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US President Donald Trump said he was directing all federal agencies to immediately cease work with Anthropic, an artificial intelligence laboratory, adding that there would be a six-month phase-out for the Department of Defense and other agencies using the company’s products.
“I am directing all federal agencies of the United States Government to immediately stop using Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it. We don’t want it. We will never do business with them again!” Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Friday.
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President Trump’s directive comes amid a weeks-long feud between the Pentagon and a San Francisco-based startup over concerns about how the military uses AI in war.
A spokeswoman for Anthropic, which has a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense, did not respond to a request for comment.
President Trump’s decision falls short of threats made by the Pentagon, including potentially invoking the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic into compliance.
The Pentagon also said it was considering designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk, a designation previously reserved for companies with foreign adversaries.
President Trump’s comments came just over an hour before the Pentagon’s deadline for Anthropic to allow unrestricted military uses of AI technology. It comes nearly 24 hours after CEO Dario Amodei said the company “cannot in good conscience comply” with the Pentagon’s request.
The president called the company “a left-wing madhouse” and said Anthropic made a mistake in trying to overpower the Pentagon. President Trump wrote in Truth Social that most government agencies must immediately stop using Anthropic’s AI, but gave the Pentagon six months to phase out the technology already integrated into military platforms.
“We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and we’ll never do business with them again!” Trump wrote.
At issue in the defense contract was a clash over the role of AI in national security. Anthropic said it has asked the Pentagon for limited assurances that Claude will not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or for fully autonomous weapons. But after months of private discussions that escalated into public debate, the company said in a statement Thursday that the new contract language was “framed as a compromise, combining these safeguards with legal language that can be freely ignored.”
President Trump threatened further action if Anthropic did not cooperate with the phaseout. President Trump warned that if Antropic fails to help during the phase-out period, he will “use the full power of the President to compel them to comply, with serious civil and criminal consequences.”
“Threatening” move
The setback comes as AI leader Anthropic tries to survive fierce competition to sell its novel technology to companies and governments, especially for national security purposes, ahead of a widely anticipated initial public offering. The company said the IPO decision has not yet been finalized.
Anthropic is the first frontier AI lab to deploy models on a classified network via cloud provider Amazon.com, and the first to build customized models for national security customers, the startup says.
The company’s product, Claude, is used across intelligence and military agencies.
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, criticized Republican President Trump’s actions.
“The president’s directive to suspend the use of major U.S. AI companies across the federal government, coupled with inflammatory rhetoric attacking the companies, raises serious concerns about whether national security decisions are made with careful analysis or political considerations.”
The conflict is the latest eruption in a series of unrest dating back to at least 2018. That same year, employees at Alphabet Inc.’s Google protested the Pentagon’s use of the company’s AI to analyze drone footage, straining relations between Silicon Valley and Washington. Companies such as Amazon and Microsoft competed for defense projects, and last year continued to grow closer, with more CEOs pledging to work with the Trump administration.
The controversy stunned AI developers in Silicon Valley, with a growing number of employees at Anthropic’s biggest rivals, OpenAI and Google, expressing support for Amodei’s position in open letters and other forums.
“The Department of Defense is negotiating with Google and OpenAI to agree to what Anthropic has rejected,” reads an open letter from some OpenAI and Google employees. “They’re trying to break up each company because they’re afraid the other will give in.”
And in a surprise move by one of Amodei’s most powerful rivals, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sided with Anthropic on Friday, questioning the Pentagon’s “threatening” move in an interview with CNBC and suggesting that OpenAI and much of the AI field share the same red line. Mr. Amodei previously worked at OpenAI until leaving in 2021 to found Anthropic with other OpenAI leaders.
“Despite our differences with Anthropic, I pretty much trust them as a company and I think they really care about safety,” Altman told CNBC.
