CBS News reported this week that sources familiar with the Pentagon’s use of artificial intelligence confirmed that the U.S. military used Anthropic’s Claude Artificial Intelligence (AI) model during the launch of the U.S. and Israel’s joint kinetic airstrikes on Iran on Feb. 28.
The U.S military is reportedly still using it.
The reveal comes after President Donald Trump announced over the weekend that he’s enforcing federal agencies to “immediately cease” using Anthropic’s technology, giving them six months to transition it out of their operations. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth additionally called the AI company a “supply chain risk.”
The Pentagon did not disclose how the AI tool is being used. However, it's still being used despite President Trump’s recent ban, which arose following a dispute the week prior during negotiations between the AI company and the Pentagon.
The dispute involved Anthropic’s urge for “guardrails that would explicitly prevent the military from using Claude to conduct mass surveillance on Americans or to power fully autonomous weapons,” according to CBS News.
Negotiations over the terms of its agreement stalled after the Department of Defense (DoD) demanded that the company agree to allow the Pentagon to use the model for “all lawful purposes.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei shared that the company “cannot in good conscience” allow the models to operate within those parameters.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr commented on the situation, sharing with CNBC on Mar. 3 that the AI firm “made a mistake” in working with the DoD, following the government’s blacklisting of the company.
“There’s obviously rules of the road that are in place that are going to apply to every technology that the Department of War contracts with,” Chairman Carr stated.
Hours after President Trump’s ban on the firm’s technology, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that his company had agreed to a contract with the DoD to use its AI models.
On Mar. 2, Altman reflected on the negotiations, claiming that the company “shouldn’t have rushed” its agreement, describing it as “opportunistic and sloppy.”
OpenAI has established revised terms of the deal, which include a clarifying statement that “the AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.”
