By Andrea Shalal, Jeffrey Dastin and Ryan Patrick Jones
WASHINGTON, Feb 27 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday he is directing every federal agency to stop work with artificial intelligence lab Anthropic while the Pentagon declared it a supply-chain risk, capping a weeks-long fight over technology guardrails in an apparent blow to the startup’s business.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said, “I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!”
He added there would be a six-month phaseout for the Defense Department and other agencies that use the company’s products.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s supply-chain risk designation, typically reserved for companies in adversary nations, means that defense contractors could be barred from deploying Anthropic’s AI as part of work for the Pentagon. The defense industrial base includes tens of thousands of contractors, including major public companies.
The actions were pegged to a Friday deadline that the Pentagon set to resolve an escalating feud with San Francisco-based Anthropic, over concerns about how the military could use AI at war.
Spokespeople for Anthropic, which won a $200 million ceiling Pentagon contract last year, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s announcement stopped short of the Pentagon’s threat that it could invoke the Defense Production Act to require Anthropic’s compliance. But the U.S. president vowed further action if Anthropic did not cooperate going forward.
Trump warned he would use “the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow” if Anthropic did not help with the phaseout of its technology.
WEAPONS, SURVEILLANCE CONCERNS
The setback comes as AI leader Anthropic raced to win a fierce competition selling novel technology to businesses and government, particularly for national security, ahead of its widely expected initial public offering. The company has said it has not finalized an IPO decision.
At the same time, the battle over technological guardrails had raised concerns that the Department of Defense would follow U.S. law but little other constraint when deploying AI for national-security missions, regardless of safety or ethics service terms embraced by the technology’s developers.
Anthropic had sought guarantees that its AI would not be used for fully autonomous weapons or for mass domestic surveillance – applications in which the Pentagon has said it had no interest.
Anthropic was the first frontier AI lab to put its models on classified networks via cloud provider Amazon.com and the first to build customized models for national security customers, the startup has said.
Its product Claude is in use across the intelligence community and armed services.
U.S. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat and vice chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, criticized the action taken by Trump, a Republican.
“The president’s directive to halt the use of a leading American AI company across the federal government, combined with inflammatory rhetoric attacking that company, raises serious concerns about whether national security decisions are being driven by careful analysis or political considerations.”
The conflict is the latest eruption in a saga that dates back at least to 2018. That year, employees at Alphabet’s Google protested the Pentagon’s use of the company’s AI to analyze drone footage, straining relations between Silicon Valley and Washington. A rapprochement ensued, with companies including Amazon and Microsoft jousting for defense business, and still more CEOs pledging cooperation last year with the Trump administration.
But theoretical “killer robots” have remained a concern held by human-rights and technology activists. At the same time, Ukraine and Gaza have become theaters for increasingly automated systems on the battlefield.
(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco, Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto, Andrea Shalal in Washington and Ismail Shakil in Ottawa; Writing by Daphne Psaledakis; Editing by Caitlin Webber and Matthew Lewis)
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