Washington — President Donald Trump announced Friday that he will order all federal agencies to phase out the use of Anthropic technology, following an unusually public spat between the company and the Department of Defense over the safety of artificial intelligence.
President Trump’s comments came a little more than an hour before a Pentagon deadline for Anthropic to grant unrestricted military uses of its artificial intelligence technology, and nearly 24 hours after CEO Dario Amodei said the company “could not in good conscience comply” with the Pentagon’s request.
Antropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s remarks.
At issue in the defense contract were conflicts over the role of AI in national security and concerns about how increasingly sophisticated machines would be used in high-stakes situations such as lethal force, classified intelligence, and government surveillance.
Anthropic, the maker of the chatbot Claude, could have lost its contract. But the ultimatum issued by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth this week poses broader risks at the height of the company’s meteoric rise from a little-known computer science lab in San Francisco to one of the world’s most valuable startups.
Humanity rejects Pentagon’s latest proposal for security measures
If Amodei does not relent, military officials said they will not only cancel the contract with Anthropic, but also “deem it a supply chain risk.” This designation is typically imprinted on foreign adversaries and can derail important partnerships between the company and other companies.
And if Mr. Amodei relents, he could lose trust in the burgeoning AI industry, especially among top talent drawn to the company by its promise to responsibly develop better-than-human AI that could pose catastrophic risks without safeguards.
Anthropic said it has asked the Pentagon for limited assurances that Claude will not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or for fully autonomous weapons. But after months of private discussions that escalated into public debate, the company said in a statement Thursday that the new contract language was “framed as a compromise, combining these safeguards with legal language that can be freely ignored.”
It came after top Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell posted on social media that the military “has no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal), nor does it want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement.” He emphasized that the Pentagon wants to “use Anthropic’s models for any lawful purpose,” but he and other officials did not provide details on how they hope to use the technology.
Conflict further polarizes the tech industry
Emile Michael, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, later slammed Amodei, claiming that X “has a God complex” and “wants nothing more than to seek personal control of the U.S. military and is willing to jeopardize the security of our nation.”
That message didn’t resonate in many parts of Silicon Valley, where a growing number of technology officials from Anthropic’s biggest rivals, OpenAI and Google, expressed support for Amodei’s position in an open letter late Thursday.
OpenAI and Google, along with Elon Musk’s xAI, have a deal to supply their AI models to the military.
Musk on Friday endorsed the Trump Republican administration on his social media platform X, saying “humanity hates Western civilization” after Michael called attention to an earlier version of Claude’s Guiding Principles that encouraged “considering non-Western perspectives.” All major AI models, including Musk’s Grok and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are programmed with a set of instructions that guide the chatbot’s values and behavior. In anthropology, this guideline is called the constitution.
Some tech leaders allied with Trump, such as Musk and Palmer Lackey, co-founder of defense contractor Anduril, have joined the fray, but the polarizing debate over “woke AI” has also put other companies in a difficult position.
“The Department of Defense is negotiating with Google and OpenAI to agree to what Anthropic has rejected,” reads an open letter from some OpenAI and Google employees. “They are trying to break up each company for fear that the other will give in.”
But in a surprise move by one of Amodei’s most powerful rivals, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sided with Anthropic in an interview on CNBC on Friday, questioning the Pentagon’s “threatening” move and suggesting that OpenAI and much of the AI field share the same red line. Mr. Amodei previously worked at OpenAI until leaving in 2021 to found Anthropic with other OpenAI leaders.
“Despite my differences with Anthropic, I pretty much trust them as a company and I think they really care about safety,” Altman told CNBC. “I’m glad they’re supporting our fighters. We don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Republican and Democratic lawmakers and a former leader of the Pentagon’s AI initiative also expressed concerns about the Pentagon’s approach.
“Criticism of humanity may garner harsh headlines, but in the end we all lose,” retired Air Force Gen. Jack Shanahan wrote in a social media post.
Shanahan faced another wave of opposition from tech workers during the first Trump administration, when he led Maven, a project that used AI technology to analyze drone footage and target weapons. At the time, so many Google employees protested their participation in Project Maven that the tech giant refused to renew its contract and pledged not to use AI in weapons.
“As I was being honest during Project Maven, “And Google, you’d be forgiven for thinking I’d side with the Department of Defense here,” Shanahan wrote on social media Thursday. More so than I did with Google in 2018. ”
He said Claude is already widely used across the government, including in classified settings, and Anthropic’s red line is “reasonable.” He said the large-scale language models of AI that power chatbots like Claude are also “not ready for prime time in national security settings,” especially for fully autonomous weapons.
“They’re not trying to be cute here,” he wrote.
Pentagon ready to punish Anthropic if it doesn’t compromise
Parnell argued Thursday that opening up the use of the technology would prevent the company from “jeopardizing critical military operations.”
“We do not allow any company to dictate the terms of how we make operational decisions,” Parnell wrote. Anthropic said it will make a decision on whether to comply with the request or face the consequences by 5:01 p.m. ET on Friday.
When Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Amodei met on Tuesday, military officials warned that they could designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, terminate its contract, or invoke a Cold War-era law known as the Defense Production Act to give the military broader authority to use its products even if the company did not approve it.
“The latter two threats are inherently contradictory. One sees us as a security risk, while the other sees Claude as essential to national security,” Amodei said Thursday. He said he hopes the Pentagon will reconsider given Claude’s value to the military, but that if not, Anthropic will “work to enable a smooth transition to another provider.”
Copyright © 2026 by Associated Press. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.
