The Pentagon just turned the screws on Anthropic. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated the AI company as a "supply-chain risk" Thursday evening, less than two hours after President Donald Trump banned Anthropic products across the federal government. The move sends shockwaves through the defense contracting world, threatening to immediately impact major players like Palantir and Amazon Web Services that rely on Anthropic's Claude AI for Pentagon work. It's an unprecedented escalation in what's become a high-stakes standoff between Silicon Valley and the Defense Department over AI policy.
Anthropic just went from AI darling to Pentagon pariah in under 120 minutes. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the supply-chain risk designation late Thursday, a dramatic escalation that goes well beyond President Trump's earlier executive action banning the company's products from federal systems. The timing tells you everything about how quickly this situation is deteriorating.
The immediate fallout hits some of the defense industry's biggest names. Palantir and Amazon Web Services both integrate Claude into their Pentagon work, and now face urgent questions about contract compliance. According to The Verge's reporting, it's not yet clear whether the Pentagon will extend its blacklist to companies using Claude for civilian applications outside national security work. That ambiguity is going to cause chaos in procurement offices across the defense industrial base.
The supply-chain risk label carries serious weight. It's the same designation the Pentagon has used for Chinese telecom giants and other foreign entities deemed threats to national security infrastructure. Applying it to a San Francisco-based AI startup backed by Google and founded by former OpenAI researchers marks a sharp departure from the government's typical approach to domestic tech companies.
This didn't come out of nowhere. The Verge reported that Anthropic and the Pentagon spent the past week in tense negotiations over the company's acceptable use policies. Those talks apparently went nowhere, prompting Trump's Truth Social announcement earlier Thursday that he was . Hegseth's follow-up designation suggests the Defense Department wanted to send an even stronger signal.
