Pentagon freezes out Anthropic as it signs deals with AI rivals - Defense News

The Pentagon has excluded Anthropic from recent AI partnership agreements, designating the company a 'supply-chain risk to U.S. national security' in March 2026. The decision stems from Anthropic's refusal to grant the Department of Defense unrestricted access to its Claude AI models for use in fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance applications. The Pentagon did not include Anthropic in a series of agreements announced with seven other AI companies.

The Department of Defense's March designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk is central to the exclusion. The Pentagon stated that Anthropic's restrictions on model use for certain military applications constituted an unacceptable risk. Anthropic had maintained that its acceptable use policy prohibits deploying its models in autonomous weapons systems and large-scale surveillance without human oversight and legal safeguards. The Pentagon determined that these restrictions could impede operational flexibility.

The exclusion of Anthropic highlights ongoing tensions between AI developers' safety policies and military requirements for unrestricted access to cutting-edge AI models.