President Donald Trump has ordered all federal agencies to completely cease using technologies from the AI startup Anthropic within six months.
“We don’t need this, we don’t want it, and we will no longer do business with them!” the President stated.
In July 2025, the US Department of Defense awarded contracts worth up to $200 million to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI for developing AI solutions in security. The department's Digital and AI Technologies Directorate planned to use these solutions to create agent systems.
By January 2026, the WSJ reported on the risk of terminating the agreement with Anthropic due to disagreements over the startup's strict ethical policies. These rules prohibit the use of the Claude model for mass surveillance and autonomous lethal operations.
Officials' dissatisfaction grew amid the integration of the Grok chatbot into the Pentagon's network. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth emphasized that the department “will not use models that do not allow for warfare” when commenting on the partnership with xAI.
In February 2026, the US Army utilized Claude in an operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, escalating the conflict.
The Pentagon acknowledged the possibility of severing ties with Anthropic, with Secretary Hegseth calling the company a “risk to the supply chain.”
CEO Dario Amodei stated that Anthropic would prefer not to collaborate with the Pentagon than agree to the use of its technologies in ways that could “undermine rather than protect democratic values.” He confirmed that the issue lies in the potential use of tools like Claude for two purposes: “mass surveillance within the country” and “fully autonomous weapons.”
“The leftists at Anthropic made a catastrophic mistake trying to twist the arms of the military and force it to comply with their terms instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness endangers the lives of Americans, our troops, and national security,” Trump wrote.
He described the startup as an “out-of-control” company run by people who “have no idea what the real world is like.”
In addition to Anthropic's chatbot, the Pentagon is using OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and xAI's Grok for non-classified tasks. All three developers have agreed to relax restrictions that apply to regular users.
It is worth noting that SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk, recently merged with xAI and will participate in creating voice-controlled autonomous drones for the military.