technology out.
Anthropic rival OpenAI — known for ChatGPT — then announced that it had cut a deal with the military.
“From the very beginning, this has been about one fundamental principle: the military being able to use technology for all lawful purposes,” a senior Pentagon official told CBS News on Thursday. “The military will not allow a vendor to insert itself into the chain of command by restricting the lawful use of a critical capability and put our warfighters at risk.”
Amodei has strongly criticized the Trump administration’s decision, calling it “retaliatory and punitive.”
Asked by CBS News last week if he had a message for Mr. Trump, Amodei said “everything we have done has been for the sake of this country” and “for the sake of supporting U.S. national security.”
“Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world,” he said. “And we are patriots. In everything we have done here, we have stood up for the values of this country.”