The federal government's action is said to be unprecedented — the first time an American company has been designated a supply chain risk. During President Trump's first term, the government took similar action to restrict foreign-based companies like Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.
It comes after an impasse over Anthropic's request for two "red lines" that would explicitly prevent the U.S. military from using its Claude model to conduct mass surveillance on Americans or power fully autonomous weapons.
"We believe that crossing those lines is contrary to American values, and we wanted to stand up for American values," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told CBS News.
The Pentagon previously said it wanted to be able to use Claude for "all lawful purposes," without restrictions, arguing that the uses of AI that Anthropic is concerned about are already prohibited. Claude is currently being used by the US military in the war on Iran, according to sources familiar with the military's use of AI.
Anthropic is currently the only AI company whose models are deployed on the Pentagon's classified systems. After talks between the two sides broke down last month, one of Anthropic's largest rivals — ChatGPT creator OpenAI — it had signed a deal with the Pentagon.
"The Constitution does not allow the government to wield its enormous power to punish a company for its protected speech," the company said in the lawsuit. "No federal statute authorizes the actions taken here."
White House spokesperson Liz Huston responded to the lawsuit by saying President Trump "will never allow a radical left, woke company to jeopardize our national security by dictating how the greatest and most powerful military in the world operates."
A source directly familiar with Claude's military capabilities told CBS News the main task Claude is undertaking for the military is sifting through large amounts of intelligence reports, like synthesizing patterns, summarizing findings, and surfacing relevant information faster than a human analyst could.
"The military is now processing roughly a thousand potential targets a day and striking the majority of them, with turnaround time for the next strike potentially under four hours," said retired Navy Admiral Mark Montgomery, now a senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. "A human is still in the loop, but AI is doing the work that used to take days of analysis — and doing it at a scale no previous campaign has matched."
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