Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on February 27, 2026, that he was directing the Pentagon to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk to national security, escalating a dispute over restrictions on military use of its Claude AI model.
In the same announcement, Hegseth said the move accompanied a directive from President Donald Trump for the federal government to cease all use of Anthropic’s technology.
Anthropic responded on February 27 that it would maintain its exclusions for mass domestic surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons, and would challenge any supply-chain risk designation in court. The company said it had not yet received direct communication from the Pentagon or White House about the status of negotiations.
The disputed restrictions
Hegseth said the military required unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every lawful defense purpose. Pentagon technology chief Emil Michael said on February 19 that the department would comply with existing surveillance laws and autonomous weapons regulations, but would not allow a supplier to impose additional operating rules.
Anthropic said the negotiations had lasted months and reached an impasse over its two requested exceptions. In a February 26 statement, CEO Dario Amodei said those uses had never been included in the company’s Pentagon contracts.
Amodei argued that current frontier AI systems were not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons, which select and engage targets without human involvement. He also said mass domestic surveillance threatened fundamental rights, while expressing support for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence uses.
Claude was already deployed across defense and other national security agencies for intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning and cyber operations, Amodei said. He said Anthropic had never objected to particular military operations or attempted to restrict use of its technology on an ad hoc basis.
Disagreement over the restrictions’ reach
Hegseth said that, effective immediately, military contractors, suppliers and partners could not conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. He also said Anthropic would continue providing Pentagon services for no more than six months to allow a transition to another provider.
Anthropic disputed the breadth of the restriction Hegseth described. The company argued that a supply-chain risk designation under 10 U.S.C. § 3252 could affect Claude’s use on Pentagon contracts, but could not restrict contractors’ use of Claude for other customers. It said individual customers and customers with commercial contracts outside Pentagon work would retain access.
Defense Production Act threat
Amodei also said Pentagon officials had threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the removal of Anthropic’s safeguards. His statement described a threatened action, rather than an announced invocation of the law.
Section 4511 of the act authorizes the president to require priority acceptance and performance of contracts deemed necessary or appropriate for national defense, and to allocate materials, services and facilities for that purpose. Those provisions do not by themselves establish whether the government could compel Anthropic to remove its usage restrictions.
