New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin and CEO and co-founder of Anthropic Dario Amodei speak onstage during the 2025 New York Times Dealbook Summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 03, 2025 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
The Department of Defense has officially informed Anthropic’s leadership that the company and its products have been designated a supply chain risk, effective immediately, according to a senior department official.
“From the very beginning, this has been about one fundamental principle: the military being able to use technology for all lawful purposes,” the official told CNBC. “The military will not allow a vendor to insert itself into the chain of command by restricting the lawful use of a critical capability and put our warfighters at risk.”
Anthropic is the only American company ever to be publicly named a supply chain risk, as the designation has traditionally been used against foreign adversaries. The label will require defense vendors and contractors to certify that they don’t use Anthropic’s models in their work with the Pentagon.
The formal designation marks the latest development in the ongoing clash between Anthropic and the Pentagon, which have been at odds over how the startup’s artificial intelligence models, known as Claude, can be used.
Anthropic wanted assurance that its technology would not be tapped for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance, but the DOD wanted Anthropic to grant the agency unfettered access to Claude across all lawful purposes.
Even as talks between the two organizations collapsed, the DOD has used Anthropic’s models to support the U.S. military’s operations in the ongoing conflict in Iran, as CNBC has previously reported.
Anthropic did not comment. The company said in a statement last week that it will challenge “any supply chain risk designation in court.”
Bloomberg was first to report the official designation.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared a post on Friday that said he was directing the DOD to label Anthropic a “Supply-Chain Risk to National Security,” but that alone wasn’t enough to serve as an official designation.
President Donald Trump also directed federal agencies to “immediately cease” all use of Anthropic’s technology on Friday. He said he “fired” Anthropic in an interview with Politico on Thursday.
“Anthropic is in trouble because I fired [them] like dogs, because they shouldn’t have done that,” he told Politico.
Anthropic’s relationship with the Trump administration has grown increasingly fraught in recent months.
David Sacks, the venture capitalist serving as the White House AI and crypto czar, previously accused Anthropic of supporting “woke AI” because of its stance on regulation, and of “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering,” after a company executive wrote an essay in October titled “Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has also largely avoided rubbing elbows with Trump, in contrast to other industry executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Amodei notably didn’t attend Trump’s inauguration last year.
Amodei reportedly said in a memo to staffers on Friday that the administration does not like Anthropic because it has not donated or offered “dictator-style praise to Trump,” according to a report from The Information.
Investors have been following the clash between Anthropic and the DOD closely, and shares of the startup’s partner Palantir fell 2% on Thursday.
The software and services provider, which counts on government contracts for about 60% of its U.S. revenue, collaborates with Anthropic for its work with military and defense agencies as part of an agreement that was signed in late 2024.
Analysts at Piper Sandler wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday that Anthropic is “heavily embedded in the Military and the Intelligence community” and that moving off the company’s technology could “pose some short-term disruptions” to Palantir’s operations.
Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the DOD in July, and was the first AI lab to integrate its models into mission workflows on classified networks. But as negotiations between the two organizations stalled, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI also agreed to deploy their models in classified capacities.
Altman announced OpenAI’s deal with the DOD hours after Anthropic was blacklisted on Friday. He said in a post on X that the agency displayed a “deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.”
WATCH: Defense Department CTO Emil Michael: We can’t be reliant on any one AI provider anymore
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/05/anthropic-pentagon-ai-claude-iran.html
