WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump announced on February 27 that he would direct federal agencies to stop working with the artificial intelligence lab Anthropic, while the Pentagon declared it a supply chain risk, ending a weeks-long battle over technology guardrails with an apparent blow to the startup’s business.
In a post on Truth Social, President Trump said, “I am directing all federal agencies of the United States Government to immediately stop using Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and we will never do business with them again!”
He added that there will be a six-month phase-out for the Department of Defense and other government agencies using the company’s products.
Meanwhile, supply chain risk designations by the Department of Defense are typically limited to companies from adversarial countries, meaning defense contractors could be barred from deploying Anthropic’s AI as part of their DoD operations. The defense industrial base includes tens of thousands of contractors, including large publicly traded companies.
The action was pegged to a Friday deadline set by the Pentagon to resolve an escalating conflict with San Francisco-based Anthropic over concerns about how the military uses AI in war.
A spokeswoman for Anthropic, which won a contract with the Pentagon last year worth up to $200 million, did not respond to a request for comment.
President Trump’s announcement halted the Pentagon’s threat to potentially invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic into compliance. However, the US president has vowed to take further action if Anthropic does not cooperate in the future.
President Trump warned that if Anthropic did not cooperate in phasing out its technology, he would “use the full power of the President to compel compliance, with significant civil and criminal consequences.”
Concerns about weapons and surveillance
The setback comes as AI leader Anthropic tries to survive fierce competition to sell its novel technology to companies and governments, especially for national security purposes, ahead of a widely anticipated initial public offering. The company said the IPO decision has not yet been finalized.
At the same time, the fight over technological guardrails has raised concerns that the Pentagon will be subject to U.S. law and few other constraints when deploying AI for national security missions, regardless of the safety or ethical terms of service accepted by the technology’s developers.
Anthropic had sought assurances that its AI would not be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance, but the Pentagon has said it is not interested in these uses.
Anthropic is the first frontier AI lab to deploy models on a classified network via cloud provider Amazon.com, and the first to build customized models for national security customers, the startup says.
The company’s product, Claude, is used across intelligence and military agencies.
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, criticized Republican President Trump’s actions.
“The president’s directive to suspend the use of major U.S. AI companies across the federal government, coupled with inflammatory rhetoric attacking the companies, raises serious concerns about whether national security decisions are made with careful analysis or political considerations.”
The conflict is the latest eruption in a series of unrest dating back to at least 2018. That same year, employees at Alphabet Inc.’s Google protested the Pentagon’s use of the company’s AI to analyze drone footage, straining relations between Silicon Valley and Washington. They continue to grow closer, with companies like Amazon and Microsoft vying for defense projects, and more CEOs pledged to work with the Trump administration last year.
But the theoretical “killer robots” continue to be a concern among human rights and technology activists. At the same time, Ukraine and Gaza are the scene of increasingly automated systems on the battlefield.
This story has been updated to add new information.
(Reporting by Jeffrey Dustin in San Francisco, Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto, Andrea Shalal in Washington and Ismail Shakir in Ottawa; Writing by Daphne Psaredakis; Editing by Caitlin Webber and Matthew Lewis)
