President Donald Trump unleashed an all-caps screed against Anthropic on Friday, threatening criminal consequences for the AI company if it didn’t comply with his demands. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth followed up with his own tweet making clear that Anthropic will be deemed a “supply chain risk,” a designation that means any contractor with the U.S. government will be banned from doing business with Anthropic.
The president is upset that Anthropic has refused to drop safeguards in Claude that prohibit the Department of Defense from using its AI model for domestic surveillance or completely autonomous weapons systems.
“THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! That decision belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given Anthropic an ultimatum to drop all safeguards or be labeled a “supply chain risk,” something that’s never happened to an American company before. Hegseth also threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act, which would theoretically allow the U.S. government to demand that those safeguards be stripped.
The president went on to describe the people at Anthropic as “leftwing nut jobs” and made a bizarre claim that the AI company was putting American lives in danger.
“The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War [sic], and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY,” wrote Trump.
There’s nothing in U.S. law that requires a private company to adjust its terms of service to make the Defense Department happy, as long as they’re not violating sanctions.
“Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!” wrote Trump.
Trump wrote that they’d be given six months for a “phase out period,” which initially made it sound like the president just pushed the deadline back rather than actually banishing Anthropic from military work. But Hegseth’s tweet would later make it clear that this wasn’t just some loose negotiating tactic.
“There will be a Six Month phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic’s products, at various levels. Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow,” Trump wrote.
The Pentagon had given Anthropic a deadline of 5:01 p.m. ET on Friday to comply, but the AI company wrote a letter on Thursday saying it would not give in. Trump was obviously not happy with that.
“WE will decide the fate of our Country — NOT some out-of-control, Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” wrote Trump.
Labeling Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” is a startling escalation that will bar Anthropic from all government work and force any Anthropic customers with government contracts to cut ties, as Fast Company recently noted.
Companies that provide services to Anthropic would also be impacted, including Palantir, which provides the cloud infrastructure secure enough to let Claude be used for classified work.
Pete Hegseth tweeted about the decision after Trump’s post on Truth Social, claiming that Anthropic had given a “master class in arrogance and betrayal” and a “textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon.”
The defense secretary claimed that Anthropic had been hiding behind the “sanctimonious rhetoric of ‘effective altruism'” and insisted they had perpetrated a “cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.”
Hegseth went on to write, “America’s warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final.”
This week, Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon.
Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted…
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) February 27, 2026
Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia who’s the Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, issued a statement Friday calling Trump’s rhetoric inflammatory and said that it raises serious questions about “whether national security decisions are being driven by careful analysis or political considerations.”
“President Trump and Secretary Hegseth’s efforts to intimidate and disparage a leading American company – potentially as the pretext to steer contracts to a preferred vendor whose model a number of federal agencies have already identified as a reliability, safety, and security threat – pose an enormous risk to U.S. defense readiness and the willingness of the U.S. private sector and academia to work with the [Intelligence Community] and DoD, consistent with their own values and legal ethics,” Warner said.
“Indeed, Secretary Hegseth’s loud insistence on the sufficiency of an ‘all lawful purposes’ standard provides cold comfort against the backdrop of Pentagon leadership that has routinely sidelined career military attorneys and challenged longstanding norms and rules regarding lethal force.”
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