Pentagon says its Anthropic ban is on, despite Lutnick remarks

After talks with Anthropic broke down, the Defense Department declared the firm and its products a threat to the supply-chain and began moving to drop it as a contractor. Photo by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images

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United States Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Anthropic PBC has resolved its long-running issues with the Trump administration but a top Pentagon official begs to differ.

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In a social media post on Thursday, U.S. Under-Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael said that the Defense Department’s decision to declare Anthropic a supply-chain risk remains in effect.

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“Anthropic is still a designated Supply Chain Risk at @DeptofWar and for the Defense Industrial Base. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Michael wrote in a post on X, closing with a phrase popularized by President Donald Trump on his own social platform.

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Michael’s message came a day after Lutnick told Bloomberg Television that Anthropic, one of the top U.S. artificial intelligence developers, had “gotten religion” and solved its differences with the administration. In a sign that relations had been smoothed over, a top company executive joined Lutnick for a fireside chat Wednesday at a Group of 20 tech meeting in North Carolina.

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Lutnick worked closely with Anthropic’s Tom Brown, who spoke with him at the G20, to iron out issues that had prompted the Commerce Department to briefly impose export controls on the company’s Mythos and Fable models. Those restrictions, based on government concerns about bad actors jailbreaking models to access powerful AI cyber capabilities, were lifted in late June.

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The Pentagon’s dispute with Anthropic was a separate dust-up that took root at the beginning of the year. It was spurred by defence officials’ concerns that the company was seeking to impose unnecessary guardrails on how the Pentagon could use its models, interfering with the military’s chain of command

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After talks broke down, the Defense Department declared the firm and its products a threat to the supply-chain and began moving to drop it as a contractor. Pentagon officials, including Michael, have insisted they intend to find other providers of AI servicers.

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Anthropic has filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the Pentagon’s designation. Last week, the company won a key victory in the case when a federal judge in San Francisco sided with Anthropic and ordered the government to lift its ban. A separate case is being pursued by the firm via a federal appeals court in Washington, DC.

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In his social media post on Thursday, Michael made no reference to the ongoing litigation.

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—With assistance from Joe Mathieu.

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