Pentagon says it has stopped using Anthropic's Claude AI, after missing its own late-August phase-out deadline

Political Guyentist · October 6, 20261 min read

The Defense Department cut off Anthropic after labeling it a national security supply-chain risk in February 2026; Google, xAI and OpenAI hold Pentagon AI contracts.

A Pentagon official told the BBC the department "has ceased the use of Anthropic products." Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth labeled Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk in February 2026. He did so after the company refused to drop safety limits built into Claude, its AI model.

Still open. Anthropic is suing over the designation.

BackgroundWhere Claude ran inside Pentagon systems before the ban3 facts

Claude ran inside the Maven Smart System, Palantir's intelligence and targeting platform, analyzing satellite, drone and signals data.
Maven's five-year contract ceiling grew from $480 million to $1.275 billion, as planned users grew from hundreds to thousands.
Anthropic was the first frontier AI company deployed on classified U.S. government networks, starting in June 2024.

What we’re less sure of4 of 8 claims

Medium
The Pentagon missed its own late-August deadline to phase out Anthropic's Claude.
The claim appears only in the headline and is inferred from the BBC report. No source in the list documents the deadline date or the miss.
Medium
Until last week, Claude was still being used in research, intelligence work and Iran operations.
Attributed to 'people familiar with the matter,' anonymous sources reported by the BBC.
Medium
Anthropic is the first U.S. company to receive a supply-chain risk label historically reserved for foreign-linked firms such as Kaspersky, Huawei and ZTE.
AP describes the designation as unprecedented and contrasts it with foreign-adversary cases. However, the Huawei/ZTE precedents cited, a congressional hearing and the 2019 NDAA ban, used different legal mechanisms than the FASCSA/§3252 label. 'Same label' is therefore partly the desk's inference.
Medium
On Sept. 25 a divided D.C. Circuit panel upheld the Pentagon's designation 2–1.
Supported only by Clark Hill's law-firm summary. No court record or second outlet is in the sources list.