WASHINGTON: Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has said the company has “no choice” but to challenge in court the Pentagon’s formal designation of the artificial intelligence firm as a risk to US national security.

The CEO, writing in a blog post on Thursday, insisted however that the ruling’s practical scope is narrower than initially suggested, signalling that the designation would not have a catastrophic effect on the company.

Amodei said the Department of War the name preferred by the Trump administration for the Department of Defence confirmed in a letter that Anthropic and its products, including its widely-used Claude AI model, have been deemed a supply chain risk.

It is the first time a US company has ever been publicly given such a designation, a label typically reserved for organisations that operate within foreign adversaries, like Chinese tech company Huawei.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon named as its chief data officer a computer scientist who aided billionaire Elon Musk’s efforts to overhaul the government last year and who has boosted white supremacists and misogynists online.

In a social media post, the Pentagon said Gavin Kliger’s new role “places him at the centre of the department’s most ambitious AI efforts,” focusing on “day-to-day alignment and execution of the Departments AI projects, working directly with America’s frontier AI labs to support the warfighter”.

Kliger, in social media posts between Oct 2024 and January last year, has voiced controversial views and reposted content from white supremacist Nick Fuentes and self-described misogynist Andrew Tate.

Amodei, in his blog post, said the company disputes the legal basis of the action, but sought to reassure customers. “It plainly applies only to the use of Claude by customers as a direct part of contracts with the Department of War, not all use of Claude by customers who have such contracts,” he wrote.

Published in Dawn, March 7th, 2026