President Donald Trump banned all federal agencies from contracting with Anthropic after the company refused to remove its restrictions on domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems from its AI model, Claude. Later that same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the Defense Department had agreed to use ChatGPT supposedly subject to the very same restrictions.
The acrimony between the federal government and Anthropic, which had been brewing for two months, reached a boiling point on Tuesday, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei met to discuss the terms of the Defense Department's contract with Anthropic. Hegseth demanded that Anthropic equip the Pentagon with an AI model "free from usage policy constraints that may limit lawful military applications" or be labeled a supply chain risk and possibly nationalized.
