‘Has ceased the use of Anthropic products’
The US Department of Defense is no longer using Anthropic’s AI tools. A department official told the BBC in a statement on Monday that the Pentagon “has ceased the use of Anthropic products” — seven months after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated the company a national security supply chain risk and said the department would stop using it by late August. No explanation was given for the delay.
The statement came in answer to a BBC question about the department’s use of Anthropic, after several people familiar with the matter said Claude was still in wide use. As recently as last week, according to former US defence officials and contractors who have worked with the Pentagon on AI, Claude was being used for research, analysis and intelligence gathering, and in military operations against Iran. A spokesman for Anthropic declined to comment.
Why the Pentagon blacklisted its first classified-work supplier
Anthropic’s tools had been used by the US government and military since 2024, and the company was the first frontier AI developer to have its models deployed in agencies doing classified work. The relationship broke down earlier this year when the Pentagon pressed Anthropic to strip the safety guardrails from Claude and give the military unrestricted access to its products. Anthropic refused, citing mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
Hegseth then designated the company a “national security supply-chain risk” — a label normally reserved for suppliers based in countries considered a threat to the United States. He set the six-month phase-out on 27 February, one day before the US and Israel attacked Iran. Anthropic called the designation “unprecedented and unlawful” and sued the Trump administration to overturn it. A federal appeals court upheld the Pentagon’s position in late September.
Claude was inside Maven
Part of the reason the removal took so long is where Claude sat. Several people said it was embedded in Maven Smart System, the Palantir-operated platform the Pentagon uses to organise intelligence and other data, including satellite imagery and drone footage. That data was fed into Claude and other large language models for tasks including identifying potential military targets, and officials drew on the output when compiling the one-page briefs that move up the chain of command. Maven is also used by some US allies to share intelligence with Washington.
“The fact that it took the Pentagon until now to remove all use of Claude from across the system is indicative that these things are not just plug and play,” said Lauren Kahn, a senior research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former US defence official. “Once they become integrated it can be painful to remove them.”
Google, xAI and OpenAI move in
While the legal fight has run, the Pentagon has signed contracts with Google, xAI and OpenAI, and OpenAI’s tools have been more widely adopted across some military departments in recent months, two people familiar with AI use at the department said. When Hegseth first ordered the phase-out, one former senior defence official said, “there was concern with moving beyond Anthropic to OpenAI” and other tools.
Anthropic’s relations with the White House, meanwhile, appear to be warming. Trump met chief executive Dario Amodei twice there last week. “How we address those risks is still under discussion,” Amodei told reporters, but “if we work with the president, we can win safely.” Trump called him “great” and “fantastic”. What to watch is whether the supply chain designation survives the litigation, and whether a company can stay shut out of the Pentagon while being welcomed at the White House.
