Just eight months earlier, Anthropic had signed a US$200 million ($256 million) contract with the Pentagon to deploy Claude within the military’s classified systems. The deal included specific usage restrictions — Anthropic’s terms of service prohibited use for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. At that time, neither the Pentagon nor Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth raised any objection to the terms of service.
Two weeks ago, Israel and the US began a massive coordinated attack on Iran that left its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei and defence top brass dead. The attacks triggered an ongoing war in which Iran has retaliated by launching waves of missile and drone strikes across the Middle East, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar. The joint Israel-US attacks came just three hours after the deadline imposed by the US Department of Defense, or the Pentagon, for AI start-up Anthropic to comply with its ultimatum that it allow “any lawful use” of its AI technology without additional restrictions, or face blacklisting and designation of its technology as a “supply chain risk” — a classification until recently reserved for foreign adversaries like China’s tech conglomerate Huawei, which reportedly has close ties with the People’s Liberation Army.
When Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to drop the safety restrictions on its AI technology, stating his firm would rather not work with the Pentagon than compromise on its guard rails, President Donald Trump announced that his administration would cancel all US military contracts and direct all US federal agencies away from using Claude, Anthropic’s powerful and widely acclaimed AI platform, designed for advanced reasoning, coding and natural conversation. The White House and Pentagon announced that the military and US government agencies had just six months to phase out Anthropic and replace it with AI tools from rival firms like OpenAI and billionaire Elon Musk’s xAI, now part of SpaceX.
