The administration of US President Donald Trump has placed Anthropic, a company that develops artificial intelligence models, on a national security blacklist. What will be the consequences?
The administration of US President Donald Trump has placed Anthropic, a company that develops artificial intelligence models, on a national security blacklist. What will be the consequences?
The Washington Post reports that the decision takes effect immediately. U.S. federal agencies must now stop using Anthropic’s technology, and any companies doing business with the U.S. military are prohibited from working with it.
This week, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth issued a tough demand to AI company Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. The Pentagon is demanding that the military be given unfettered access to its advanced AI model, Claude, without any restrictions, by Friday evening.
Anthropic publicly responded that it «cannot in good conscience agree» to the demands, even under threat of contract termination. The company said it would not compromise its principles of not using AI to monitor US citizens or integrate it into fully autonomous weapons systems.
After that, President Donald Trump sharply criticized Anthropic.
«The leftist lunatics at Anthropic have made a CATASTROPHIC MISTAKE in trying to FORCE the Department of Defense to abide by their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is endangering AMERICAN LIVES, our military, and our national security,» Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social page.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth added in a post on X later Friday that he was declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk.
«From this point forward, no contractor, supplier, or partner doing business with the U.S. military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic,» Hegset wrote.
Anthropic said it will challenge the blacklisting in court. The company believes that a broad ban is not permitted by federal law and that the company’s designation as a risk to the supply chain is «legally unfounded.»
The company wrote that «designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented step that has historically only been applied to US adversaries and has never before been publicly applied to a US company.»
Experts believe that such a drastic intervention by the Trump administration is likely to have consequences not only for the US government’s relationship with Anthropic, but also potentially complicate the administration’s work with other AI developers, especially in the defense sector.
