By 7 pm Friday, Anthropic’s SF rival OpenAI stepped in and said they would gladly take the contracts<\/a>. And by 8 pm Friday night, the US was launching military attacks on Iran<\/a>. \u00a0<\/p>\n When the Trump administration banned all government use of Anthropic and its well regarded tool Claude, Trump declared on Truth Social that \u201cLeftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War,\u201d and that \u201cI am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic\u2019s technology. We don\u2019t need it, we don\u2019t want it, and will not do business with them again!\u201d<\/p>\n That is all quite hilarious when considered in the context that the US military still used Anthropic\u2019s Claude tool anyway<\/a> in this weekend\u2019s attacks on Iran, according to a report in the Sunday Wall Street Journal. That Journal article is behind a paywall, but the same information was also reported in a free article at Axios<\/a> separately at about that same time. <\/p>\n The Journal’s reporting says the Pentagon used Claude in the Iran attacks to select targets, conduct theoretical battlefield simulations, and for general intelligence assessments. According to Axios, despite Trump\u2019s bans and tantrums, \u201cThe Pentagon still sees Anthropic’s Claude as superior to other models.\u201d<\/p>\n And maybe getting banned by the Trump administration is good for business. As a separate Axios report points out, the Trump ban sent Anthropic\u2019s Claude to the number one most downloaded app in the Apple App Store<\/a> over the weekend, a position it still held as of Monday morning<\/a>. \u00a0<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/trump-Claude.jpg\")
Image: via Truth Social<\/a><\/p>\n