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• Trump directs agencies to stop working with AI firm; Pentagon to designate company a ‘supply-chain risk’
• Actions follow dispute over company’s ‘red lines’ on autonomous weapons, surveillance
• Rival OpenAI announces its own deal for classified networks amid fallout
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said on Friday he is directing the government to stop working with Anthropic and the Pentagon announced it would declare the startup a supply-chain risk, dealing a major blow to the artificial intelligence lab after a showdown over technology guardrails.
Trump added there would be a six-month phase-out for the Defence Department and other agencies that use the company’s products.
If Anthropic does not cooperate with the transition, the president said, he would use “the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow.”
The actions mark an extraordinary rebuke by the United States against one of the premier companies that has kept it in the lead on national security-critical AI. The move threatens to give Anthropic, which is backed by Alphabet’s Google and Amazon.com, a pariah status that Washington until now had reserved for foreign adversary suppliers.
The moves also set a precedent that US law alone would constrain how AI is deployed on the battlefield, with the Pentagon seeking to preserve all flexibility and not be limited by warnings from the technology’s creators against powering weapons with potentially unreliable AI.
In a statement, Anthropic said it would challenge any risk designation in court by the Department of Defence, which the Trump Administration has renamed the Department of War.
“We believe this designation would both be legally unsound and set a dangerous precedent for any American company that negotiates with the government,” the company said.
“No amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.”
Late on Friday, rival OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft and Amazon, announced its own deal to deploy technology in the Defence Department’s classified network.
CEO Sam Altman said on X, formerly Twitter, that the Pentagon shared its principles for human responsibility over weapon systems and for having no mass US surveillance.
“We put them into our agreement,” Altman said of the points. “We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted.”
It was not immediately clear whether these contractual details differed from the red lines proposed by Anthropic.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said Anthropic would be designated a supply-chain risk following an impasse in months of talks on whether the company’s policies could constrain military action.
Meeting with Hegseth this week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued for weapons and surveillance limits, irking Pentagon officials who maintained that US law, not a private company, would determine how to defend the country.
The designation could bar tens of thousands of contractors from using Anthropic’s AI when working for the Pentagon.
That represents an existential threat to its government business and could harm its private-sector relationships, said Franklin Turner, an attorney who specialises in government contracts.
“Blacklisting Anthropic is the contractual equivalent of nuclear war,” he said.
A similar US action was taken to remove Chinese tech giant Huawei from the Pentagon’s supply chains. Starting in 2017, the US restricted Defence Department use of Huawei equipment and prohibited federal agencies from purchasing its technology.
‘Killer robots’
Tech companies and the Pentagon have repeatedly locked horns since at least 2018, when employees at Google protested against the Pentagon’s use of its AI to analyse drone footage.
A rapprochement ensued with companies including Amazon and Microsoft jousting for defence business. But concerns over theoretical “killer robots” have grown among human-rights and technology activists as wars in Ukraine and Gaza have showcased increasingly automated systems.
Anthropic’s AI is already in use across the intelligence community and armed services. It was the first among its peer AI companies to work with classified information through a supply deal via cloud provider Amazon.
The Pentagon has signed agreements worth up to $200 million each with major AI labs in the past year, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.
Published in Dawn, March 1st, 2026
