Pentagon Gives Anthropic Supply-Chain Risk Label, CEO Confirms Court Challenge

Last updated: 2026/03/06 at 8:44 AM

News Room Published 6 March 2026

The next step in a dispute between AI company Anthropic and the US Department of Defense has seen the former designated a supply-chain risk, meaning it will be cut off from partnering with other brands that work with the Pentagon.

This comes after a week of failed negotiations between the makers of Claude and the US government. Anthropic refused to agree to new guidelines requiring its AI models to be used in any lawful use case.

Anthropic said it wouldn’t agree to the new rules without assurances that its AI models can’t be used to power fully autonomous weapons or enable mass domestic surveillance of US citizens.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week that he would give Anthropic a supply-chain risk designation if it continued to refuse to implement the changes to the guidelines. A senior Pentagon official confirmed Anthropic’s new label to The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei posted on the company’s blog, saying the brand sees “no choice but to challenge it in court.” Amodei also says Anthropic doesn’t foresee problems for most Claude customers stemming from the new designation.

He says, “The language used by the Department of War in the letter (even supposing it was legally sound) matches our statement on Friday that the vast majority of our customers are unaffected by a supply chain risk designation.”

“With respect to our customers, it plainly applies only to the use of Claude by customers as a direct part of contracts with the Department of War, not all use of Claude by customers who have such contracts.”

Claude AI user numbers continue to grow amid the disruption, with the app sitting at the top of the free charts on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store in the US and in some other countries.

Anthropic’s chief product officer said on Thursday that the brand is seeing more than a million new customers a day.

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Amodei also apologized for a post sent to company staff last week, which has since leaked and been published by The Information. The memo quoted Amodei as saying, “We haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has),” referring to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

OpenAI has agreed to the US government’s changes, announcing that GPT models can be used in the Department of Defense’s classified networks.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.