Anthropic did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The Pentagon had said Anthropic must agree to comply with its demand by 5.01pm Friday (local time) or face compulsion under the Defence Production Act.
The Cold War-era law, last invoked during the Covid pandemic, grants the federal government sweeping powers to direct private industry towards national security priorities.
The Pentagon also threatened to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk – a label typically reserved for companies from adversary nations.
‘Dangerous precedent’
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said he was directing the Pentagon to follow through on the latter threat, and that “effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic“.
“Anthropic delivered a masterclass in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon,” Hegseth wrote on X.
The conflict had earlier drawn a show of solidarity from others in the industry, with hundreds of employees from AI giants Google DeepMind and OpenAI urging their companies to rally behind Anthropic in an open letter titled “We Will Not Be Divided”.
“We hope our leaders will put aside their differences and stand together to continue to refuse the Department of War’s current demands for permission to use our models for domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight,” the letter said.
“They’re trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in. That strategy only works if none of us know where the others stand,” it added.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told employees yesterday that he too was seeking an agreement with the Pentagon that would include red lines similar to Anthropic’s, and that he hoped to help broker a resolution.
“We have long believed that AI should not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons, and that humans should remain in the loop for high-stakes automated decisions,” he wrote in a memo to employees, according to US media.
The Centre for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a Washington-based technology policy NGO, sharply criticised Trump’s move against Anthropic.
The President is “wielding the full weight of the federal government to blacklist a company for taking a narrowly-tailored, principled stance to restrict some of the most extreme uses of AI you could imagine”, CDT chief Alexandra Givens said in a statement.
“This action sets a dangerous precedent. It chills private companies’ ability to engage frankly with the Government about appropriate uses of their technology,” Givens added.
– Agence France-Presse