No defense contractor tells the Pentagon what it can do with the weapons it buys. Claude does — or did, until Friday.
President Donald Trump ordered every federal agency to immediately stop using Claude, the artificial intelligence model built by Anthropic, capping a week of negotiations over a question the military considers non-negotiable: operational control. Trump announced a six-month phase-out for agencies currently using Anthropic’s products and threatened “civil and criminal consequences” if the company impedes the transition.
Anthropic signed a $200 million Pentagon contract in July 2025. Claude became the only artificial intelligence model operating on the military’s classified networks, delivered through data analytics firm Palantir. Anthropic’s contract included language prohibiting Claude’s use in mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon’s position was that restricting how it uses a purchased tool is not a vendor’s decision to make.
The dispute went public after Claude was used through Palantir during the January operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Anthropic reached out to Palantir to ask how its technology had been used. Palantir flagged the inquiry to the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded with a memo directing AI companies to make their models available for all lawful military purposes, free from company-imposed restrictions.
Negotiations collapsed this week. Anthropic rejected what the Pentagon called its final offer Thursday, saying new contract language would allow its safeguards “to be disregarded at will.” CEO Dario Amodei said the company “cannot in good conscience accede.” Pentagon Undersecretary Emil Michael responded on X that Amodei “has a God-complex” and “wants nothing more than to personally control the U.S. Military.”
Raytheon doesn’t approve missile targets. Boeing doesn’t sign off on bombing runs. When a vendor retains authority over how the military uses its technology in the field, it inserts itself into the chain of command. That’s the line Anthropic crossed, and the Pentagon said so publicly for weeks before Trump acted.
The same week Anthropic held its public line against the Pentagon, it quietly dropped its Responsible Scaling Policy — a two-year-old commitment to pause training more powerful AI models if safety couldn’t be guaranteed. The company said the policy was out of step with a market where competitors were advancing without similar restraints.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced Friday morning that his company shares Anthropic’s red lines on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance — a complication for the Pentagon’s replacement strategy. Elon Musk’s xAI had already signed under the standard all-lawful-use terms. Pentagon officials confirmed Grok is cleared for classified systems, though they acknowledged it is not as capable as Claude in those applications. Trump posted on Truth Social roughly an hour after Altman’s statement.
Palantir, which provided the infrastructure connecting Claude to classified military networks, stayed silent throughout and now needs a new AI partner for that work. HCA reported last week that Palantir left Denver for Miami on February 17, citing Colorado’s AI regulation law — ten days before the confrontation that exposed exactly what its Pentagon platform was doing.
The Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era law giving the government authority to compel private companies to meet national defense needs, remains available if Anthropic does not cooperate during the phase-out period. Trump did not invoke it Friday. He left it on the table.
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