The Defense Department has made good on the Trump administration’s warning by officially classifying artificial intelligence firm Anthropic as a supply chain threat in an extraordinary action that may compel federal contractors to cease using the company’s Claude AI assistant.
Pentagon officials announced Thursday they have “officially informed Anthropic leadership the company and its products are deemed a supply chain risk, effective immediately.”
This determination appears to close the door on any additional discussions with Anthropic, coming almost one week after President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth alleged the firm poses risks to national security.
The president and defense secretary revealed a list of potential sanctions last Friday, coinciding with tensions over Iran, following Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s refusal to compromise on his concerns that the company’s technology might enable widespread domestic surveillance or fully automated weapons systems.
The California-based firm did not provide an immediate response to requests for comment Thursday. Anthropic has previously threatened litigation if the Pentagon moved forward with what the company characterized as a “legally unsound” measure “never before publicly applied to an American company.”
Pentagon representatives did not respond to inquiries by deadline.
Several defense contractors have already begun severing relationships with Anthropic, an emerging leader in the technology sector that markets Claude to numerous businesses and government organizations. Lockheed Martin announced it will “follow the President’s and the Department of War’s direction” while seeking alternative large language model providers.
“We expect minimal impacts as Lockheed Martin is not dependent on any single LLM vendor for any portion of our work,” the defense contractor stated. It remains unclear whether this classification targets Anthropic’s use across all federal contractors or specifically those working with military agencies.
The Pentagon’s choice to implement regulations originally created to counter supply threats from foreign enemies has drawn swift condemnation from critics and some allies of Trump’s Republican government. Federal regulations define supply chain risk as a “risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert” a system to disrupt, compromise or conduct surveillance.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat serving on both the Senate Armed Services Committee and Senate Intelligence Committee, described it as “a dangerous misuse of a tool meant to address adversary-controlled technology.”
“This reckless action is shortsighted, self-destructive, and a gift to our adversaries,” she stated in a written response Thursday.
Neil Chilson, a former Federal Trade Commission Republican chief technologist who currently oversees AI policy at the Abundance Institute, characterized the move as “massive overreach that would hurt both the U.S. AI sector and the military’s ability to acquire the best technology for the U.S. warfighter.”
Earlier Thursday, a coalition of former defense and national security leaders sent correspondence to federal legislators voicing “serious concern” regarding the classification.
“The use of this authority against a domestic American company is a profound departure from its intended purpose and sets a dangerous precedent,” wrote the group of former officials and policy specialists, including ex-CIA director Michael Hayden and retired military leaders from the Air Force, Army and Navy.
The letter emphasized that such classifications are designed to “protect the United States from infiltration by foreign adversaries — from companies beholden to Beijing or Moscow, not from American innovators operating transparently under the rule of law. Applying this tool to penalize a U.S. firm for declining to remove safeguards against mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons is a category error with consequences that extend far beyond this dispute.”
Despite losing major defense contractor partnerships, Anthropic has seen dramatic growth in consumer adoption during the past week as users support its ethical position. The company reports more than one million daily Claude signups this week, propelling it ahead of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini as the leading AI application in over 20 nations on Apple’s app store.
The Pentagon conflict has also intensified Anthropic’s competitive feud with OpenAI, which announced a Friday agreement with the Pentagon to essentially substitute ChatGPT for Anthropic in classified settings.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman later acknowledged he regretted hastily pursuing an agreement that “looked opportunistic and sloppy.”
