Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) on Monday filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense (DOD) and a host of other federal agencies as a part of its ongoing battle with the Pentagon over the use of its AI models.
In its suit, filed in a California district court, Anthropic is seeking to overturn Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to label the AI company as a supply chain threat and President Trump’s move to ban the use of Anthropic’s software across the federal government.
“Seeking judicial review does not change our longstanding commitment to harnessing AI to protect our national security, but this is a necessary step to protect our business, our customers, and our partners. We will continue to pursue every path toward resolution, including dialogue with the government,” an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement.
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The blowup between the DOD and Anthropic comes after the company told the department that it wouldn’t allow the DOD to use its AI models for the mass surveillance of Americans or to develop fully autonomous weapons.
Anthropic already works with the DOD, and reports say the Pentagon used the company’s technology during its operation in Venezuela in January and in the current conflict with Iran.
But Trump and Hegseth’s announcements mean that the DOD has six months to transition to a different AI platform.
“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!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Feb. 27.
After the ban, Anthropic rival OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) quickly swooped in and, on Feb. 28, announced it had reached an agreement to work with the Pentagon.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, however, shot back in a leaked memo to employees posted by The Information, criticizing OpenAI and the Trump administration.
“The real reasons [Department of Defense] and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg [Brockman, OpenAI’s president] have donated a lot), we haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has), we have supported AI regulation which is against their agenda, we’ve told the truth about a number of AI policy issues (like job displacement), and we’ve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce “safety theater” for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at DoW, Palantir, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve),” Amodei wrote.
