The U.S. military reportedly used Anthropic’s AI model Claude to inform the attack on Iran, despite President Donald Trump’s decision announced hours earlier to sever ties with Anthropic and its artificial intelligence tools.
The use of Claude in the massive joint bombing of Iran by the United States and Israel, which began on Saturday, was reported by the Wall Street Journal and Axios. This highlights the complexity of the U.S. military taking powerful AI tools out of commission when the technology is already intricately integrated into operations.
According to the magazine, the US military command used the tool not only for intelligence purposes, but also to select targets and perform battlefield simulations.
On Friday, hours before the Iran attack began, President Trump ordered all federal agencies to immediately stop using Claude. He accused Anthropic on Truth Social of being “a radical left-wing AI company run by people who have no idea what the real world is.”
The uproar was sparked by the U.S. military’s use of Claude in a raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. Antropic objected, pointing to its terms of use, which do not allow Claude to be used for violent purposes, weapons development, or surveillance purposes.
Since then, relations between Trump, the Pentagon, and AI companies have steadily deteriorated. In a lengthy post on X on Friday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth accused Mr. Anthropic of “arrogance and betrayal,” adding: “America’s warfighters will never be held hostage to the ideological whims of Big Tech.”
Hegseth requested full and unrestricted access to all of Anthropic’s AI models for any lawful purpose.
But the defense secretary also nodded about the difficulty of quickly separating military systems from AI tools, given that they are so widely used. He said Anthropic will continue to provide services “for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better, more patriotic service.”
Since the hiatus with Anthropic, rival company OpenAI has stepped in with the breach. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company has reached an agreement with the Department of Defense for use of its tools, including ChatGPT, on sensitive networks.
