US President Donald Trump said on Friday he is directing the government to stop work with Anthropic, and the Pentagon said it would declare the start-up a supply-chain risk, dealing a major blow to the artificial intelligence lab after a showdown about technology guardrails.
Trump added there would be a six-month phase-out for the Defence Department and other agencies that use the company’s products. If Anthropic does not help with the transition, Trump said, he would use “the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow”.
The actions mark an extraordinary rebuke by the United States against one of the premier companies that has kept it in the lead on national security-critical AI, threatening to give Anthropic a pariah status that Washington until now had reserved for enemy suppliers. Google and Amazon are among Anthropic’s financial backers.
The moves further set a precedent that US law alone would constrain how AI is deployed on the battlefield, with the Pentagon seeking to preserve all flexibility in defence and not be limited by warnings from the technology’s creators against powering weapons with unreliable AI.
In a statement, Anthropic said it would challenge any risk designation in court by the Department of Defence, which the Trump administration has renamed the Department of War.
“We believe this designation would both be legally unsound and set a dangerous precedent for any American company that negotiates with the government,” the company said.
“No amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.”
Late on Friday, rival OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, Amazon and others, announced its own deal to deploy technology in the Defence Department’s classified network.
