Trump Bans Anthropic AI Over Military Guardrail Dispute

President Donald Trump ordered all U.S. federal agencies to cease using AI technology from Anthropic PBC after the company refused to remove safety guardrails prohibiting mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth further designated Anthropic as a supply-chain risk to national security, a label typically reserved for foreign adversaries. This action terminated a $200 million contract and barred U.S. military contractors, including Lockheed Martin, from conducting commercial activity with the firm.

Despite the ban, the U.S. military continued using Anthropic's Claude AI for intelligence assessments and target selection during joint strikes with Israel in Iran that killed hundreds, including a strike on an elementary school. The Pentagon also previously utilized Claude during a January raid in Venezuela to capture President Nicolás Maduro. The administration established a six-month phase-out period for embedded military systems while transitioning to rivals OpenAI and xAI.

OpenAI secured a deal to deploy models on classified networks, though CEO Sam Altman later amended the agreement to explicitly prohibit domestic surveillance following a public backlash. This controversy triggered a "QuitGPT" movement, propelling Claude to the top of the U.S. Apple App Store. The surge in demand, combined with a fire at an Amazon Web Services data center in the UAE, caused multiple widespread outages of Claude services on March 2. Anthropic has vowed to challenge the supply-chain risk designation in court, calling it legally unsound.