The U.S. Department of Defense “has ceased the use of Anthropic products,” a department official told the BBC on Monday, months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth labelled the company a supply-chain risk and set a late-August phase-out deadline.
Multiple people familiar with the matter told the BBC that Anthropic’s Claude model was still used as recently as last week for research, analysis and intelligence gathering, as well as in military operations against Iran. The people, who include former U.S. defense officials and contractors who have worked closely with the Pentagon on AI, said Claude was viewed as a critical tool for sorting through large volumes of information. An Anthropic spokesman declined to comment when asked about the Pentagon’s statement.
Hegseth designated Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk in February after the company refused Pentagon demands to remove safety guardrails from Claude, citing concerns about mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, the BBC reported. He said the department would stop using Anthropic by late August and set a six-month phase-out deadline on Feb. 27. Anthropic called the designation unprecedented and unlawful and sued the Trump administration. A D.C. Circuit panel upheld the blacklist in a 2-1 ruling on Sept. 25.
While that fight continued, the Pentagon signed contracts with Google, xAI and OpenAI, the BBC said. OpenAI tools have been more widely adopted in some military departments recently, two people said.
Claude remained embedded in Maven Smart System, a Palantir-operated platform the Pentagon uses as its primary system for organizing intelligence and other data, multiple sources told the BBC. Pentagon employees continued to use Claude, including Anthropic’s Mythos models, “throughout the whole period of the controversy,” one of the people said.
Lauren Kahn, a senior research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former U.S. defense official, told the BBC that deep integration into Maven made a quick removal hard. “The fact that it took the Pentagon until now to remove all use of Claude from across the system is indicative that these things are not just plug and play,” she said. “Once they become integrated it can be painful to remove them.”
Anthropic has been used by the U.S. government and military since 2024 and was the first advanced AI company with tools in classified government work, the BBC reported. President Donald Trump met Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei twice at the White House last week. Amodei said how to address AI risks was “still under discussion,” but that “if we work with the president, we can win safely.” Trump called Amodei “great” and “fantastic,” the BBC reported.